Speaking Up For Special Needs Publishing a book to launch a speaking career isn’t unusual. But the Dixon family of Finding Words Press may be unique because they created a book to get a teenager with brain damage on the lecture circuit. The company’s only title, A Stroke of Luck, came about because of bad …

Fiction Succeeds With An Ass-Kicking Female Chaplain Jaime Richards is a US Armychaplain, but this heroine’s explosive situations—and occasional explosive language— have won her a following among Christians and atheists alike, and generated healthy sales for Arundel Publishing, a Warwick, NY, company founded in 2011 that does how-to nonfiction and YA novels as well as …

New to the IBPA board this year, Brooke Warner is publisher of She Writes Press and president of Warner Coaching Inc., both based in Berkeley, CA. A native of San Juan Capistrano in southern California, Warner went east to George Washington University for her undergraduate degree and then returned west to San Francisco State University, …

60 And Going Strong Founded by John Fries Blair at a time when he could have been planning his retirement, John F.Blair, Publisher, is celebrating its 60th anniversary. Lasting so long was hardly assured, as publicist Sally Johnson explains, “When Blair died peacefully at his legendary desk in 1986, lawyers advised the family to close …

Reaching Readers for Reading Rainbow Independent Publishers Group is distributing LeVar Burton’s first children’s book, The Rhino Who Swallowed a Storm. Created by Burton, longtime host of the children’s program “Reading Rainbow,” with Susan Schaefer Bernardo and illustrator Courtenay Fletcher, the title is being published by Reading Rainbow, a brand now owned by Burton and …

The co-editorial director of Publishers Weekly and one of IBPA’s new board members, Jim Milliot offers both encouragement and a caution for independent publishers. Technology means both challenges and opportunities for indie publishers, he recently noted. “With digital publishing and e-books now firmly established in the industry, it has never been easier to publish a …

Blogging That Builds Sales You don’t have to spend money to make money if your DIY efforts are as focused as those of Lloyd Lofthouse of Three Clover Press in Walnut Creek, CA. His carefully documented publicity efforts for My Splendid Concubine point up the value of a blog tied to your book—and the value …

Selling Rights Around the World Parenting Press has sold Korean rights to two children’s picture books—The Way I Feel, by Janan Cain, and The Way I Act, illustrated by Cain and written by Steve Metzger—to Book Bank Publishing Co. The Press has also sold simplified Chinese rights to those titles in the People’s Republic of …

The newest member of the IBPA staff, Molly Farragher has been working with customers ever since she got her first part-time job—and she assures us that selling association programs is much more satisfying than displaying hams. Yep, that’s hams, as in pork. Customers in the retail ham store where she worked “took the process of …

Plentiful Publicity “It’s the kind of book that makes you wonder why you’re still sitting at a desk, dreaming of setting sail for the Caribbean or hiking the Himalayas,” Newsweek wrote in June about World Rider Press’s Forks: A Quest for Culture, Cuisine, and Connection. That praise came just a few days after author/publisher Allan …