PUBLISHED JUNE 2015 by Deb Vanasse, Founder, Running Fox Books It begins with one person, one vision, one book—a book that flourishes with a press that knows how to make the most of the strengths that come with being small. Building on that single success, the vision expands, and with it the press. As IBPA …

PUBLISHED MAY 2015 by Linda Carlson, IBPA Independent staff reporter “Create quality books” and “Sell outside bookstores” may sound familiar, but those time-tested tactics are what spell success for Octane Press. And publisher Lee Klancher has proved that you can do both those things with titles about tractors—and taxi drivers, and motorcycles. Klancher had years of …

PUBLISHED JUNE 2015 by Linda Carlson, Reporter, IBPA Independent magazine — This is the third in a series of articles under the headline “Marketing Whatever You Have to Market.” Access the full series here. This is the third in a series of articles designed to help you brainstorm marketing strategies in the context of the …

Because many of the Independent Publishers Group’s (IPG’s) client publishers serve specialized market niches, we have pursued a lot of accounts outside the traditional book trade. To help those publishers be successful, we sell to gift stores, to museum stores, and to other stores not primarily devoted to books. (We also sell to schools but …

  Since Publishers Said No — Submitted by Ruth Donald, Proud Horse Publishing, proudhorsepublishing@gmail.com. Like many other fiction writers who dream of having their novels published, I started out by going the traditional route. When I wrote my first Hunter Rayne Highway Mystery back in the mid-’90s, there were only three options: Query agents or …

Linda Carlson writes for IBPA’s Independent magazine from Seattle. She can be reached at linda@ibpa-online.org. Like the people who left home to build America, the 22 employees at DawnSignPress think of themselves as pioneers, always seeking new ways to deliver content. Appropriately, their informal motto is “Think big, start small.” Founder Joe Dannis attributes that …

Why All Self-Publishers Should Sell Direct December 2013 Suw Charman-Anderson The self-publishing process has become pretty well established by now; a received wisdom shapes every entrepreneurial writer’s secret dreams: 1. Write book 2. ??? 3. Profit! Amazon is the secret sauce that many self-publishers rely on to propel them to the authorial stratosphere, hoping that …

  Bulk Sales Bring More Revenue (and You Can Make Them Happen) May 2013 by Theodore P. Savas   As the co-owner and managing director of Savas Beatie LLC, a small independent publisher of (primarily) military history titles, I get to be responsible for everything. We launched in early 2004 and have about 100 books …

Writers know they should show and not tell because that will help readers understand and get involved with their story or content. For much the same reason, a publisher who wants to sell a book in large quantities to a nonretail corporate buyer should first ask about the prospective buyer rather than tell about the …

  Stalking Invisible Book Sales An Anti-WYSIATI Approach April 2013 by Judith Appelbaum   A new survey of IBPA members has just confirmed what much broader earlier surveys also found: Smaller publishers make sizable sales that nobody adds up. The latest survey, which drew a 10 percent response, indicates that even the largest publishers in …