Outskirts Press

[Amica]

I have my first novel coming out via Outskirts Press in the next month or two.

I had corresponded with another author who had published her novel through Outskirts and was very happy with them. She had written the same general sort of novel that I had, so I found her email address on amazon and asked her a lot of questions about her experience with Outskirts. She gave me some good advice and answered all my questions thoroughly.

I am in the process of editing my galleys right now; I have another few days to finish before I send them back for final printing. There have been a couple of snags in my communication with the author representative (she takes 3-7 days to answer my emails, and sometimes has trouble understanding exactly what I'm asking -- then the clarifying emails take another week), which gets tedious. Aside from that, things have been running fairly smoothly. They let me insert my own cover instead of using one of their stock ones (I had commissioned an artist privately to draw the cover for me), which improves the look of the book drastically.

It's vanity publishing, so it doesn't really count... but I'm guaranteed a bunch of sales right away from the people who initially read the story online and told me I should publish it. Otherwise I would probably have gone the traditional route.

But I hadn't seen anything about Outskirts around here yet, so I thought I'd give my point of view.

[Gravity]

If you get enough sales to cover your cost, and that's all you wanted, then Outskirts is a great choice! !thumbsup! I hear they make a very nice book.

[Amica]

Yes, that's pretty much all I'm looking for, for this one. Thousands of sales would be nice, but somehow or other I don't think they're in the cards. :)

I do have promises from most of my readers that they'll flood my Amazon page with good reviews, though! So that ought to be worth something at least.

I've seen another book published by Outskirts, and it looked pretty much like a regular trade paperback: the print was straight on the page; the pages were all cut square; the print was dark enough to see clearly and was consistent throughout. I've seen other POD books that didn't show nearly the same quality as this one.

[Tommie Lyn]

I found some interesting information on Larsen-Pomada Literary Agents website. If you go to the following link and scroll down to point 11, you'll find that they, in certain instances, recommend self-publishing as a way to test market your book (I believe the example they gave was for non-fiction, and I'm not sure if they apply this advice to fiction as well). And they say that if you establish a track record, you may have agents/editors looking for you.

Amica, since you are already into the self-publish scenario, you might read their advice (they have a number of pages devoted to "The Savvy Author") and see if there is anything helpful to you. I'm going to begin implementing some of their test marketing suggestions (i.e., getting feedback from a number of types of readers before you ever submit a manuscript, so that you have the opportunity to address any problems they find which you've overlooked).

http://www.larsenpomada.com/pages.cfm?ID=17