We are often contacted by aspiring authors who want to publish their books with us. Unfortunately we can’t publish them all. However, we are very big believers in the idea that more knowledge in the world is a good thing and we would like to encourage everyone who wants to share their knowledge with the world to publish their book.
We feel that the books that we publish are extremely valuable and high quality and we put a great deal of effort into each one to make it a success. However, in many situations we just don’t feel right taking a percentage of profits as the publisher for books where we can’t contribute a great deal of added value. There are many books that could, and should, be self-published by the authors since no publisher could ever add enough value to justify their cut of the profits. Anybody can publish high-quality books today if you know the right partners to help bring them to life.
So, we’ve compiled a list of the partners that we work with to produce our books to help aspiring writers shortcut around some of the obstacles that stand between them and getting a book to readers directly. We are a small business and have consciously selected other small businesses to partner with whenever possible. We prefer working with people who are incentivized to build personal relationships and provide personal service.
We did a lot of homework and got many personal recommendations from our friends in the business before we decided to work with them. Epistemy Press has worked closely with all of the partners below in the past and they have earned our trust and highest recommendations from their superior levels of professionalism, quality and execution (FWIW: they haven’t paid us for these endorsements either, we’re promoting them for the good karma points). If you’re serious about producing a high-quality book, you need to work with high quality partners like these.
Development Editor
A phenomenal editor is absolutely the most critical component to delivering a quality book. No matter how good you think your final draft is and how many times you’ve reviewed and edited it, a really good editor will highlight everything “wrong” with it and suggest ways to fix it you never could have imagined. Trust us. Bob is the best there is for non-fiction. He has reasonable rates and is incredibly thorough and dependable. Here’s an example of what he did to a chapter we thought was pretty darned good. You can’t appreciate how valuable this level of thought and feedback is until you’ve had someone like Bob chew up your work (although it really stings your ego).
Robert Weiss
weisrobert AT gmail.com
Layout, cover design, graphics
Michelle and her team at 1106 Design are wonderful to work with. They have an extensive menu of services they can provide new authors. We use them for cover design, ebook and print layout and some graphics work. They deliver on time and have very reasonable rates. Very dependable and collaborative.
Michele DeFilippo
1106 Design
Web: http://www.1106design.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/1106design
See their book: Publish Like the Pros: A Brief Guide to Quality Self-Publishing (Free Download)
IP Attorney
If you’re just putting your books onto Amazon and Apple, you probably won’t need an IP attorney. But once you start wading into copyright, trademarks, translations and other contracts, you’re gonna really need a helping hand from someone like Judy. She’s a phenomenal lady and has been on all sides of publishing law for 30 years. She’s a joy to work with, very dependable and responsive. Her rates are very reasonable and her advice is spot on.
Judith B. Bass, Esq.
http://www.jbbasslaw.com/
Website design
Most author’s don’t need a terribly complex website and since we had the really difficult ebook store functionality covered by Razoyo and Booxtream, we chose to go with a local designer who does custom WordPress sites. Ryon is super-responsive and easy to work with. His rates are very reasonable and we got everything up and running in just a couple days. The WordPress infrastructure is quite sufficient for our needs and there are lots of plugins to help us expand if we need to.
Local Leap Marketing
Ryon Gross
ryon AT localleap.com
https://localleap.com
Ecommerce Site
To deliver our books directly to readers at fair prices that we can control, we partnered with Razoyo to customize an off-the-shelf ecommerce package to our unique needs and business model. Paul and his team have been extremely flexible and delivered exactly what we needed in a short amount of time. They built some great custom API integration code to work with the social DRM tools we use to watermark our ebooks.
Paul Byrne
razoyo.com
pbyrne (at) razoyo.com
Social DRM
We want our books to be as easy to read and consume as possible, and that also applies to how they are read and which devices they are read on. In general, we’re not big fans of technical DRM like what you get on the iBookstore and Amazon. So we’ve made all our books availible without any technical DRM. Readers can move them between devices easily, without any technical headaches. However, we also believe that our intellectual property is valuable, that our books are priced fairly and that people shouldn’t pirate our books. That’s just not nice. So we’ve partnered with Booxtream to enable social DRM watermarking in all of our books.
Social DRM is a non-annoying way to remind people that they shouldn’t share, post or email our books to strangers. The Booxtream system places a few personally-identifying pieces of data (visible and invisible) into the ebook file that readers download. If someone posts a book on the web, we’ll figure out who’s copy it is in about 3 seconds.
Huub has been great to work with and was incredibly responsive to our queries. Booxtream also does the Social DRM for Pottermore (Harry Potter ebooks), so that puts us in great company 🙂
Huub van de Pol
Booxtream
www.booxtream.com/
info (at) booxtream.com
Voice Over/Narration for SAP Demos
David did all the voice-over narration for the 9.5 hours of SAP demos included in the Business Process Integration with SAP ERP book. He was great to work with, very responsive and went the extra mile to help us get everything just right. We found David through voices.com, which was a great site to search for voice talent and get quotes.
David Kaplan
voice1ontherun AT verizon.net
http://www.voices.com/demos/DavidKaplan
Miscellaneous
You’re going to need to get ISBN numbers and copyright your material. Bowker is pretty straightforward to get the ISBNs set up and the US Copyright website is also pretty easy to work through.
Bowker For ISBN numbers
US Copyright Office for copyright of your books