How Do I Choose a Publishing Company?

To say the book publishing industry has changed the last several years would be an understatement! If you have done any research on publishing companies, you have probably met with confusion. There are a lot of publishers to choose from.

The first thing you should know is that there are two main groups of publishers: traditional publishers and self-publishers/vanity publishers.

Traditional publishers are more stringent with what types and how many manuscripts they accepts. Most require submissions from an agent. They typically offer high quality editing and design services. The good thing is that they publish quality books. The bad thing is that they reject a percentage of manuscripts submitted to them.

Self-publishers/vanity publishers accept just about anything. They typically don’t offer much in the way of editing and design services and rarely are their books sold in bookstores or stocked in libraries. The print and broadcast media, book reviewers and others know these print mills and rarely will do interviews with their authors, articles on their books or book reviews. So little demand exists for them. It is common that these books are only sold to the author's friends and family. The good thing is that anyone can get a book published, but that is also a negative—the book market is flooded with books of varying quality.

In the old days, vanity publishers like these advertised in the classified sections of magazines for writers and were considered the last publishing option of choice for a desperate writer after they received large numbers of rejections from traditional publishers. Today they have gained more acceptance, but we feel they should still be the last publishing option of choice for wise professional writers and authors. 

Recently at an Interquest meeting (Interquest is a technology consulting firm serving the digital printing industry), the keynote speaker was CEO of Lulu Bob Young. Lulu is a leading self-publishing company. He stated that “Lulu is a $40 million dollar business that publishes 20,000 new titles each month.”

What is good about that statement for authors and the book publishing industry? We respond, very little! The book selling market is flooded with over 120,000 books a year from just one self-publishing company alone, with almost all of its titles not edited or meeting any other professional standards that a quality traditional book publisher would require. 

Other self-book publishing companies, for example Author Solutions Inc. that owns many of the self-publishing companies that appear in advertising to be unrelated or competitors, but are operated by this one company online with high advertising budgets. They claim to publish over 20,000 titles a year. Some of the names of their companies are Xlibris, Trafford Publishing, iUniverse, Authorhive, Inkabook, Word Clay and Author House.  

About American Book Publishing

What we are: American Book Publishing is a traditional book publishing company. We have published on average about 50 titles a year over the last decade. Today we carefully select about 80 titles per year to publish, with full quality traditional book publishing services for these selected titles. We offer quality services such as developmental editing, professional cover design services, copy editing, book distribution and marketing services and more. We are also unique, in that we don’t require an agent to submit; authors may submit directly to us.

What we are not: We do NOT operate like the self-publisher/vanity publishers that are prominent on the Internet today.

We invite you to read comments from our authors about our company. In the following 20 pages, we are providing over 400 authors references an over 50 industry references about our company and the work we have done for them as their traditional publisher. 

We have these available in order to give you information from your peers American Book Publishing so you would know what to expect from us. These author references are over 95% of the authors we have worked with. 

You won't find anywhere near this amount of author references in one place—with full names, book titles and book covers—by most other publishers today. We have searched far and wide for them and have not been successful. We believe this is the best way to select a book publisher today and to avoid any confusion from Internet pages mentioning American Book Publishing by competitors with information that is not accurate. 

If you would like to submit to us, have a professional editor review your manuscript, and let you know if your title meets our selection standards, we encourage you to do so before turning to the vanity publishers. Many new authors today think that is their only option. It is our part of our mission as a company to provide an opportunity for a many new talented authors to be published each year. Please send your query to Gail at info@american-book.com.