AN OPEN LETTER TO THE POTENTIAL YBK AUTHOR
We receive many queries that we think can be answered by reading the letter below.
YBK Publishers, Inc.
39 Crosby Street
New York, NY 10013
Dear Potential YBK Author:
YBK is a not-for-fee publisher using print-on-demand methods. We select books to publish in the same way traditional print-run publishers do. In being selective we maintain the quality of our publishing list.
Because print-on-demand does not require producing an inventory of books, it is an inexpensive method to publish. The print-on-demand publisher thus can be selective on the basis of a book’s quality, not its sales potential. We don’t spend a lot of money to print thousands of copies of a book before we publish it. This lets us publish books whose sales potential is at first uncertain. Yes, we must still spend our own money, mostly for typesetting, but this is nowhere near as costly as traditional publishing, so it's affordable if we know the book can sell at least our breakeven quantity.
Another cost-saving feature of this method that better allows publishing narrow-market titles is that the author strongly engages in the marketing, selling and publicizing of the book. This works because the author has greater insight than we do about who will buy his or her book and will be more effective in promoting, advertising, and marketing that book. Bear in mind that, at first, it is local groundswell that gains the attention of larger markets.
Because of these reduced costs to bring the book to market, we have a very low break-even point. We will publish a book if even as few as 300 copies are expected to sell in the first year or two of its published life. This entails an understanding by you of what is required to sell that many books and making known to us the methods you expect to use to help us do this. You will need to participate with us in the generation of sales as you know where to find the market for your specific book much better than we do. But even before we get to that, your book must meet our very stringent content and editorial standards. While we professionally copyedit and proofread every book we publish, we cannot afford to do rewriting or substantive editing.
Our books have a full-color laminated cover, ISBN number, copyright in your name, Library of Congress Catalog Card number (including filing your book with the Library of Congress), appearance in Books in Print, listing on Amazon.com, listing on BarnesandNoble.com and hundreds of other bookseller Web sites throughout the world and listing with Ingram—the largest U.S. wholesaler of books—the wholesaler of choice that bookstores go to to purchase their inventory. We manufacture our books in the U.K. and Australia as well as in the United States. Europe, and the Pacific are supplied through our U.K. and Australia facilities.
Our website enables you to read certain chapters of the books we publish (listings page). It seems worth saying that when you examine the kinds of books we publish and their contents, the quality of the writing and the quality of the content we seek will become apparent to you.
If you'd like to see how well known YBK books become, put the title of any of our books between quote marks and put that into a Google search box. You'll be amazed at the number of "hits."
We hope that this helps in your decision about proposing your book for publishing by YBK Publishers. We look forward to the prospect for working with you. Thank you for your interest in YBK Publishers.
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