Shakespeare’s Sister, Inc. is looking for non-fiction books to publish through the print-on-demand service lulu.com.
Check below the fold for details.
It’s possible for anyone to publish through lulu.com. In fact, it is free, as long as you don’t want an ISBN and global distribution. An ISBN will cost some $40, and global distribution (which gets the book on amazon.com, etc.) adds about $120 to that.
What you have to do is provide a formatted manuscript.
And that’s where Shakespeare’s Sister comes in.
First: there are plenty of people who will help you publish through lulu.com–for a price. In other words, you pay them up front and they do the formatting work. There are others who claim to help you market your book. Some of them may even be able to do so.
What we are doing at Shakespeare’s Sister is somewhat different. We will act as publisher (doing all the formatting of the book, including creating cover art), taking on the cost of the ISBN and global distribution and will even pay you a royalty on books sold–not all of the royalty paid by lulu.com (we need to recoup our investment, after all, and make a little money for the formatting work we will do), but a royalty a little higher than most traditional publishers pay: 10% of the retail price.
What we will not do is extensive marketing. Unfortunately, we have neither the staff nor the skill for that. We will do what we can, but much of the work will need to be done by the author.
Don’t expect to make much money through publishing this way. It’s a means of getting your book out under a publisher’s name, taking it one step from what is often called “vanity” publishing. We won’t make much either. Our reason for doing this is that we want to be part of the momentum for change within publishing. If we can present books of high enough quality often enough, we can be a force in making the publishing world take print-on-demand seriously. Maybe we can help break the logjam created by the publishing industry’s infatuation with the blockbuster.
Though we can use traditional copyright, we prefer to use Creative Commons’ much more open copyright for our books.
So far, we have published three books (two by this diarist). We want to publish more.
If you have a non-fiction book you would like to see published, send a short (300 word) abstract of the book and a brief bio (we need to know about our authors) to us at shakespearessisterinc@gmail.com. If the abstract interests us, we will ask for a sample chapter.
We can’t promise we will publish your book, but we will give it a look if it seems like something that would interest us as readers.
And good luck to all of you. There are great writers here on BooMan and on dKos, where we also presented this call. We would like to see more of them produce books.
Shakespeare’s Sister, Inc. started out as a gift store, cafe, and gallery in Brooklyn, NY named in response to Virginia Woolf’s essay “A Room of One’s Own” where Woolf rebuts the argument that women aren’t as creative as men–or there would be a female DaVinci, a female Shakespeare. She creates a fictional sister for Shakespeare as talented as he, then demonstrates quite clearly that her creativity could never have had output. Our focus is on our belief that everyone is creative (even those whose creativity we sneer at), and that all creativity needs to be promoted.
Though we no longer have a cafe, we still have our gallery and store (where we sell as much handcrafted material as possible) and, though the number of readings has fallen off in recent years (we need to get them going again), we have hosted hundreds of poetry and fiction readings in the 12 years we have been around.
Now we are expanding into publishing, another area where creativity is too often squashed.
