I stand humbly corrected, Dee, Amanda.
But, for the heck of it. From 6-3-05 to 1-24-06
I am not including, The NYT offer, or, the buy your own books and receive royalties from Aug 2004. The third in this series is meant to, "Pump your up, and make you think that you can do this too.
Here are six months worth of send us money e-mails.
Dear author,
We have another milestone in our crosshairs: PublishAmerica is about to cross the "One Million Dollars Paid In Royalties" line.
Stop and imagine it for a moment: one million dollars that are finding their way to authors because others have decided to buy and read their books.
How rewarding this is. It truly underscores what we have been saying all along: PublishAmerica is treating its authors the old-fashioned way -- we pay them, thanks to your legions of book buying readers. We do not charge our authors a penny, ever. Instead, we pay them. A million dollars collectively! That's what good old traditional publishing is all about. PublishAmerica is a young company, we have barely entered our seventh year. And already our royalties paid over our young lifetime are amounting to this!
Book sales have been going through the roof lately, possibly in part as a result of our decision last year to make our titles returnable. Bookstore orders have doubled in the past few months, even in the famously slow first half of January, with bookstores ordering a PublishAmerica book every three minutes, day and night, seven days a week.
More than anything else, this is your success. You and your fellow PublishAmerica authors have written these books that others have purchased for their education or entertainment. It is the quality of your writing, above all else, that has caused our royalty payments to add up to this astonishing amount.
In the last week of next month we will be putting new royalty statements and checks in the mail. To celebrate the million-dollar milestone, we are making a rare exception by presenting an unusual offer to those who, under Pars. 5 and 10 of their contract, volunteer to order copies of their own book in the last week of January.
Do not buy any books that you don't need or want. PublishAmerica authors are under no obligation whatsoever to buy their own books, in any way, at any time. However, some of you prefer to keep copies of their own book on hand, and though we rarely if ever pay royalties on author purchases, this celebratory offer is for those promotional tigers among you who fall under that category.
So here goes:
On all orders of 60 or more copies placed by the author, we will allow a 45 pct discount, plus we will pay royalties on those books! These royalties will be included in February's check!
Dear author,
Consider the company you keep.
Today we are congratulating your fellow author Benjamin Frazier, who is well on his way to becoming a Hollywood celebrity! His PublishAmerica book "
Shelly's Diary" is currently being filmed on location in North Carolina, starring Stella Parton (Dolly's sister) and Traci Dinwiddie (
Dawson's Creek,
The Notebook). The big-screen release is certain to create a buzz, and you may expect the film to show in a theatre near you! Seeing your book turned into a movie is every author's dream, so here's to Ben Frazier, with pride!
This has been a stellar year for PublishAmerica and its authors, with larger growth numbers than ever before. More than 30,000 new authors have submitted their work for our review this year alone, and we have signed a contract to 6,000 of them, for a whopping total of 16,000 authors currently under contract. For an indication of the impact that numbers like this have on book consumers, and on the economy, consider this:
*PublishAmerica books have reached
more than a million homes, or more than one percent of all U.S. households. People who until recently had never heard of any of our talented authors, are now reading their works: a tremendous contribution to both literature and literacy.
*PublishAmerica is now capable of releasing a book within
less than 30 days after we have received a manuscript's final draft. Books become available to a worldwide market faster than ever before.
*Until PublishAmerica was established, many authors such as yourself who were denied access to mainstream publishing houses, felt pressured to join a pay-to-publish vanity publisher as a last resort. At an average $1400 fee per vanity published book, PublishAmerica's 16,000 authors, who are never charged any fees at all, have been able to
keep more than $22 million in their own pockets!
*
Every ninety seconds, every business hour of the day, every business day of the week, somewhere in the country a bookstore needs and orders a PublishAmerica book. Barnes and Noble continues to be our number one retail vendor!
With the holiday season now upon us, this is the time to thank those bookstores. Therefore we are offering them a special discount that we are also making available to any individual, our own authors included, who consider this the ultimate book buying (and giving!) season:
25-50 copies of any book title: 40 pct discount;
51-100 copies: 45 pct discount;
101 or more copies: 50 pct discount.
To ensure delivery in time before the holidays, this offer expires December 8. Phone orders only at
301 695 1707. Full-color books are excluded.
Thank you for helping change an industry, and Happy Holidays!
PublishAmerica Author Support
Dear author,
With the new year now firmly in place, we have more happy news to share with you.
Today we are welcoming as a new PublishAmerica author Pulitzer Prize winner William Coughlin. He served as a World War II fighter pilot, taught journalism as a professor, wrote for the Los Angeles Times and United Press International, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1990 as a newspaper editor. Mr. Coughlin wrote us a very kind letter asking to join your ranks as a PublishAmerica author, and we are happy to welcome him, and his book "Beyond the Seas", on board.
We also celebrate the recent appearance of our author Hedda Nussbaum on the Larry King Live show. Hedda has previously been employed and published by Random House, and she joined PublishAmerica's ranks more than a year ago. Ms. Nussbaum, a well-known author who writes about domestic abuse, has enjoyed much media attention lately for her book "Surviving Intimate Terrorism". Congratulations!
Also, exciting things continue to be happening for PublishAmerica authors in and around Hollywood. After we announced the upcoming big-screen success of our author Benjamin Frazier a few weeks ago, we can now also inform you that author Lisa Croll Di Dio has seen her book "Sherwood Forest" optioned by a Los Angeles production company, represented by the Beverly Hills-based Michael Eisner law firm. Another PublishAmerica book, "Absolution: The Ted Roth Story" by author Edmund Hulton, has been made into a screenplay by award winning New York screen writer Doug Klozzner and is currently being shopped around in Hollywood.
That is all fantastic news, and it comes on the heels of a continued steady barrage of positive news stories about many other PublishAmerica authors. The Georgia News-Daily and the Fayetteville, Georgia, Citizen are writing enthusiastically about an author's second book with PublishAmerica. The Winchester, Virginia, Star calls an author's work "poetry in motion" and prominently pictures him signing copies of his book. The Clovis, California, Independent discloses to its readers that a local body-shop manager is actually a gifted novelist.
The Hoboken, New Jersey, Reporter highlights an author whose book portrays the town as it was during World War II. The venerable Arizona Republic reveals that another PublishAmerica author gave Ronald Reagan his tuxedo trousers to wear during a formal dinner in the Philippines. And this is just a small sample from the roughly sixty press clippings that we have seen last week, on top of PublishAmerica and its authors being trumpeted in big-circulation papers such as the Houston Chronicle and the Christian Science Monitor.
It is no wonder that PublishAmerica book sales have soared to an all-time high over the holiday season. Congratulations to all of you!
On behalf of the entire PublishAmerica team, we wish you Happy and Prosperous New Year!
PublishAmerica Author Support
Dear Author,
Every hour of every business day, bookstores nationwide order and stock a new PublishAmerica title. The store manager has decided to stock it because he believes that the book will sell. As a result, thousands of PublishAmerica books are sitting proudly on bookstore shelves all across the fruited plain.
And they do sell. They sell regardless of whether the bookstore can return unsold copies.
A bookstore's decision to stock a book is generally made by the manager. A bookstore typically stocks just one percent of the 190,000 new books that are published each year. For bookstores to stock all books published would mean adding 20 feet of new shelf space every day, seven days per week. Therefore bookstore managers must be selective on what books they choose.
Sometimes they base the decision on whether the book is returnable. If the book is not returnable, they sometimes choose not to stock it.
Many of our titles are already returnable. We have been running an experiment with an increasing number of our titles. It appears that once a bookstore has established a book's selling potential, and stocked the book, the store manager's decision is proven right: PublishAmerica books are competitive, high quality, reliably selling books.
Therefore, as of next month, we are making all of our books returnable!
Although many of our titles are currently stocked in stores, you may soon find even more bookstore managers inclined to order and stock your book now that there is zero risk involved for them.
Please bear with us as we must do this gradually, in order to enable our wholesaler Ingram to accurately activate the new status on roughly eleven thousand books that are currently in print, starting with the titles that are selling more than 40 copies in September (libraries and individuals who order more than 40 copies this month are receiving a 40 pct discount; phone orders only at 301 695 1707).
Also, there will be a few exceptions initially, such as full-color picture books, and for the time being this revolutionary experiment will be limited to U.S. bookstores only. We will review the results after a few months and see what, if any, adjustments must be made.
Congratulations on being part of this exciting and revolutionary adventure.
--PublishAmerica Author Support
Dear author,
You are changing an entire industry.
The last time we sent you an announcement was when our ranks had surpassed ten thousand authors. Today we can inform you that three thousand more authors have become your PublishAmerica peers. Each day, more than 130 new authors who have heard or read about your successes, want us to review their manuscripts. Because they saw what you have achieved, and they want it, too.
A force of almost 13,000 strong, you are changing an industry that was once dominated by an elite. What PublishAmerica's authors are accomplishing has never been seen in the history of publishing. To say that this has not gone unnoticed, is an understatement.
Therefore we proudly announce to you the upcoming release of How to Upset a Goliath Book Biz, subtitled PublishAmerica, the Inside Story of an Underdog with a Bite.
Written by PublishAmerica CEO Willem Meiners, with an introduction by company president Larry Clopper, the book
*gives you a unique behind-the-scenes look at PublishAmerica,
*is illustrated with photos of our office and staff,
*exposes the fading role of bookstores,
*explains why PublishAmerica's success was inevitable and unstoppable,
*shares numerous anecdotes about, and quotes from, PublishAmerica authors.
You may now order your own copy of the PublishAmerica inside story, at the special pre-release discount price of $9.95 (retail price: $24.95), here: http://www.publishamerica.com/inside_story.
But there is more! To celebrate your successes, we are offering bookstores a special discount deal that we also extend to any individual who needs books on hand: This offer covers all of our titles except full-color picture books:
*between 25-50 books: 40 pct discount
*between 51-100 books: 45 pct discount + a copy of How to Upset a Goliath Book Biz for free!
*between 101-200 books: 50 pct discount + a copy of How to Upset a Goliath Book Biz for free!
*201 or more books: 55 pct discount + a copy of How to Upset a Goliath Book Biz for free!
The offer expires June 10. Orders by phone only, at 301-695-1707.
Thank you, and have a great Summer!
PublishAmerica,
Author Support Team
. I'd be surprised, then, if PA hasn't known for a long time that its books need a BINC and don't have one.
You figure it out.
