Hello!
Debra Dixon here, publisher- Bell Bridge Books which is the multi-genre imprint of BelleBooks. Most of the books we're publishing these days are through the BBB imprint.
www.BellBridgeBooks.com
We do welcome romance in our women's fiction list these days. Yes, that is a change during the last year. And I dare say you'll see the occasional romantic suspense but we are not a "romance publisher."
Romance is a well-served market. We have limited slots available, and if we're going to field romance titles, we have to be very selective to compete with the major publishers. Or those titles have to be a fit for something else we do. DEBORAH GRACE STALEY has a gentle, small town series, that has done quite well for us and has been picked up in large print in both the US and the UK.
We're doing the ebook launch of NYT's besteller Jill Barnett. She had a number of never-in-ebook titles.
We'll be doing a Christmas Regency anthology in 2011. (Why? I love the Regency and it's my pet project for 2011. However, that's invitation only.)
In the SF/fantasy/horror list, we are not looking for romantic fantasy or paranormal romance. If they have a romance that's perfectly fine, but romance should not be the main focus of the novel. And the writing has to be fabulous. We've been open for SF/F/H for three years. We've bought only a handful of books. Again, we have to be selective.
As for print distribution, we have a warehouse and all books receive anything from a micro run to a standard small press run. We always have books in stock. Our titles are returnable, with standard discounts offered to the wholesalers and booksellers. We present all our titles to the major buyers. Most are picked up for some sort of buy from Barnes & Noble. Obviously the books are always available from us, the online bookstores like Amazon & BN & Borders.
Ingram and B&T have been our major wholesalers through the years, but as the industry changes, with even a major publisher (Dorchester) announcing they would move to the print -on- demand model, all publishers are reevaluating how they print. We've used a mix of short run and traditional run for the last three years.
Booksellers don't really care how you print the book. They care more about whether the book is returnable to the wholesaler.
As for ebooks, our books are in all the major platforms: Kindle, Apple, BN, Sony, Kobo, etc.
We do have foreign agents and present our titles to foreign publishers. Two of our young adult authors just had their series picked up in France by separate publishers. Anthony Francis, one of our urban fantasy authors just sold in Germany, etc. No publisher can guarantee large print, mass market, foreign or audio subrights sales. But subrights sales are a part of our process. We try for everything we can.
We pay an advance, and we increase advances for future books depending on sales.
Hope that answers some questions! (I didn't download the spell check tool. So grade on the curve if I've made any errors. This is a tiny window!)
)--that they are looking for women's fiction, cozy mysteries, historicals, young adult (dark and light)--which is the reason I was looking at them, urban fantasy, fantasy, and horror.
