[Publishing Svcs] Publish Savvy

I wouldn't, until I saw a bunch of examples of her work to check for quality. 'A few thousand' is more than I'm willing to pay upfront, anyway. If I could spend that, I'd hire top-quality individual services from artists and editors with proven track records, and do the rest myself.

Their 'About Us' page has the same diatribe I've seen from other vanity/subsidy publishers and author services companies: 'the system is broken!'

Maybe, but I don't see that going with a company like this is fixing much of anything. Some of the books look interesting, some look amateurish, and the apparent focus on devotionals and other religious themes is a little worrying. (That market has been a huge target for less-than-scrupulous publishers before. Not that PublishSavvy is like that, I don't know, but there is the potential for affinity fraud.)

Formatting and distributing an ebook you can do yourself for free with minimal effort, so she's basically charging "a few thousand" just for a cover. And the covers on their website aren't that great.

Just about everything from the web site screams stay away...

LordMark said:

I may have to self-publish

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Why would you have to? Are you currently querying and being rejected, or is there some other reason? It's much better to choose to self-publish than feel you have to for whatever reason.

Does it look ok? The person who runs it says she’ll format the book, do the cover, and send it to barnes and nobles, amazon, and other outlets, but it’ll cost me a few thousand.

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The only services listed on the website are editing-related, with a mention that they can help with marketing, so it'd be interesting to know how that "few thousand" figure was reached.

A few thousand, by the way, is far, far too high. A single company that does everything should do it cheaper than if you paid individually. If you want everything done for you, you're probably going to pay between $850 and $1500-$1800 on the top or so. Shop around, and use a company with testimonials from authors about books that impress you.

You can pay individually for editing and a professional-looking cover, as well as formatting, and probably get by a bit cheaper. And you can save money by doing some of it yourself, like uploading to retailers.

Any company you use for uploading, if you go that route (I will never understand why anyone would let someone else have access to their retailer accounts, but that's me), needs to upload to an account you can access and change the password to when they're finished (as in, it's your email, not theirs on the thing), and needs to do so without requiring an ongoing percentage of your sales.

About this company specifically, what about their site or the books on their "Clients" page gives you confidence that they're the professionals you want to pay? I'm not seeing anything that would entice me to hire them.

shelleyo said:

About this company specifically, what about their site or the books on their "Clients" page gives you confidence that they're the professionals you want to pay?

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This.

LordMark, whether you're considering a publisher as you've done previously or a self-publishing service, they have to recommend themselves to you by the quality of their work.

It shouldn't be a matter of finding any micropress or self-publishing service and asking if people here can disqualify it. Ideally, that press's performance or that service's quality should bring them to your attention, set them apart from the crowd. If there's nothing about a particular press/service which appeals to you to the point where you'll consider coughing up a few thousand dollars, you might want to consider finding another which does.

People here will always provide feedback, but I think we'd also like to teach you how to fish, so you'll be able to look out for yourself.