Greetings, everyone!
This is Jeremy Gotwals, the founder of Holon Publishing. I felt compelled to chime in and thank you for your comments, as well as respond with a few of my own. Before I alarm you (or the admins) I absolutely did not join this forum to solicit, by any means. I am a writer as well, and given the time, I would love to contribute to AW's forums. However, the representation of my company is extremely important, so I felt the need to join the conversation to clear the air.
First, I'd like to say that this thread has provided helpful insights on how we need to improve our website at Holon, and our representation in general.
Yes, we are long overdue for updated photos of our team members, updated photos of our authors, more information about our latest titles, and much, much more. We're well aware of the flaws of our website and have been mapping out the plans for an overhaul for quite a while. We've been making baby steps, because frankly, we've been too overbooked to overhaul our own website! To which you might inquire, "Then why do you have time to write this post?" The answer is that
I can't afford to "not" make the time to respond to this, because today,
branding is what people are saying about you when you're not in the room.
A few comments:
We do still have information about some of titles, and some of our titles are indeed available for sale on our website.
Our website used to be more "reader-centric." Given the size of our team, we could not keep up with the daily orders through our site, so we scaled this back and focused on our Amazon sales (which are print-on-demand, thereby automating fulfillment completely) and empowering authors to sell directly. We also sell many books at our events and signings, besides our local wholesale efforts.
It is our plan to focus more on making our content more directed at readers, in the future, but this is a long process.
I would have to disagree that our website is "over-designed," however. Thank you anyway for this insight.
Also,
Tiakall, I think you might be having browser difficulties. Nevertheless, it's good for us to consider. We do not want people experiencing functionality difficulties - so we will have to look into why you may be seeing our website differently.
RavennaTate - Thank you for the critique on our book covers. I will not bother being defensive on this note, rather, I will say that I've certainly seen worse, from companies who charge considerably more for cover design (*cough* the "Vanity Presses"). I have also seen worse from companies that are not self-publishing related at all, and do not charge for services.
As stated above however, we
do have our books for sale on our website.
Barbara R. - I have encountered a lot of people who share your opinion about the use of Kickstarter in the publishing world. When authors cannot afford to pay for professional editors, designers, or marketing, we assist them in raising the money to do this with Kickstarter. It's fairly straightforward - and has worked for a few of our titles. Even some highly reputable publishers (McSwinney's) have used Kickstarter.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with using Kickstarter to cover costs, and it does not make us a vanity press. On the contrary, the very fact that we assist writers in raising the funds they need to publish rather than forcing them to pay out of pocket, makes us the opposite of a vanity press.
Kickstarter democratizes the funding process for publishing and empowers readers with the ability to choose what they would like to see published.
A bit more about our story, and our model:
I founded Holon at the end of 2011 / beginning of 2012. We did not have investors, nor did we technically have "partners" other than the independent professionals we hired and strategic partners such as Ingram, who we use for distribution. It's been a rough and bumpy ride, with many close calls, and
we certainly are not perfect, but we have come a very, very long way.
Holon was founded with the purpose of disrupting the industry of self-publishing / traditional publishing, and that is exactly what we are doing.
Very gradually. In smaller, grass-roots ways, first.
We have had many happy authors who have sold many books, we have also had some unhappy authors over time, who did not sell very many books.
We have had readers of our authors who were thrilled to buy their books, and buy other books with Holon. We have also had readers who were critical of our products.
We do provide self-publishing solutions, but we also provide alternative hybrid-publishing solutions that we are still refining, such as solutions that involve the use of kickstarter, or that involve financing with the businesses in our community who pay for marketing with us. These alternatives either eliminate costs, or reduce costs, for authors to hire professional editors, designers, marketers, and for those authors to have their books available through our distribution network via Ingram. I do want to strongly emphasize, however, that we are not a vanity press. The very fact that there are no prices on our website, other than the prices of books for sale on our website, should be an indicator that we are not a vanity press.
You are correct, however, we do need more information on our website. We have quite a bit of work to do!
The fact that we have been going this long as a company and that this is still my full-time job should be an indicator that we have some idea of what we're doing. Obviously, however, there are some bad companies out there, so that is not always the case.
In the meantime, if you want a better idea of "who we are" our facebook page has more regular / fresh content, if you take the time to scroll down.
http://www.facebook.com/HolonPublishing
We're building a community that has impacted a lot of lives. We hope to continue to do so.
We'd like to believe that we've done some great work for people, otherwise we wouldn't still be around, and I wouldn't have a job.
There's no question, however,
we have a long way to go to be as great as we can be.
Thank you all for your time.
Best regards,