North Star Press of St. Cloud, Inc.

That name rang a bell for me. An author who published with North Star is also publishing through another subsidy publisher right now. Guess it's a hard habit to break.

This is the group that looks like it's buying the assets of Jolly Fish Press, after buying Flux this year. It sounds an awful lot like they're trying to buy some growth and legitimacy. Jury's out on how that will work for North Star...or the Flux and Jolly Fish authors who've chosen to move.

Filigree, it's North Star Editions http://www.northstareditions.com that has just acquired JFP and did buy Flux last year. This one is a different NS, owned by a family from the looks of it. Would be nice if when registering a business the names would all have to be different to existing ones, gets so hard to keep them all sorted

Cross posted. I'll change my links.

I would point out that both North Star Editions and North Star Press are based in the same area in Minnesota. If they're not related, the former was stupid to name themselves after the later. Can we say unequivocally that they're not owned by the same people?

We can say that the newer press was stupid not to do a name search before launching, if they are not connected.

But I keep seeing this with small presses, not limited to North Star.

Hi, Filigree. This will be VERY OFF-TOPIC, but I just have to get it off my chest.

I used to work the 9-to-5 jobs, never considering writing as a career even though it has always been my passion and aspiration. Then, I happened to check out AW Forum and I saw that you're publishing with Nine Star Press. You're sort of the one who have led me to check out Nine Star Press and eventually I submitted a few writings to them. Unfortunately, I was rejected. LOL! Nonetheless, that's how I started out writing romance. I used to dabble in non-fiction and poetry.

Filigree said:

We can say that the newer press was stupid not to do a name search before launching, if they are not connected.

But I keep seeing this with small presses, not limited to North Star.

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Nine Star Press has some confusion behind the name, too...there is or was another Nine Star publishing a decade or so ago, and I keep running into their Amazon listings.

As for being rejected: keep plugging away, at the presses of your choice. This is an endurance race, not a one-time sprint.

Oh, I definitely am not giving up. My goal is to publish at least four e-books in 2017. LOL! Hopefully, I can reach my goal. *fingers crossed*

Filigree said:

Nine Star Press has some confusion behind the name, too...there is or was another Nine Star publishing a decade or so ago, and I keep running into their Amazon listings.

As for being rejected: keep plugging away, at the presses of your choice. This is an endurance race, not a one-time sprint.

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Not to get too much more off-topic (I would like more clarification of the two North Stars!), be careful of 'how' you publish your e-books. Many small presses are not really worth the effort. Uninformed and unprofessional self-publishing can be as damaging to a writer's future reputation as vanity publishing. You'll see this a lot on AW: being badly published is worse than not being published at all.

I have submitted to some publishers that seem to have plenty of good recommendations by authors on AW. Hopefully, they will let me know in about 10-12 weeks time. I usually read through all the pages on AW before deciding. Haha!

I know that every author's experiences will be different, but I figure that if most authors seem to be alright with certain publishers, I don't see the harm in submitting to them as well. I might as well try them out, and if fortunate enough to be accepted and given a contract, then I can decide after reading through the contract.

Talking about contracts, I have also read a thread on AW about them. Pages upon pages of good advice from other authors and things to be aware of. I actually spent like four, five hours reading through a few different threads on good publishers, contracts, etc. Hopefully, my first experience will be good.

Filigree said:

Not to get too much more off-topic (I would like more clarification of the two North Stars!), be careful of 'how' you publish your e-books. Many small presses are not really worth the effort. Uninformed and unprofessional self-publishing can be as damaging to a writer's future reputation as vanity publishing. You'll see this a lot on AW: being badly published is worse than not being published at all.

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kvogl said:

I caught this conversation and thought I'd share what I've learned in teaching at the Loft, the largest writing center in the country, and in publishing my book. Keep in mind that as an author, you will want to have your books on hand at any signings you do, and often these are the ones you've brought along with you. North Star offers them at a 50% discount, much cheaper than any of the other publishers out there. The most discount other pubs offer is only 30%. I've known big-name authors at writer's conferences buy out their own books from what their publishers have on display because it's cheaper than what they have in their contracts.

It's a writing reality that you will have to buy copies of your own book, it's up to you to decide on what terms work best for you.

If you don't think you can sell 200 of your books, negotiate down what it is you buy up front. But, if you don't think you can sell 200 of your books, is this the book you want published under your name? Note that these are not publication costs they are asking you to cover.

In the interest of full disclosure, my book Lost and Found: A Memoir of Mothers was just released by them. (It's about my birthmother finding me through my mom's obituary.) In two weeks I've sold everything I had to buy up front and ended up having to buy more, so I could have books on hand.

Their books have received several awards, and a friend of mine who published her book there back in 1999 is still enjoying her book in print. It's been an honor and a pleasure to work with the people of North Star - who still live up in St. Cloud, where it was founded. Happy to answer any questions...
Kate St. Vincent Vogl
Lost and Found: A Memoir of Mothers (North Star 2009)
www.katevogl.com

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Kate is right about having to buy books. You must plan on being your own best marketing and sales force. The spread of self-published print and ebooks has flooded the market. Supply has increased while reader demand hasn't, which is bad for the price of books. Ebooks for 99 cents are everywhere. This means the difficult job of making a profit as a publisher has become even tougher, and this effects the pocketbooks of authors. The publishing industry is in a spin trying to figure out how to survive. For most publishers it means turning authors into marketers and sales people. Blogging, book fair appearances, email blanket bombing, readings, and hyping your work anyway you can is now required. You must have a social media platform from which to sell yourself and your work. The age of simply writing a book that makes money is over. This is true whether you self-publish or have a publisher. Some say this is an argument for self-publishing. Why let the publisher take a big chunk out of the retail price? Fair enough, but as Kate points out there are editorial advantages to having a publisher, an organization that sends out ACRs to important reviewers, and one thing that no self-publisher has--a distributor. A publisher like North Star Press can put your work in a bookstore. Bookstore owners, even indies, are very reluctant to take self-published print books. For one thing the accounting for one author isn't worth it. More to the point, the technical quality of self-published work is all over the board, which makes store owners say no rather than risk a customer returning a book full of typos, grammar, and punctuation errors. If you self-publish hiring a good line editor can run $500 to $800. The cost of cover design and printing 200 books could easily run another $400 to $600. Those are your out of pocket costs. North Star is going to charge about about $6.00 wholesale per book. If you look at it, buying your book from them wholesale as opposed to doing it yourself is a wash. Either way, you are going to be the one in charge of selling your book. You will get royalties, but they are generally chicken feed. Selling fiction is no way to get rich. Have an attorney look at the North Star contract. Good luck.

http://bit.ly/2fNravf
http://amzn.to/2fxUkuR

I've never bought my books from the publishers. I willingly promote on social media but don't market. I did school and library presentations but they were paid visits.
Why would a writer do "marketing" and put out money to buy back their own books from a "publisher", one that is still in line to benefit from the sales a writer is responsible for making? Their "about" page doesn't give any indication they would be of more help with their services (listed but with no prices I could find) then self publishing (which the owner does via her own press)

TFaust said:

Fair enough, but as Kate points out there are editorial advantages to having a publisher, an organization that sends out ACRs to important reviewers, and one thing that no self-publisher has--a distributor. A publisher like North Star Press can put your work in a bookstore.

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If North Star was good at getting books into shops, getting reviews with reviewers who'd make a difference, and all the rest, the author would not need to be the main salesperson for their book. Many authors do things like social media promotion, but they are not hand-selling their book. They're promoting the idea of their book, and the customer then buys is from a place stocking the book. In other words, the author is not expected to buy a big stock of their book and sell them at the roadside, because that's the job of the book shops.

Either most sales come through book shops or most sales are down to the author directly hand-selling. If the former is true, there is no need for the author to buy books in order to sell them. If the latter is true, the author is better off self-publishing, where they have full control and keep all the profits from their sales work. You can't claim that North Star is great at selling through shops and then say the author needs to hand-sell or they won't sell anything. Or at least, you can say it, but it's not going to be taken seriously. The two things don't go together.