Okay, I've never done one of these before...I don't think mine is as imaginative or finteresting as M.R.J.'s, but I'll give it a go:
PublishAmerica is arguably in a better position than just about any other traditional press to face today's challenges.
Because real publishers have to sell books to the public; we sell ours just to our authors and their families, who are guaranteed to buy at least a few copies.
Finances are in great health, the company has always been debt-free, operations are lean, our product is as popular as ever, and last year PublishAmerica grew bigger than ever before.
Because we have to keep signing new [strike]suckers[/strike] Authors every minute, as our old ones wise up.
The secret of our success is no secret: PublishAmerica provides an absolutely free service for our almost 35,000 authors, who bring just as many small niche markets with them.
Translation: The secret of our success is selling our books back to our authors, each one of whom is pretty much the only market for their books.
If an economy wants to hurt an enterprise such as ours, it must first fatally hurt the worlds that spin around our authors. That's not happening.
If an economy wants to hurt an enterprise such as ours, it must first fatally destroy our authors' abilites to buy their own books from us. That's not happening, because if they don't buy their own books they will never see a single copy.
The universes in which they move may consist of a few hundred or a few thousand individuals, but our authors do have something to offer to them, to entertain, to teach, something that can be found nowhere else.
The universes in which they move may consist of only a few dozen people, even, but we all know your mom is going to buy copies of your book, and so are you--no matter how broke you are. And what you offer the people who buy your book is pride in
you; the people who love you will buy your book (from you, after you buy your own copies) whether they want to read it or not. Which is the way PA makes its money.
As long as they write their words, PublishAmerica will print and distribute them. We serve those micro niches, we connect them, we bring our authors' words to their readers.
You, your family and friends are certainly a "micro niche". And you, your family and friends are the only market PA "serves".
It's apparently true that the big commercial houses have been losing readers. PublishAmerica however has found new readers. With each new author we add new readers -- we have never added more authors than we did in 2008, and we never sold more books, too.
Think there's a connection there, between signing more authors and selling more books? Think HARD. Who is buying those books?
At higher sales prices than before, for good measure. When others slashed their prices in order to be competitive, PublishAmerica raised them. We were confident that our readers would be willing to pay what it takes to obtain the quality works of our authors, and we were right.
When others slashed their prices in order to entice the general public to buy their books, we raised ours, knowing you would still buy as many copies as you could. And you did.
As a result, we sell more books, written by more authors, at higher prices, yielding higher royalties, and leaving our organization on solid grounds.
I seriously doubt ALL of PA's books sold in a year exceeds the number of copies sold by real publishers--even by a single real publisher--in a year. 30,000 authors...let's say each buys a hundred copies...Anybody here think Random House sells less than 300,000 books in a year, over all of its titles? Or Simon & Schuster?
We enjoy a uniquely high author loyalty: each day, forty percent of our new book contracts go to authors who already have one or more books in print with PublishAmerica. We don't know how many authors actually complete a second book, but reportedly it's less than half. This suggests that virtually every PublishAmerica author who wrote a second book stays with us.
This is not only ridiculously specious math, it's specious reasoning. Who cares how many of your authors stay with you for a second book? All that tells you is they either haven't thrown up the Kool-Aid or they aren't able to get a deal with a real house. Heck, anecdotal evidence from the PAMB alone shows a large proportion of PAers go on to honest self-publishing (and yes, I'm aware that anecdotal evidence from the PAMB is as specious as the math and reasoning above.)
Surprised? Not if you read the papers. There is pretty much no newspaper left that hasn't reported on yet another PublishAmerica author.
Yes, but that essentially means nothing. Local papers did fawning stories on a certain David Gemmell plagiarist too; does that mean she was legit? Or that features editors have space to fill and are desperate for subjects? You decide.
We aren't big on big-name celebrities, but man, do we have a big supply of grassroots heroes to share. They are our core strength, our tens of thousands of hard-working, successful, proud authors. They live on Main Street, and they serve Main Street niches.
Okay, the first sentence is actually kind of a nice thing to say. I can't really snark on that. But the rest of it...once again, the translation of "Main Street niches" is "You, your friends and family."
As long as PublishAmerica does what its name says it does, publishing America, we're on Main Street. That's where the nation's backbone is. A spine that is as steeled and solid as it ever was.
As long as you're willing to drink the Kool-Aid and buy your own books, PA will continue to spit them out. They're getting rich off your dreams while you flounder in the gutter; they thank their gods for your steely spine because it means you're not ready to give up your dreams, which means they get to keep making money off you when it should be the other way around. They thank their gods for your steely spine because it means you believe your book can be the one that breaks out and succeeds, and you keep coming back.
So how'd I do?