What is Southern Hills Press?
The world of publishing is packed with different personalities. Like finding a spouse, selecting a publishing company to handle your book requires careful scrutiny, and may take months or even years. However, with your newly finished manuscript, you may not want to wait so long to see your work in the marketplace. As with a marriage, you want your relationship with your publisher to be pleasant, profitable and something that you want to last for the long term.
Southern Hills Press (SHP) entered the fray of independent publishing companies in order to serve a unique type of author. We’re looking to work with talented writers who have seen, as we have, that the book world has changed in the past few years. Authors today need not only compose excellent text, but they must spearhead the marketing effort of the final project as well. We provide the infrastructure that allows authors to quickly move from manuscript to marketplace. The writers must be excited enough about their own work to stick with the project for the months and years required to make the book a success.
We will certainly consider publishing “experimental” works, and have the technology to create short runs in order to test the viability of the product.
What kind of press is Southern Hills?
In the publishing world, a broad variety of companies cater to authors’ needs. Some companies are traditional, where an author or his agent approaches them about printing a work; the publisher then owns all the rights to the book, and the author gets a relatively low royalty. Though the author may not make a lot of money (unless his book becomes a bestseller), his work is published and some level of marketing is provided, depending on the drive of the publisher.
Then there are subsidy presses, where the author is asked to invest some of his own money, or to get a sponsor. In this case, the royalty paid out to the author will usually be higher than with a traditional publisher, but the author will have to take on all the marketing responsibility. One area of subsidy press is called the vanity press, where the author is basically paying for the printing of the book, and the publisher merely supplies him with an agreed-upon number of printed copies.
Some publishers are called Print-on-demand publishers. Yet this term is not really an accurate one. Print-on-demand (POD) does not refer to the business model of the publishing company, but rather to the technology used by the company to make the final product. Books used to be printed by the thousand, using huge, offset printing machines. Today, however, with special laser printer technology, a book can be printed one-at-a-time. So a traditional publisher may still be considered traditional if it uses POD (and many of the big ones already do), and a subsidy press can use whatever printing process it deems to be the most cost-efficient.
Since SHP looks at each book as its own business venture, we will determine for each book whether we will invest in it (thus acting as a traditional publisher) or whether we will partner up with the author (thereby working in the subsidy model). It’s important for authors not to get false illusions. No matter how many “I made a million writing my own book” articles an author may read, this doesn’t usually happen. However, that doesn’t mean people shouldn’t write and publishers shouldn’t publish. Rather, it’s critical to view your book from many aspects. Will having published a book help your career, make you some money, get out an important message, or simply help you achieve a life-goal? If we feel that a book has incredible profit-making potential, we will offer a traditional publishing deal. If we aren’t sure, or if the book is appropriate for a market in which we lack expertise, then we’ll consider it for a subsidy contract. In either case, though, the look of the final product must always live up to our quality standards of excellence.