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Virtual Publishing Agency

Outsource Your Book Publishing Entirely with our "Virtual Publishing Agency"

Book Compilation * Ghostwriting * Book Production

You've heard of ad agencies, marketing agencies, and insurance agencies. Why not a Publishing Agency?

You can't be an expert in everything. When it comes to advertising, marketing and insurance, you let an expert take care of your business needs. So why shouldn't you do the same thing with publishing?

As an entrepreneur, consultant, coach, or solopreneur, you may have considered writing a book to boost your credibility and get new leads.

After discovering all the great ways a book can benefit your business maybe you purchased a book on self-publishing. But you read through it and became discouraged. After all, you are busy running your business and serving your clients, so how can you become an expert in publishing and run your business at the same time?

Have Us Do the "Heavy Lifting"

With our Publishing Agency approach, you can have a book in your hands with minimal effort and without the expense of hiring a ghostwriter to write the entire book. The end result will sound like you wrote it because you did.

We have a lot of experience in taking existing content and turning it into books. (We have published 10 of our own books since 2006.) You can take advantage of our expertise and let us do a lot of the heavy lifting involved in creating a book manuscript.

If you have:

• Information products
• Teleseminar transcripts (or audios that you can have transcribed for us to use)
• Articles for which you own the copyright
• Blog posts
• Newsletters
• Presentations
• White papers
• Case studies
• Marketing materials

Give them to us and we'll create a rough draft of a book for you using the same methods we used to create our own books. We can take your existing content, go through it to find the themes, and work with you to come up with a slant and focus for the book. We'll help you figure out what to keep and what to leave out.

Then we take your writings, pull it all together, and return it to you as a Microsoft Word file with notes on where we need to "fill-in the blanks" and add transitional text. This process may require some "back and forth" to work through editorial issues, but it's a lot easier than doing it yourself. We write any missing materials for you need, acting as your ghostwriter. (If you don't need writing services, you may want to check out our Blog to Book Service.)

The secret to our success is our IdeaWeaver software, which makes it easy to bring together many ideas and "chunks" of content. Of course, you can go through this process yourself without our help (we offer a free trial of IdeaWeaver and detailed explanations of how we repurpose our content into books).

But if you don't have time and/or don't want to learn new software, let us do the hard part of getting that first draft together for you.

Complete Turnkey Book Publishing Services

After your manuscript is done, we'll walk you through the rest of the publishing process using our Publishize self-publishing method. You receive professional copyediting, book layout, cover design and help getting set up with our printer.

Our printer is Lightning Source (LSI). The reason we use this company is with LSI, you can self-publish a book, avoid the stigma of going through a subsidy (or "vanity") press, and produce and ship books only when they are ordered.

Although many other printers use the same type of short-run digital printing technology to print books only when they are ordered, no other company has the distribution advantage Lightning Source does.

LSI is owned by Ingram, so when you sign up with LSI, you get access to a large distribution network. Getting your book into the Ingram database via LSI makes it available to leading distributors such as Ingram, Baker & Taylor, Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com and many others. Technically, bookstores and even libraries can get your book. As a publishing business owner it means you no longer:

• have to carry a huge inventory of books;
• need to have a tens of thousands of dollars available to do your first print run;
• have to sign up with an expensive distributor and give away up to 60% of your profits on every book sale; or
• have to be at the mercy of big publishing company decisions.

With our "Publishize" approach to publishing, you can retain complete control of your book and make more money. (You can read more about how we do what we do in our book Publishize: How to Quickly and Affordably Self-Publish a Book That Promotes Your Expertise.)

With our approach to self-publishing, you have more opportunities for marketing because you don't have so much cash tied up in inventory. And most importantly, unlike many turn-key book providers, we do not take any percentage of your profits. None! The book is yours, all yours.

When you sign up for our Publishing Agency program, we help you with:

• Numbers and organizations such as ISBNs, Library of Congress numbers, Books in Print, and bar codes.
• Book production. Once the draft of your manuscript is done, we will use one of our stable of copyeditors to have it professionally edited. Then we will lay it out using industry-standard software. You don't need to know anything about the realities of book design and layout (four-color process printing, layout, desktop publishing, photo manipulation, creation of print-ready PDF files, bleeds, cropping, margins, gutters, headers, footers, design, typography and more).
• Printing and getting set up with Lightning Source. We understand their printing requirements, so you end up with a book that looks good.

If you are a business owner who doesn't want to deal with all the nitpicky details involved in publishing your book, let us help.

Why Us?

Using our Publishize approach we have published 10 books since 2006. These books continue to make money for us daily. (You can see them listed here.) Since 1996, we have worked with clients ranging from large publishing companies like Macmillan Computer Publishing and Penton Media to solopreneurs on projects ranging from book layout, technical editing, graphic design, layout, cover design, Web design and more. (Check out our client list and our project portfolio.)

Many people have told us that they don't want to "deal with all the details" of writing and self-publishing a book. But unlike a "subsidy publisher," "POD printer," or "self-publishing company" you remain in complete control. That means:

• The text of the book contains all your ideas and sounds like you wrote it. (You wrote most of it, after all!)
• You retain all your rights to all your materials.
• You are the publisher of record and own your own ISBN. Your books are not produced under someone else's imprint or ISBN.
• You keep all the profit from every book. When you hire us as your Virtual Publishing Agency, you are paying for our service. We don't act as a "middleman" and take any of your profits.
• You have your own account with Lightning Source. You can log in and look at your sales statistics or place orders at any time.
• You work with just one company. When necessary, we work with a prescreened network of freelance "book people" to help get your project done. You don't have to deal with hiring and evaluating technical skills or look at portfolios.

Of course, this type of Publishing Agency service isn't for everyone. If you want to manage your book project yourself, you may want to take advantage of our "a la carte" services, which you can read about on our Write Your Book, Publish Your Book, or Promote Your Book pages.

When you sign up for our Publishing Agency Package, you must make a three or six month commitment to finishing your book, and pay an initial deposit.

The cost of the program depends on your project. We will create a custom quote for you, but generally most projects range from $10,000 - $15,000 to create a book that is approximately 150 pages (37,500 words).

We will go over your materials and create a customized contract that details the phases of the project and milestone payments. Again, this package takes you from "soup to nuts." You receive:

• Compilation of a rough draft based on your materials.
• Writing of missing material (ghostwriting).
• Developmental editing support to come up with a manuscript
• Complete book production services (editing, layout, cover design)
• Help with ISBNs and Lightning Source setup

This program is limited to only 9 clients per year, so we can provide personal service on each book project. Of course, some projects are more complex than others, and some content simple isn't workable as a book, so we screen our Publishing Agency clients carefully.

Get a Free Consultation to Find Out if Our Publishing Agency Program is Right for You

All of the information you provide below is completely confidential and incurs no obligation. Please answer each question as completely as possible so we can better understand your project. If you have sales pages for content you plan to incorporate, make sure to provide URLs for these products or programs so we can take a look before the call.