How to Grow a Publishing House

by

Lauren Roberts

With the introduction of print-on-demand technology that enables the printing of small quantities of books (even one), there has been an alarming number of people who think all they need to be a publisher is manuscripts. Ask any industry professional, however, and you’ll learn it’s a lot harder. The fact is that most attempts to create a successful publishing house fail. Why? Because the founders don’t do their homework.

As a book reviewer, I routinely have contact with publishers and publicists. One of the most interesting has been that of a relatively new publisher and it came not through the reviewing end, but through her long-ago postings on the site of a notorious “publisher.” For a reason I can’t explain, I was intrigued. As she moved on and then later opened the doors to Behler, I contacted her and we’ve stayed more or less in touch until we met for the first time at the recent Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.

Her success has not come easily, but it has come. And because of what she has learned and accomplished, I thought my readers might enjoy getting to know her too. Meet Lynn Price, founder with her husband, Fred, of Behler Publications.

When did Behler Publications open its doors?
January 2003.

Where did the name come from?
Behler Publications is in honor of one of the main characters from my book—Erik Behler. Without his creation, this business would have never been eventually created.

What is the focus of Behler? Why did you choose that?
We seek works of personal journeys with social relevance. We did this because of their timeless quality. Readers can hang their hat on personal journeys due to its empathetic nature. It’s our belief that stories containing social relevance add a thought-provoking element that incites discussion. It’s memorable.

What were the steps you took from idea to completion?
Who said we’re complete? [laughs] I think having a winning combination takes time and a willingness to evolve. Over the nearly four years we’ve been in business, we’re constantly making small changes to enhance our platform. The minute a publisher relies on a tried and true method and stops entertaining expansion for the betterment of their sales, they stop becoming the best they could be.

What kind of background did you have in publishing prior to opening your doors?
Zero. Insane, I know. Our idea to open a publishing company was borne out of anger and frustration at how I had been treated when my book came out. Like many new writers, I failed to do my homework on the publishing industry and ended up with a highly questionable company, Publish America. They promised me the moon—shelf space in the stores, “line-by-line editing,” a marketing department that would work to get my book into the hands of readers.

My book was in “editing” by the time I realized the truth. I learned about their no-return policy. This meant that bookstores wouldn’t order my book because they wouldn’t be allowed to return it. The above average retail price made it unattractive to buyers. The non-existent editing (which consists of running a manuscript through spell check and formatting it) helped to degrade my book’s quality. Add this to their “marketing” efforts which equates to sending out little announcements of the book’s release to people on a list that the author provides, and you have a book that will die on the vine.

It was at this time that I saw the writing on the wall and complained to my husband that we could do a better job than PA. He had just retired from his job and was freelancing while considering what he’d like to dip his fingers into. One thing led to another, and Fred began researching in earnest about our opening up our own publishing company.

PA has a rather notorious reputation. Please describe your experience with them.
They’ve earned their reputation. By the time my book came out, I’d pretty much abandoned it. I knew that no one would touch it. I’d talked with event planners at my neighborhood stores only to be told if it was a print on demand book that I could forget about a signing. The conversations were always the same: Who was my publisher? Oh, Publish America? This is when the eye rolls began. Yes, yes, definitely forget it, they’re one of the worst.

I complained to PA about the high retail price and pointed out books of the same page count that were five to seven dollars less. I was told in a stern manner that the price would remain. Basically any time I had a question or comment that cast doubt upon their policies, I was dealt with via a tart e-mail.

I learned that Publish America made their money off the backs of their authors. The only way for books to be sold was if the author bought their books at inflated prices and peddled them. PA is an extremely wealthy company. The president, Willem Meiners, has a lovely helicopter that he flies all over the place. Conversely, I spent two thousand dollars for a hundred books that I couldn’t sell because I couldn’t get them into stores and had zero backup from PA. They’re still in my garage and serve as a reminder of everything I’ve become since that time.

What did you learn from your experience? How have you used it for Behler?
I learned that PA has a cult-like mentality and is very vindictive and cruel if you dare to question “the faith.” When they found out we’d opened Behler Publications, they flashed my home town and my husband’s name all over their message board while calling me every name in the book and basically spitting in my face.

I learned that it’s far better to rise above one’s disasters, and PA was a huge disaster. But because of this experience, Behler was created with a fierce determination to do things right. Honesty and clarity are two of the main bricks of our foundation, and we’ve carried that into every contract we issue to authors.

A publishing house has to be one of the riskiest financial ventures ever undertaken. Writer Beware’s files are loaded with names of those that have imploded because their founders had no experience in the industry. What were the factors that led you to succeed where many other have not?
Excellent financing and a very savvy husband who dealt with finances and contracts every day for over thirty years. We also had amazing people from the publishing industry who were willing to advise and guide us along literally drop into our lap. Even though publishing is a huge industry, it’s really rather small. Eventually everyone knows everyone else if you’re around long enough, and gossip is the lifeblood of its arteries.

Other factors that have led to our sustenance include the willingness to never give up, always think outside the box, and never stop asking questions. We’ve had people in very high places give us their time and talent in order to insure that we succeeded.

How many manuscripts do you receive in a month? Of that number, how many on average will you publish in a single year?
We receive about two hundred queries/submissions a month. Out of those roughly 1200 submissions, we’ll publish between nine and twelve.

Of those, how many come from agents, and how many come in from authors? Do you have a preference for one or the other?  
The number we receive from agents is increasing as we become better known. Right now the numbers are pretty low, maybe forty a year come from agents. As to what I prefer—this depends upon the agent. There are some agents that I’ll clear the desk for because I trust their judgment and know they’ll send me really great material. Other agents don’t get me terribly excited because I feel they don’t understand the marketplace because they consistently take on inferior work. In those cases, I’m perfectly content to take un-agented work. But I do see a time where we’ll only accept agented work.

What do you look for in a publishable manuscript? How do you know which manuscripts that come in to you can be sold as books?
First thing I look for is whether it meets our criteria of personal journeys with social relevance, and this is why submitting a bang-up synopsis is vital. Second, I look at the level of writing. If it sings to me, then I’ll continue reading the first thirty pages. At the same time, I keep my eye on their bio. As much as it sucks, authors have to have a platform—something that makes them either a professional in their subject matter or a terrific marketing plan. I don’t care what some authors may say; it’s imperative that they realize their job doesn’t finish with “The End,” that it’s only just beginning. Buyers who see an active author know that they’ll create demand far better than the author who sits on his hands. No matter how hard we as publishers work to advertise, we can only go so far. The author has to support our efforts in a big way.

As for how I know which manuscripts that come can be sold as books—it’s not entirely my decision. We have a submissions committee that consist of editors and our distributor and sales people. I may love a manuscript and am willing to sell my firstborn for it. But if I get the no from the sales people, I have to consider their opinions very carefully. They’re the ones out in the trenches and know what we, as a small independent publisher, are up against.

What is the range of advances that Behler offers?
It all depends upon how confident we feel the book will sell at presales. They range anywhere from a couple hundred to a couple thousand. The author who has two full time publicists working for her or has a strong and established readership has us far more confident as to their selling power over the author who doesn’t have a strong marketing plan.

                                                 

Several of your books have won awards. Tell us about your recent ones, and about the books that won them.
We’re very proud of this year’s winners. Douglas Light wrote one my favorite books in the whole world, East Fifth Bliss, which took first place in the fiction category at the Benjamin Franklin Awards. This is a darkly comic tale about Morris Bliss and tells of loss, procrastination and identity. The reason I love this book so much is that Morris is in all of us. He’s always fixin’ to do something, to live his life to its full potential. It’s not until his life careens out of control that he struggles to finally take action.

Our second title to make a major win is a wonderful writer’s guide, Body Trauma: A Writer’s Guide to Wounds and Injuries by David Page, M.D. This won a silver medal IPPY. We were thrilled because this is the first of our Get It Write series, and has wonderful potential to be a hot seller. This is a marvelous writer’s tool for anyone who needs the 411 on what happens to a body when exposed to any number of maladies, be it man-made or natural. Dr. Page goes into great detail about what goes on in a hospital and the operating room. He’s truly the writer’s best friend.

Our last award was for Donovan’s Paradigm, which won a gold medal IPPY, and was written by, well, me. What made this especially sweet was this was the book I sued Publish America for to get my rights back and won. I immediately rewrote the book, slapped it into editing, gave it a new title and cover art and released it a year ago. We had over thirty titles in print before my book ever hit publication. Donovan’s Paradigm centers around new surgeon, Kim Donovan’s, attempt to introduce an alternative healing program on the surgical. It rips open a breeding ground of controversy on the surgical floor, and has Erik Behler, St. Vincent’s senior surgeon, leading the charge.

It’s a representation of what’s going on in medicine today. People are being told by their doctors that there’s nothing more that can be done. This leaves a huge hole in medicine, and Donovan’s Paradigm seeks to fill that hole with presenting real options that are really taking place in American hospitals.

What books have you and will you publish in 2007?
I think we’re at about 45 titles. We publish(ed) eight titles this year. 2008 is shaping up to be a busy one. We’re at thirteen titles already and will have to start scheduling into 2009.

There’ s a statistic floating around that says 81 percent of the American public thinks they should write a book, though only 25 percent of that same public actually read them. Yet there are somewhere around 100,000 trade books (meaning books sold to the public) published each year. How then do you sell a book?
No doubt that competition is huge, and it boils down to a superior product, distribution and author platform. You can have a terrific product that will gather moss in the warehouse unless you have the services of a good independent distributor with a top sales force. The first thing buyers ask the sales force is what the author is doing to promote the book, to create demand. It’s also vital to have a niche. We’re about personal journeys with social relevance. This gives buyers a quick tagline on us and creates interest. We advertise in trade magazines that match a particular title, market our books to a title’s key audience, recommend publicists if an author doesn’t have one already, attend trade shows and pimp to the libraries.

You are an author as well as a publisher. Tell us about your book. Was it fun to write? Did you enjoy the research?  
Donovan’s Paradigm details the controversy surrounding the slow integration of alternative types of healing into Western medicine much to the dismay of the medical community. Too many people are being told there’s nothing more that can be done for their conditions. Where is the patient to turn to next? Enter alternative forms of healing.

Many docs despise these methods because they don’t satisfy standard scientific analysis. You can’t stick an acupuncture patient under a microscope and measure its benefits. I agree with many of the docs’ concerns. If you can’t adequately measure a treatment, then how can you determine its efficacy? On the other hand, maybe we need to consider other means of testing and measurement. It’s a fascinating notion because health concerns us all, and many of us are left hanging without adequate answers.

My research with John Pan, M.D. was fascinating. His integrative care clinic has M.D.s and alternative care practitioners working happily under one roof. Instead of a doc coming in and barely looking you in the eye for their allotted fifteen minutes, John’s patients get an hour with him. He doesn’t focus on just the tumor on your arm, but the entire patient. He wants to know what’s going on in his patients’ lives. For example, we all know that stress kills, but the only time a patient hears this is from their cardiologist. An internist normally doesn’t wonder about their patients’ stress levels. They treat the affliction and move on. The idea of whole mind/body care intrigued me, and I couldn’t help but wonder if we Americans wouldn’t be healthier if docs factored our environment, lives and thoughts in their diagnosis and offered natural healing options such as Reiki or hypnotherapy over prescribing drugs with known side affects. For instance, I talked with cancer patients who took meds for nausea during their chemo. Those invariably produced side effects which required more meds, some that introduced their own set of problems. Those same patients dropped all the meds and went in for Reiki or biofeedback and had remarkable recoveries.

There’s more than meets the eye with the human mind and spirit, and it’s these elements that are the focus of my book.

What are some of the more outrageous experiences you have had to date?
Oh Lord, where to start. Human nature is a fascinating study, and when you mix people and art together, you get a very strange blend at times. Some experiences that tend to repeat themselves are the writers who submit and can’t take constructive criticism. They’ll write back inviting me to do all kinds of interesting things with a number of barnyard animals. For this reason, I give very few critiques on works that I reject. Too bad, really, because writers always want to know why they were rejected. The few bad apples ruin it for everyone.

A couple weeks ago I had a lady submit to us informing me that I had exactly one week to read her 210,000-word manuscript and get a contract out to her because, after all, she had a busy schedule with her job. After splitting my sides laughing, I let her know that we weren’t the right company for her.

What are some of the best experiences you have had to date?
Boy, there have been so many, it’s hard to pin them all down. I have to say that meeting our distributor is a big ticket item. Greg over at Blu Sky Media Group is a great guy, willing to think outside the box, who gets the job done. Hearing that we had a huge order for several of our new titles was reason to pull out the champagne.

Having more and more of our books reviewed by the big trade magazines is very sweet. We’ll be getting our first New York Times review for The War of the Rosens, and I couldn’t be happier if I were twins.

Lastly, winning three major writing awards in one season.

What do you feel you have done right? What would you change if you could go back?
We’ve met the right people at the right time, asked a million questions and never assumed we knew it all. We surrounded ourselves with people who think outside of the box. The adage—“This is the way it’s done in the industry”—only goes so far. You have to be willing to get very little sleep, spend a lot of money. It’s a fact that no matter how well prepared you are, you’re still going to make mistakes. You need to be able to weather those mistakes.

What would we do differently? Spend more time in the research phase before opening our doors so we’d be better organized. Looking back, I can see how it’s vital to define your company. Do you publish mysteries, horror, nonfiction? Jerry Simmons, retired VP from Time Warner Books, made this recommendation to us. We put our heads together and defined our editing staff’s strong suits and figured out how to parlay their talents into books that people would care about for many, many years. The outcome was to publish personal journeys that have a heavy social relevance.

What is the hardest thing about running a publishing house?
Time. If we could inject another eight hours into the day, this would be nice. Another challenge is staff. We’ve grown so far so fast that don’t want to become a victim of our success. Thankfully, whenever we need more editors or interns, they appear out of nowhere.

What is an average day like?
I’m normally at my desk by 7:30 a.m. I first check my mail and put out the fires. If I’m personally editing a book, like now, I open up the file and begin working on it. Throughout the day, I’m on call to answer questions, review submissions, write tip sheets, refine synopses, write press releases, get galleys out to reviewers and anything else that crops up. I don’t normally leave my desk before 7:30 p.m. Long day.

BookExpo America, the annual industry trade show, just finished its 2007 event as did the American Library Association one. What do you do at these shows? Why is it important to attend? (P.S. How are the parties?)
This is a case of showing our pretty face to those in the industry. Over three days of the BEA, we ended up signing two brilliant writers. We also pitched our new titles or our company to librarians, indie bookstores, reviewers and agents. Getting your name out is the lifeblood of this industry. If people don’t know you exist, they aren’t going to order your books. This is a tight-knit community, and people remember you year after year.

The parties are fabulous.

I understand you know the famous blogging agent, Miss Snark. What is she really like?
Unlike her blogging persona, she’s a lovely woman with a marvelous sense of humor. I love her for her “call ‘em as I see ‘em” approach. It matches my own appreciation for cutting through the bull and getting to the meat. Extremely knowledgeable and does one of THE best jobs at selling her authors.

How do you picture Behler's readers?
What a cool question. I think our readers are smarter than the average because our books aren’t fluff. They have meat that leave readers thinking about what they’ve read for a long time. That’s one of the litmus tests I have when signing a new author. Do I think about it for several days afterward? Can I get it out of my head? If I can’t, chances are that the reader won’t, either.

What do you as a reader (not a publisher) look for in a book?
I look for a story that has substance, a hook, elements that make me think. I love character development because they’re the heart and soul of a story. Sure, there are books that are all plot, and they do very well. But, face it, I’m a chick. I want character development to accompany that strong plot. It doesn’t have to be a whole lot, but it’s gotta be there.

What are your favorite books?
My first love will always be John Lescroart. His books about the ever-flawed Dismas Hardy always have me hoping that he’ll manage to excel at his personal life as well as he does his professional life. His dialog technique is among my favorites.

Other favorites, I’m not ashamed to say, are a couple of our own. East Fifth Bliss is simply wonderful. I see so much of Morris Bliss in all of us. The War of the Rosens. Little Emma Rosen just wrapped herself around my heart and never let go. Far surpasses Bee Season.

Does your personal reading aid or conflict with your professional reading? In what ways?
You assume I’m pleasure reading. [laughs] I have so little free time that my shelves are chock full of books I’m fixing to read. When I do get that chance to read, I’m hindered by the innate desire to edit. I can be heard clucking my tongue over things I would have done far differently. It’s annoying as all get out.

What are you reading now?
Um, can you wait for me to remove the cobwebs from the cover? [laughs] Yikes. I really need a vacation.


Note: I was shocked to learn last week that Jan Nathan, founder of Publishers Marketing Association, has died. Lynn Price and I both knew her (before we knew each other), and are devastated by the loss. A personal tribute to her and her work for small publishers has been posted in Bibliopinions.
 

Almost since her childhood days of Mother Goose, Lauren has been giving her opinion on books to anyone who will listen. That “talent” eventually took her out of magazine writing and into book reviewing in 2000 for an online review site where she cut her teeth (as well as a few authors). Stints as book editor for her local newspaper and contributing editor to Booklist and Bookmarks magazines has reinforced her belief that she has interesting things to say about books. Lauren shares her home with several significant others including three cats, 800 bookmarks and approximately 1,000 books that, whether previously read or not, constitute her to-be-read stack. She is a member of the National Books Critics Circle (NBCC) and Book Publicists of Southern California as well as a longtime book design judge for Publishers Marketing Association’s Benjamin Franklin Awards. You can reach her at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it