VENTURING OUT WITH A SMALL PUBLISHING HOUSE

Today, I'm happy to welcome Christine Lindsay as our guest on Novel Rocket. Her debut novel, Shadowed in Silk is receiving rave reviews and I, for one, can't wait to download it on my nook after reading the back cover blurb! If you'd like to learn more about Christine and her writing ministry, click on her link here. So without further delay, here's Christine.

No doubt about it, there are pros and cons to being published by a small but traditional publishing house. A writing peer said to me one day that she was afraid to entrust her book to a publisher that was just starting out, like I was with WhiteFire Publishing—a company that isn’t even as old as one of my grandsons.

It used to be that if a writer was published by a bigger and more established publisher, he or she could rest on their laurels, trust in that marketing team to get their book visible to the buying public. But we all know the publishing world is changing—even authors with larger houses have to do so much more marketing than they used to. In many ways their marketing isn’t much different than what a self published author has to do. The whole Ebook versus paper has re-drawn the lines on the playing field.

But here are some of the ‘pros’ that I have discovered in working with a smaller house:

• WhiteFire is a traditional publisher so that I receive royalties for my books as they sell. Same as the bigger houses, but I like that point.
• I can reach the publisher at any time of the day. In fact I feel like I belong to a publishing family with sibling authors such as Dina Sleiman, Sandi Rog and Roseanna White.
• WF gave me the same quality of editing and copy editing, as well as inner design for my book as the larger houses.
• They paid for a high quality front and back cover that quite frankly took my breath away. And they allowed me such hands involvement with my cover that still awes me. WF let me arrange the professional photo shoot in my hometown, using my birth-daughter as the model, and she wore the costumes that I arranged, including the sari material I had bought in India. By the way, my birth-daughter is the child I relinquished to adoption when she was 3 days old, and we were reunited 20 years later. God’s fingerprints were all over that cover.

One tactic that may be new to established houses is that WhiteFire published my debut novel, Shadowed in Silk, in 2 stages. First as an Ebook in May, and then as a printed book in September, 2011.

With the release of the Ebook first, I have to admit that this forced me to work harder than those authors whose electronic and printed books are released simultaneously. How does one make their tiny Ebook visible in what looks like a sea of Ebooks all shimmering on-line like a school of shrimp?

But again, I had to do the same as my contemporaries with the bigger houses. Using the many friends I made through blogs, I planted tiny seeds. By the time the printed book became available, a sliver of the market has been seeded and interest has grown in my novel. What more can a writer ask for?

As a debut novelist, I see myself much like that little shepherd boy with a few small stones in his hand, but with the power of God he slings those stones and defeats his enemy. And the enemy of the debut novelist is obscurity.

With a small but growing publishing house like WhiteFire, I have to work harder at the marketing. But along the way I am making a lot of friends. That alone is payment. All in all, the experience has been wonderful.

Shadowed in Silk

She was invisible to those who should have loved her.

After the Great War, Abby Fraser returns to India with her small son, where her husband is

st

ationed with the British army. She has longed to go home to the land of glittering palaces and veiled women . . . but Nick has become a cruel stranger. It will take more than her American pluck to survive.

Major Geoff Richards, broken over the loss of so many of his men in the trenches of France, returns to his cavalry post in Amritsar. But his faith does little to help him understand the ruthlessness of his British peers toward the Indian people he loves. Nor does it explain how he is to protect Abby Fraser and her child from the husband who mistreats them.

Amid political unrest, inhospitable deserts, and Russian spies, tensions rise in India as the people cry for the freedom espoused by Gandhi. Caught between their own ideals and duty, Geoff and Abby stumble into sinister secrets . . . secrets that will thrust them out of the shadows and straight into the fire of revolution.

Check out the book trailer of Shadowed in Silk here.