"Jazz is not
necessarily the gateway to Hell. It may be the portal to life eternal. For
jazz is a protest against machine methods, against the monotony of life.
Jazz is an attempt at individual expression. No two people jazz-dance
alike. Others may smile and even sneer at the way the young factory girl
and her boyfriend fling themselves into the anarchy of individual jazz
experience. But it is their dance, and they are finding freedom, liberty,
release in it. They need it to get away from the awful humdrum and
monotony which are starving their souls."-The Reverend
Charles Stelzle, sermon given in 1925
Many writers and would-be-authors today must also find a way to "protest against the machine
methods...and awful humdrum and monotony which are starving their souls." This is
as true in respect to the conglomerate corporate publishing world of today
as it once was to music. The first part of our comments here
illustrate what our publishing philosophy isn't. We conclude with what our philosophy
is and with the way that we conduct our business.
There is a less than a
two-percent probability of a writer's work being accepted by a major publishing
house today. It used to be that publishing houses would invest much of
their profits from bestsellers into promoting new and talented authors. It
used to be that the large publishing houses would also use these profits
to provide an assortment of valuable titles that might not all sell at a
profit, but that would be of great benefit to the public.
We now see CEOs and
stockholders insist on a formula production line that says,
"This title was on the bestseller list for 32 weeks, therefore we
want to make the next book that we publish as similar as possible to the
last one." They want to repeat the former book’s sales performance. Their
philosophy: "Don’t reinvent the wheel; duplicate it!"
Due to
that mentality, we now have only 40 authors or so that dominate more than
80 percent of the book market!
Large publishing houses
have such secret policies as:
Using ghostwriters to
continue writing books in the name of popular writers who have passed away to
continue the line and profit flow.
Using the popularity and
appeal of celebrities to sell books, giving them the title of
"author" when, in fact, they didn’t write anything at all—a secret ghostwriter actually wrote their book.
This all works well for the
publishers and the bookstore chains, so where’s the problem?
The problem is that many
great writers today live in obscurity. They are not being given a
voice, and our global community is not being blessed with a
diversity of reading material that can stimulate the imagination, motivate
aspirations, and enrich minds with a greater variety of style, opinion, and thought.
Many of these great writers
have, as a result of the perceived norm in publishing, determined
that self-publishing is their only alternative.
There are ads in all of
the professional writers' journals and on many new, very well-advertised,
bright and flashy Web sites. Many use an affiliation with a major
publishing house or chain bookstore to infer marketing support.
After the authors buy the hype and publish their books with these organizations, they later come and tell us that their books have not sold, and they ask us to provide them with book
editing, production and distribution services.
How are we at American
Book Publishing any different?
Our
primary goal is to find and support great writers and build a team of dedicated and distinguished editors,
and support staff to enhance our ability to serve the global community with wholesome entertaining and enlightening literature and learning opportunities.
For more information on our
unique organization and our business plan for achieving the above goals,
please see our
executive summary.
Copyright 1995-2009
American Book Publishing™
*All other
trademarks used by permission. All rights reserved.
