Maybe you have noticed that there isn't much to this website. It is really just a slapped together blog. That's because we are not trying to sell anybody anything.
We aren't in the business of getting companies to pay us for grabbing your attention, either, which is why this site doesn't have a bunch of rehashed "TOP TEN WAYS TO..." (do whatever) articles posted at regular intervals.
We aren't an automated reseller of print-on-demand services or Bowker ISBN's.
We aren't a vanity press.
We don't give a shirt what you think of us, and are not beholden to the interests of advertisers, corporate sponsors, or speculative investors.
Are we the right publishing company for your project? That depends:
If your work is of extremely high quality, and you have a good fan base established, you should just self publish with the money you get from a successful kickstarter campaign.
If you are just starting out, and don't have much extra time or any kind of budget, you should join a writers group and maintain a blog for a couple of years.
If you are a business professional or established educator, there are other publishing companies that would be a better fit for your needs than us.
If you've got something edgy and relevant roughed out, and it is the sort of thing that needs to be handled professionally for it to be taken as seriously as it deserves to be, then we might be exactly the publisher you have been looking for.
We will review your work for a small fee, and tell you what needs to be done for us to publish it.
If you have a budget or kindly benefactor to work with, we will coordinate the process of bringing your project to market, and charge you for the work it takes for us to do this on a fee-for-service basis. We do it that way (unlike other publishers!) so that you are never forced to give up the ownership rights to your work.
If you do not have a budget or kindly benefactor to fund your project, but it passes our quality review process, we will finance the publication of your project ourselves if you are willing to do most of the work necessary for it to be brought to market. This means that, at minimum, we will:
Provide officially registered No Shirt Press ISBN's for one or more versions of your work when it is completed, and upload your project to Bowker for official listing in the international index as a 'book in print'. We buy ISBN's in blocks of 100 to make this possible. (Bowker has a monopoly on providing ISBN's in the United States. For an author that is self-publishing, Bowker charges $125.00 per number to do this yourself. This means that it costs $250.00 to have both print and digital versions of a book 'officially' published! Of course, authors can always get a 'free' ISBN from createspace ... but many projects are simply not as marketable when a potential buyer or distributor looks up a book and discovers it has been indexed in this way.)
Give you all the information that you need to build your own book, including design, layout, and formatting, using the same free, open source software that we rely on every day.
Help you develop viable marketing and distribution plans.
Make sure that your editor has done a good job. (please note: for us to publish your work, we require that you have an editor who is not you.)
We will charge you on a fee-for-service basis for any work that we need to do beyond this. If you want to distribute the work completely on your own, we will not even ask for a percentage of the sales proceeds.
