How we fulfill your dream

Our exclusive 7 steps to publishing success

Step 1:   Enroll you in our free author mentoring program.
Step 2:   Edit your manuscript to ready it for production.
Step 3:   Design your book and a custom cover.
Step 4:   Deliver to you a printed proof copy of your completed book.
Step 5:   Design an e-book in all popular formats.
Step 6:   Place your book with Ingram, the world's largest distribution network.
Step 7:   Assist in marketing and promoting your book.

Step 1: Enroll you in our free author mentoring program.

Confused Woman
A new author is often like a deer in the headlights, dazed to paralysis upon entering the publishing realm. We take this seriously as some of our clients come to us battered and disillusioned from past experiences.  Our first job is to establish a working relationship that goes far into the future.
Mentoring is not an event; it is a journey. It has a beginning, but no middle and no end. We don't stop mentoring our clients when the book has been produced and the copies distributed. We continue to advise and counsel through the marketing and promotion phases of your book's active lifetime.
Mentoring begins with the manuscript's review and continues  through to publishing success. Mentoring is built into our services as part of a long-term relationship commitment with our authors. We do sometimes bill for mentoring when a new author requires a lot of one-on-one effort to develop his or her story into a publishable book, even ghostwriting parts of it if need be, but for most authors mentoring is free of cost. It is built into our services in the 7 steps to publishing success.
No worries, if we need to bill separately for mentoring, we will discuss it in advance. Otherwise, it is always a built-in component of our commitment to you in the successful fulfillment of your dream.

Step 2: Edit your manuscript to ready it for production.

Our editing process is so much more than a grammar and punctuation once-over of your story. We ensure the developmental integrity of your story at the chapter, page, paragraph, and sentence level. Maybe your character is walking through a wall, or you have inadvertently left out a needed reference to a cited source. We help you correct those errors.

We ensure the substantive intensity of your story by recommending revisions to  paragraphs or sentences when needed. Overuse of a word, redundancies, and clichés are distracting to a reader. We offer you alternatives.  We suggest methods that get your point across, raise the dramatic intensity, and communicate the emotion(s) of your story more clearly.

Then, we ensure the correct grammar and punctuation is applied to each sentence. This final copyediting step is what many new authors believe the entire editing process to be, and in some instances, it is all that a publisher offers. However, as you'll learn through our author mentoring program, there is much, much more to creating a sellable work of art than punctuation and grammar.

But we don't stop there. When your book is ready, we print a proof copy for both our proofreader and you to review and approve before moving on to production and distribution.

Editing is an art not a science, and there is always room for improvement. That is why we include 3 cycles of review and revisions throughout the editing process in our exclusive multi-step quality control process. You will be involved every step of the way in bringing your dream into the world as a newborn work of art.

Step 3:   Design your book and a custom cover.
The Glass Cave front cover

You've brought your dream from a fantasy in your mind to a living, breathing story sitting in front of you. Why dishonor your work by leaving it in a word processing program, short-cutting the mechanics of turning your manuscript into sellable art?

We typeset your manuscript using industry leader Adobe InDesign software. We retouch or restore all images using Adobe Photoshop Pro. We create any illustrations in Adobe Illustrator. And we provide all additional services needed to put a beautiful work in front of book buyers. Our standards meet or exceed those of the best publishing houses in the United States because we use the most current methods in the book publishing industry.

Step 4:   Deliver to you a printed proof copy of your completed book.
Jonathan's Pocket Full of Truths Front cover

After the basic project is complete, it is time to print a prototype of the finished product, known as a "proof copy" of your book.

The proof copy validates design objectives that cannot be checked until a book is assembled, printed, trimmed, and glued into its final form. The proof copy allows us to verify alignments, margins, and of course do one more final read for any remaining errors.

If we find errors that have been introduced into the production process, we will fix them and deliver another proof at our cost. If you wish to make any revisions at the last minute, we will revise the text and deliver another proof to you at a minimal cost.

Step 5:   Design an e-book in all popular formats.
Freedom Road Publishing | Adobe Illustrator Web Graphic

E-books are designed to stringent specifications needed to ensure acceptance by all the various e-retailers in the Ingram's digital distribution network. For example, iTunes, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo all have differing requirements for the acceptance of an e-book for sale on their websites. There are price requirements, format requirements, and internal metadata requirements that all must be met for the global distribution of your book in digital form.

All e-books are tested on the devices they are designed to be read on and go through a  quality control check to ensure that the finished product passes the file validation tests for every major e-book distributor in the network.

Step 6:   Place your book with Ingram, the world's largest distribution network.
Image of World Map

You are ready to become a published author. While you have made it through 99 percent of the way to giving birth to your dream, it is still a dream until readers know that your book is available for purchase.

Distribution comes in  two forms: Print Distribution and Digital Distribution. At its core, distribution is the gateway between an author's published book and the readers who will buy it. A little out from the core are a host of distributors who make that book available to retailers. The retailers are, of course, where the readers flock to find your dream, buy it, and read it.

We place your book with so many distribution sources that it is almost impossible for it not to get noticed. However, distribution isn't the end of the road. It is the beginning of another road. The road that connects you, your work, and your efforts to readers around the globe.

Our print distribution network and our e-book distribution network are the widest, most respected, and most sophisticated networks in place today.

Step 7:   Assist in marketing and promoting your book.
Man, Jummping for Joy
Freedom Road Publishing | Kindle Reader
Positive thinking front cover

Now that your dream has been given life and a name, that is, we've produced a book and an e-book with a title, what happens? After all, who wants to throw a party that no one will attend? Here's what we do to help your book sell.

  • The marketing of  your book begins with your book cover design.
  • It continues with the book's back cover and your author bio.
  • Part of the book's marketing lies in its professional appearance, so we give it an ISBN and a barcode. The Industry Standard Book Number is one of the stamps of a professionally designed book to the book buying industry. Per industry standards, your print book and each digital version of it receives a different ISBN. Why? Because it is a stamp of a professionally produced book product, and because RR Bowker's "Books in Print" requires individual ISBNs to properly catalog your book's formats. Amazon.com doesn't require any ISBN for a Kindle e-book, but we give it one anyway because other sellers of Kindle-formatted books do require it. Since iTunes and RR Bowker (the ISBN source) require a different ISBN for each form of your product,  we use 3 ISBNs to produce your print and e-book for global distribution in all the popular formats. As far as we know, no one in this industry follows the rules of a professionally published book product this closely for the price we offer you.
  • Another professional stamp of approval is given by listing your book in all its forms in RR Bowker's "Books in Print," the bible of the professional book buying industry.
  • The marketing of your book takes another big step forward when we automatically add a BISAC category to your book's cover in addition to the barcode. The "Book Industry Study Group Classification" is the industry standard that all booksellers use to inventory and stock your book. To a book buyer, this code represents another stamp of a professional design.
  • We market your book when we add the book's "description" copy inside your e-book to the metadata that you never see but some e-retailers require. Then, we give the description to Ingram for them to use in marketing and selling your book in print and digital form, further marketing your book in all its formats.
  • We market your book by adding 6 - 10 keywords to the e-book's metadata to assist in your Google search engineer optimization and ranking. The description and keywords are critical metadata for any Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy involving Internet search engines.
  • We send out a press release announcing your new book to hundreds of radio, television, and print journalists.
  • We have Ingram place your book in their next catalog for brick-and-mortar bookstore buyers, such as Barnes & Noble, BAM, and hundreds of  independent bookstores, to see and potentially buy.
  • We send your book to a minimum of 5 book reviewers to have them read and review it on Amazon.com, Goodreads, and other important blogs and retailer sites.
  • All of this marketing will have happened before you receive your first production order of your book. No one is as responsive to marketing your book as Freedom Road Publishing.
  • However, we're not finished yet. We will subscribe you to the Freedom Road Bullet. You will receive twice monthly updates on the industry, writing tips and techniques, contests, and stories from other authors. The Freedom Road Bullet is a newsletter and blog written by writers for writers. If we've educated and trained you well enough, you'll be invited to be one of our guest bloggers, and together with your post, we will include your author's bio and a description of your book to further promote you as a published author to the world.

 

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