You describe Practical Inspiration as a partnership publisher, but what does that mean? How is it different to traditional publishing?
Traditional publishers make all their money from the sale of books. To survive, they need to put through as many books as possible as efficiently as possible, at as high a price as they think the market can bear. It means little scope for variation or innovation, tight control of the intellectual property, and a focus on maximizing revenue from sales to you, the author.
But as a business leader, you have different goals. You want to use your IP across a wide variety of formats, get your ideas in front of as many of the right people as possible, and have more support throughout the writing and publishing process. You might also want to be able to purchase copies cost-effectively to use in your business, and you’ll probably want a high degree of control over design decisions.
In which case, you should consider partnership publishing.
At Practical Inspiration, we offer all the benefits of traditional publishing: professional support across editorial, design, production and marketing, together with warehousing and distribution through our sales teams internationally into bookstores and libraries and a rights team proactively selling translation and other rights.
But unlike traditional publishers we provide book coaching and support through the planning and writing process, and we aim to help you make the book work harder for your business. Our terms allow you to use the material in the book in other formats (in fact we positively encourage it!) as well as giving you the lion’s share of revenues from sales. If you want more copies than the 100 we supply as part of our standard package, you can buy them at cost plus a small fee to cover overheads.
We uphold and indeed go beyond the IBPA’s Hybrid Publisher Criteria and we’re committed not just to satisfying our authors but delighting them.
We think it’s a much more rewarding and satisfying way to publish – for us as well as you – and our authors agree.
So does that mean you publish anyone?
No, it doesn’t. When we publish a book it’s a true partnership: you’re trusting us to support your brand, and we’re trusting you to support ours. There are some books that just aren’t right for us because the subject or approach doesn’t fit the ‘practical inspiration’ value we’ve worked so hard to establish, and which has such a strong reputation with booksellers, academics and readers.
If you’re interested in publishing with us, the first step is a concept review.
Are all your books published under this model?
No, we publish a number of traditionally commissioned books each year at our own expense. These come almost exclusively from the 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge. We do not accept unsolicited proposals.
You can see full details of our standard package here, or get in touch to find out more…