Luminare Press
A few months ago, I found another avenue to get Three Degrees of Freedom into print. I was bumming around the internet looking at local writer’s resources when I came upon Luminare Press. They had a free e-book titled Six Steps to Successful Self-Publishing which I thought might be worth thumbing through. It was a short, quick little read but it had some good information. The book is a nice concise outline of the steps and requirements of getting a book published outside of a traditional publishing house. I would recommend it to anyone looking to self-publish and will certainly be referencing it again myself.
From my perspective, as someone looking to get a first book printed, Luminare is another hybrid style publisher but they are a very different model than Austin Macauley or Olympia. Luminare will help you with the book publishing process but it seems more of a service than a partnership. Luminare will guide the author through the process and take care of the details. The author keeps 100% of the royalties here, but naturally they must pay for the services in full. Luminare offers free consultations to authors looking to publish. I took advantage of that and talked to the owner Patricia Marshall (and author of Six Steps to Successful Self-publishing). I’m glad I did it. It was very helpful. Patricia had a lot of good advice and did not pressure me for business. Instead she just talked me through the process, got a feel for me as a writer and my ambitions. A day or two after the phone meeting, she offered me a quote for the full publishing package for my manuscript. My manuscript is on the long side, 130,000 words, so the editing charges are a little more. It was on the order of $9,000. This investment would include editing, formatting, cover design, listing on internet booksellers among other things. A shorter manuscript would be less costly, though I can’t say exactly how much. It is worth noting that all the services offered by Luminare can be purchased in an a la carte fashion as well. An author can go to them for editing alone, or just for formatting and cover design. That allows the author to trim the expense of working through Luminare by focusing on the areas they really want help with. This opens some intriguing options for getting Three Degrees of Freedom to print.
I expect the full suite of services offered from Luminare is going to be comparable to that provided by Olympia and Austin Macauley (whom I have discussed in earlier posts). The Luminare quote was considerably higher than the others, but the others will own the rights to the book (at least for a time) and they take a cut of the royalties. The decision a writer would have to weigh is whether the additional cost at the time of publishing would be offset by the additional return on book sales. Not sure that I have the experience to assess that risk yet.
Based on the experience I’ve had so far; I would definitely feel comfortable partnering with Luminare at some point. Patricia Marshall impressed me as being honest and experienced. She was exceedingly generous with her time even though I led off with the assertion that I probably wasn’t going to go to considerable expense to publish Three Degrees of Freedom. I daresay she was even in agreement with me on that point after she took the time to listen to my situation and hear my personal goals.
If the objective is to get Three Degrees of Freedom on a bookshelf in the next year, there is certainly a chance that Luminare will play a role. If so, it will most likely be for formatting and perhaps cover design. For future manuscripts, I couldn’t possibly say for sure.