Tell us a little about Evanston Publishing, Inc. and why you started your company.
I started the business because I love reading, designing, and producing books. When I started, I began with a small personal computer on a sewing machine table in a corner of my laundry room. My first project was producing a newsletter for other companies in order to raise money to publish books. Along the way, other publishers and self-publishers began asking for my advice. Ultimately, we began to do so much work for others, we became book packagers by default.

Since Evanston Publishing, Inc. opened for business in 1986, we have helped authors publish hundreds of books, including some that have won awards, and a few that became best sellers. We also have been written up in national magazines and local newspapers.

What did you do before starting your own company?
For many years I taught English, on every level from high school to university. I was asked to join a large English textbook publisher (which was later bought out by Scott Foresman) as a production editor. That was before the days when computers could typeset a book, so I not only wrote and edited grammar and composition texts, but I learned every aspect of book production.

You often talk about your company being unique in its field. Could you explain why?
We are not a vanity or subsidy publisher. We are a specialty production house and offer as much or as little as a self-publisher or publishing company needs to publish a book.

Book packaging is not the same process as vanity or subsidy publishing, where the author pays all the costs in producing and marketing the book, yet the publishing company owns all or some of the rights to the book. If you self-publish a book with a packager, you own all the rights to the book--you are in control.

Our prices are based on the production work you need done and the number of books you have printed, not how much you plan to charge for the book. More on vanity or subsidy publishing.

You have self-published some books yourself, haven't you?
Yes, I have published two books about publishing and self-publishing, Selling Your Book and The Successful Self-Publisher, and one translation of a book originally written in French, called Two Erotic Tales by Pierre Louÿs. They can be purchased in bookstores or from our site's bookstore.

Why would you recommend that an author self-publish?
My staff and I have found that the publishing business is a very special world. Perhaps that is because the authors who want to make books are a very special breed of people. Self-publishing is an alternative that many writers turn to as traditional publishing houses close more doors to writers who have yet to make a name for themselves. It has an honorable tradition: Mark Twain, Zane Grey, Walt Whitman, William Blake, Robert Burns, Henry Thoreau, Herman Melville, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Carl Sandburg, among others, were all self-publishers at one time.

Successfully self-publishing your book is an attainable goal. I can think of few greater pleasures than seeing your own words in print, being read by other people.

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