Nancy Stouffer's publisher

[rainy_lilac at yahoo.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 14467


Ah. These guys do not give review copies. They ARE in fact vanity 
publishers, although they probably more legitimate than some of the 
most notorious vanity presses, and book reviews do not review their 
books (Publisher's weekly and the Library Journal are quite fussy 
about these issues). 

Given what you have said here it is also highly unlikely that this 
will turn up in bookstores or libraries, which tend to reply highly on 
the more mainstream channels. What is more likely is that they are 
producing the book to sell on the net, and for the author to hawk in 
person. I had a friend who now publishes books with mainstream presses 
who started off publishing her works herself and then hawking them at 
elementary schools. She tended to write books about local history and 
would show up in revolutionary garb and tell her stories, and did a 
tidy business. She actually sold those books, and finally got a real 
publisher when Madeleine Le Engle recommended her. What I remember was 
that until she got a more mainstream publisher she had to do it all 
herself.

Stouffer seems to be up to something sleazy here. I think I see her 
marketing strategy: she hopes that people will invite her to places to 
talk about her lawsuit (she promotes herself as a speaker on her 
website), and she hopes to use such appearances as an occasion to sell 
her book. Very sleazy and opportunistic.

The difference between my friend and Stouffer is that my friend was 
actually writing a quality product and was marketing her work based 
upon the intrinsic appeal of her creative work. She just needed time 
to find her audience-- kids who like historical fiction. Stouffer on 
the other hand is trying to exploit Rowling's name recognition to gain 
a little notoriety. She is using litigation as a way to get attention.

Ugh!

Suzanne


--- In HPforGrownups at y..., "Jim Ferer" <jferer at y...> wrote:
> Articles about Nancy Stouffer's reissue if "Rah and Muggles" call 
her 
> publisher "Thurman House" from Owings Mills, Md. (suburb of 
> Baltimore). No internet search turns up a hit on "Thurman House," 
but 
> a reverse phone number search shows the number belongs to a "Book 
> Producer" called Ottenheimer Publishers, Inc., with the same phone 
> number and address as given for Thurman.
> 
> According to the American Book Producers Association website, a book 
> producer puts together "complicated books" and can present them to 
> publishers or be publishers themselves. go 
> to  http://www.abpaonline.org/what.html to see their description of 
> what book producers do. Ottenheimer's listing is on that site also.
> 
> "Thurman House," or Ottenheimer, or whoever, can produce books for 
> "nontraditional" markets like mail order or door-to-door.  They 
don't 
> call themselves a vanity press, or "subsidy publisher" (the  
> industry euphemism) but they aren't a traditional house either.
> 
> So who knows? I'd be surprised to see this thing on the feature 
table 
> at Border's, but maybe you have a Rite-Aid near you. That's one of 
the 
> places that carried the book before. Too bad Rite-Aid nearly went 
> bankrupt and had to close a lot of  their stores. Something about 
bad 
> buying decisions.