“Why I love Bookstand Publishing” by Joshua Mikael "In the fall of 2004, a colleague of mine and I set out on a quest to write our first book. Without any experience or first hand knowledge of the publishing industry, we dove in headfirst and after a flurry of initial research, we decided to self-publish our manuscript, rather than pursue a traditional publishing deal, so that we could maintain the integrity of our work. "At the time, I was a graphic and web designer, and a perfectionist on top of that, so the decision to self-publish was motivated out of a desire to control not only the meaning of the words on the pages inside, but the aesthetic layout of the manuscript and the cover. We wanted to do everything and have that be what went to print. "In our initial research, we concluded that going with a print-on-demand (POD) publisher would be best for us because of our modest budget and the lack of a warehouse to keep an initial print run of several thousand books. We found a company called AuthorHouse that seemed like the “perfect” fit for us, so we paid for their services. We immediately hit a brick wall when they would not reveal to us how to submit a manuscript file that was print ready. As I had never designed a book before, this was not something I knew how to do up to my perfectionist standards, and ultimately we submitted only a cover file that was print ready and the manuscript formatting was placed in the hands of a technical representative at AuthorHouse. This was a very frustrating process because it required a lot of unnecessary back and forth with correction sheets. The tech also made “fat finger” mistakes in making it print ready, which meant more frustrations that prolonged the process. All in all, many frustrations later, the book arrived in the mail and it looked fine. But the experience was burned into my memory. "About six months after completing our book, my co-author and I decided to go back to the drawing board to improve it. We did some more research and discovered a company called iUniverse that seemed to have a good overall sense of the self-publishing POD landscape, which we now knew was full of trap doors and services that are a complete waste of time and, more importantly, money. But once again, this company refused to pull back the curtain on how to submit a print ready manuscript file to go along with our print ready cover file, so we braced ourselves for yet another frustrating integration process with respect to our manuscript and cover. Well, when we got back the proofs of our manuscript and cover, we were appalled. The cover, which has a grey background, had been turned a very ugly green, and iUniverse placed textual elements promoting themselves on multiple locations of the cover which, above and beyond the unacceptable green color, made our cover look like everything but what we—the paying customer—wanted. The manuscript looked about 5 times worse than the cover. In short, we absolutely hated their proofs. I tried to explain to them that if I took a design to Kinko’s to print a set of business cards, I could expect Kinko’s to not force me to have the Kinko’s logo on my business card, let alone in a place where the logo wouldn’t even look good. They refused to listen. They viewed my book, which I was paying them to make print ready, as their real estate to use for marketing their company brand. This completely dumbfounded me, as I had never encountered a pay-for-service company that told the paying customer how it was going to be. So we got a refund and started searching again. "Still wanting to self-publish, POD was the best choice for us, given that our budget had not changed and based on how we wanted to market our book upon completion, so we went deep into Google for answers and ended up looking at POD publishers that were smaller than AuthorHouse and iUniverse, who incidentally are the two largest POD publishers and are themselves owned by the same company; it makes sense that we got the same story and the same treatment from both of them. "Ultimately, I ended up on the phone with a nice young woman named Emily at Bookstand Publishing and I started firing all my questions at her to see if they would be worth going with. When we got to the topic of how I could submit a print ready manuscript file, Emily told me everything I needed to know right there on the phone, and I hadn’t given Bookstand a penny yet! Over the next several weeks I worked tirelessly to hone the aesthetic of our manuscript and Bookstand was always cordially there to answer my questions regarding the preparation of my manuscript file. If you think about it, it makes sense for a POD publisher to illuminate this process for authors because it’s less work for the staff, but what I came to realize is that by not revealing this part of the process, POD publishers like AuthorHouse and iUniverse can charge for something that takes about 30 minutes to explain. "Bookstand Publishing was the first POD publisher we found that didn’t look at us as people with $$$ signs on our foreheads. They looked at us as authors who needed assistance with getting our voice in print, and that’s exactly what they did every step of the way. And the end result is a book that I’m very proud to have my name associated with—not just because of the improvement to the meaning of the words on the page from doing a new edition, but because of the heightened understanding imparted to us by Bookstand about how to literally control every aspect, every element, every line, everything in and about our book. "Patriots By Choice—A Conclusive Case For Granting Naturalized U.S. Citizens The Right To Run For President, which is the title of our book, is not just a testament to the perseverance of two hungry authors writing an engaging, worthwhile manuscript. It is the sum of the efforts of my colleague and myself, as well as the team of individuals at Bookstand who chose to place themselves in our shoes, rather than our bank accounts, to help us manifest a work that meets not just our own standards, but the standards of the marketplace. "If you’re a first time author or an experienced author looking for a more personal experience with a POD publisher, Bookstand Publishing is a place where you can get something other than the same old story and results that don’t meet your expectations." | 
Joshua Mikael, Co-author of Patriots By Choice - A Conclusive Case For Granting Naturalized U.S. Citizens The Right To Run For President |
