Every new publisher must be met with a certain healthy skepticism. How do you suppose you’re different from the rest? What makes you think you deserve a piece of the formidable marketshare pie? Every new publisher tries to answer this question with the same old responses: we’re going to listen to our readers, we’re really about diversity in our author base, we plan to treat our authors the way we ourselves would want to be treated. You’ve heard it. And for those publishing houses that live up to those grand ideals, good for you.
We don’t plan to.
We put together Pickwick Ink Publishing because we wanted to see quality books out in the market. We don’t want to put out 5,000 books, we want to put out 10 good ones. We’re not willing to publish every ridiculous dolphin shape shifter story because honestly, some of that crap just makes us wince. Give us a great shapeshifter story, and yes, maybe we’d publish it. But we want a great story – a GREAT story – more than churning out new books every month. So if you request ‘more vampires versus robot stories,’ tough. We’re not listening. We want to focus on quality.
We’re also concerned with how many people claim they want diversity but then make sure their stories are finely labeled and segmented so that nobody will be accidentally exposed to something they didn’t want to see. If we have characters who are black, we’re not labeling the book under ‘black gay fiction.’ Crack open a book without knowing exactly what’s inside or where it’s headed.
Find yourself surprised.
We welcome your feedback. We’ll read it, talk about it, consider it. We’re not promising more dolphin shifter books or more historical WWII romance. But we do care what you think.