When Baton Rouge-based author Jeffrey Marx began looking for a publisher of his latest book, a collection of LSU sports profiles entitled Walking with Tigers, he had plenty of options. With six books to his name, including two New York Times bestsellers, and a Pulitzer Prize for an investigative newspaper story, Marx had an established reputation as a writer and solid relationships with several national publishing houses.
But as Business Report details in a feature from the current issue, Marx decided not to pursue the traditional publishing route and opted instead to self-publish his book, something a growing number of both rookie and veteran writers are doing. What’s more, he looked to local businesses to help sponsor a statewide books-to-school program that will put thousands of copies of Walking with Tigers in the hands of schoolchildren while also creating opportunities for the author to promote his work.
“It’s a win-win for him and for us,” says Brandon Landry, co-founder of Walk-On’s Enterprises, which is sponsoring the program along with Business First Bank. “He gets to sell his books, we help him promote it and school kids get free books.”
It’s a new way of doing business that Marx finds both challenging and liberating. Though it’s too soon to declare the experiment a success, Marx says he’s learning a lot and having fun in the process.
“There’s a freedom and a flexibility and an ability to make things up as you go that I absolutely love about self-publishing,” says Marx, who relocated from his native New York to Baton Rouge several years ago when he married local interior designer Leslie Herpin Marx. “You’re able to do things big publishers wouldn’t even think about.”
There are a couple of reasons Marx decided to self publish Walking with Tigers. Getting rich off the book isn’t one of them. Marx declines to say how much he spent publishing the book or even how many copies he printed. But it’s safe to assume the undertaking didn’t come cheap.
A high-quality, self-publishing job with a large print run can easily cost as much as $30,000 or more. It can be advantageous in the long run because the author retains total control over his intellectual property and doesn’t sign away rights to a large publishing house. But recouping those initial costs can take a long time because in the world of self-publishing there’s no one to push sales. No PR firm to schedule radio interviews on NPR. No logistics team to arrange book tours. No distributor to get the product out to independent bookstores. It’s totally on the author to do it himself.
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