Font Publications is my publishing imprint. Not all indie authors have an imprint though many do, for all sorts of reasons. Mine are quite personal.
Imprints began in trade publishing for trade reasons. The larger publishing companies have multiple imprints, using the different names as brands directed at different demographic consumer segments.
Here for example, is a list of Penguin Random House's imprints:
The commissioning editors and marketing teams at Chatto & Windus, for example, are working with quite different books ( “outstanding literary fiction and contemporary international writers as well as the best literary biography, memoir, history, cultural comment and poetry”) compared to say, Black Lace (erotic fiction for women) or Fig Tree (“entertaining, well-written books in tune with the times.”)
These distinctions are clearly important to literary agents and booksellers.
For me, and for indie authors who don't publish other authors, it's quite different. My author business name is Orna Ross and Font Publications has no legal or financial standing.
But since I started self-publishing, all my books have appeared under the Font Publications umbrella and it means a lot to me.
Font Publications: What
I am currently reformatting all my books, to put them onto the new, wonderful formatting tool called Vellum.
At the back of each book I say the following:
Font Publications is dedicated to empowering people who want to go creative, in work and in life.
Font publishes fiction, non-fiction and poetry but all the books have the same creative intention at source: to foster true freedom and independence for all, within a context of connection to others.
To go creative: go to the font.
Font Publications: Why?
This sums up one of my reasons. As a writer who publishes fiction, non-fiction and poetry, that unifying mission is carried across all the varied kinds of writing I do by this entity called Font Publications.
It is also a link to my past. From 2000 to 2008, I ran a writing school and literary agency in Dublin called Font International.
That business ended in painful circumstances– illness, partnership breakdown– but the passion and mission that drove it (from my side) carried over into my author business, when the miracle of digital self-publishing allowed me to build an enterprise around my own writing.
Having that link to the past, knowing that the work I did then feeds the work I do now, gives me great satisfaction. Every time I see the logo, I smile.
For me, having this imprint is part of the creative joy that is self-publishing.
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