Most books at the ETC Press don’t sell thousands of copies, which means you probably aren’t going to get rich. However, the editors will work with authors on a bootstrap plan for marketing the book and finding new avenues such as bundles to increase potential sales.

Since ETC Press is an on-demand publisher, there are no print runs. We don’t have the capacity to warehouse books.

Lulu.com is a book distributor, which means it will make your book available through the websites of Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple’s iBookstore. Each of those distributors takes a big cut of your revenue (roughly half). For books, ISBNs are obtained through Lulu, and LCCNs are granted by the Library of Congress.

Lulu has its own online marketplace where people can purchase your book. ETC Press only links to Lulu because the revenues on those books are substantially higher for authors. (This is how many independent and small publisher operate.)

ETC Press prices our titles as inexpensively as possible because we want people to have access to them. We’re most interested in the sharing and spreading of ideas. We base our prices off of Lulu production costs plus retail markup in order for a project to be sold through other book sellers. Lulu.com offers a revenue calculator that gives authors the ability to see how much the book costs to print and how much profit is made.

The short answer is that you retain ownership of your work. You are simply giving ETC Press permissions to publish your work.ETC Press publishes all its work under one of two Creative Commons licenses:

Once the design process is finished, ETC Press editors will export the final print and digital proofs and send those along to the author.

Here is where the process gets a bit tricky. In traditional publishing, authors would read the proof, make corrections on the PDF, and send those back. However, our design templates don’t include pages. For example: If you pull up a book on a phone, a tablet, and a computer, the “page” of the book will depend upon the size of your screen.

ETC Press has an author style guide, which explains how authors will turn in their manuscript. We do this to allow for an easy import from a Microsoft Word document into our design templates. (We separate content from design so we’re not using Adobe’s InDesign to design our books.)
Once we import the book’s content, our editor goes through the project, adds in the styles such as subheads or block quotes, adds the front and back matter (for example, the copyright page and About the Author).

The academic journals we publish each have its own peer review process. For books, we will work with individual author and editors to devise a peer review process for their books if they are interested pursuing that.

Open access means we don’t want cost to prohibit anyone from using the work we publish. And so each of our projects has a free download component to go along with the paid versions of the print and e-books.

The answer to this question comes down to the goals you have for your project. ETC Press is ideally suited to move projects from completion to distribution as fast as possible and to allow anyone who is interested in the project you’ve completed to get access to it.

This means you will have fewer hoops to jump through with your project, but it also means there will be some limitations on the design and outreach that a more traditional publisher might offer