I was asked regularly if I could help other authors to get their book published. The awful truth is that I really couldn’t because mainstream publishers aren’t interested in helping new authors, no matter how talented, to get their books into print. As always there are one or two exceptions but by and large it is simple economics.
In today’s book market, with fewer people reading, they have to be sure there are going to be sufficient sales to warrant their investment so they tend to focus on established authors or biographies of well known people. Sadly, if the author was to do something newsworthy or get themselves on Big Brother or the like, they would probably be paid to publish their book no matter what the quality because they know they will have a market of at least 5,000 books as a result of the publicity. All very discouraging to the new talented author.
My answer was to help set up a self-publishing company and in February 2009, ShieldCrest was established to invest in new, talented authors and it took off like a rocket. Where the company feels the author has a future, it will contribute part of the publishing cost.
The speed at which the company has grown demonstrates just how many talented writers there are who need to be given a chance. By doing this ShieldCrest also allows them to follow in the footsteps of other great authors who started this way…..more