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Yearly Archives: 2010

Jodee Blanco is fighting bullying nationally

The author of BenBella’s Please Stop Laughing at Us is getting a lot of air time. As school bullying dominates the media, Jodee Blanco’s visibility as the nation’s ONLY survivor turned activist working inside America’s schools, continues to escalate. In the last ten days alone she has spoken in gyms and auditoriums in nearly a dozen major markets across the country to a combined audience of thousands; …

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BenBella Cause

BenBella just closed on our second title in the BenBella Cause line. This is a small line of books, each of which is associated with a good cause, to which we donate half our profits. It’s our way of giving back and celebrating our good fortune as a publishing house.

Meals On Wheels’ Made With Love: The Meals On Wheels Family Cookbook will be published by BenBella Books Fall 2011. …

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Is the WSJ missing the point on self-publishing?

Tim Keiningham sent me an interesting article, “Vanity Press Goes Digital.” We’re excitedly and aggressively (but I hope intelligently) pursuing the digitalization of our business, but I do think that the implications for self-publishing are vastly overstated, by the WSJ here, and in general. Self publishing has been going on and successful (for top .001%) for a long time now (i.e. …

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Marketing Myth: Every Author Should Blog

If you are an author, you’ve probably heard this. And there’s no question a successful blog is a great help to an author. But most blogs – well over 90% in my estimation – don’t contribute much of anything to an author’s marketing success. A successful blog requires time, long-term commitment, creativity, focus, and discipline. …

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A book as a life’s work

I don’t think we state this as clearly as we should in our submissions pages, but we particularly like books that represent an author’s cause/life’s work/mission. These books tend to be content-rich and written with great care. They also tend to come with authors that have a very healthy attitude about marketing; they will be working in this area for years/decades to come, …

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All Hail the Goddess Chattera

We are a non-denominational publishing house, but if we were to have a house deity, it would have to be goddess Chattera, who controls the mysterious forces of word of mouth.

Few books are successful without at least some element of word of mouth. Definitions differ, but to my thinking word of mouth is everyone that hears about the book and is inspired to purchase it without any intervention on our, …

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BenBella has a New Editor-in-Chief!

I’m so delighted to announce that Debbie Harmsen is joining BenBella as the new Editor-in-Chief, General Non-Fiction. A publishing veteran, Debbie has worked for magazines, newspapers, and books, most recently editing travel guidebooks at Random House. While at Random House she won an award for her first edition of Fodor’s The Complete Guide to National Parks of the West. …

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