When I first began working with former LAPD cop Fanchon Blake on Busting the Brass Ceiling, she was determined that her memoir had to be traditionally published. She wanted to make sure that her heroic story about challenging the gender inequity that prevented females in the department from advancing would get its due.
I was fine with that idea, but apparently none of the literary agents we approached agreed. At the time, I didn’t know enough to approach smaller publishing presses that don’t always offer advances, but work closely with their authors, operate nimbly and offer substantially larger royalties than the Big 5 Publishers (Penguin/Random House, Hachette Book Group, Harper Collins, Simon and Schuster, Macmillan).
Eventually, a few years after Fanchon Blake’s passing, I decided to self-publish the book. It might not have been Fanchon’s dream, but at least her place in history would be cemented. After all, she had single-handedly initiated one of the country’s landmark Title VII cases, which would change the face of policing around the country, and had suffered the consequences of breaking the unspoken police codes of silence and loyalty. She deserved to be recognized.
To be honest, Busting the Brass Ceiling didn’t sell well, despite a foreword by bestselling author and former cop Joseph Wambaugh and a laudatory Kirkus review that described the memoir as an “inspirational, detailed, and informative police account with current relevance.” I guess that’s why I’m a writer and a book coach rather than a marketing consultant.
All that (well, at least the book’s sales potential) is about to change.
“You should talk to Mara Anastas at Open Road,” my writing coach client Jeff Swaney urged. He had contacted the VP of business development and publishing relations about None of the Answers, the memoir he had just finished, perhaps not realizing that Open Road Integrated Media’s mission is to bring “great literary works back to life.” As a 2023 New York Times article stated, the “company is republishing books that have fallen out of print and finding new ways to market works that are years, even decades, old.” His book didn’t qualify and neither did mine.
“I mentioned you,” Jeff insisted. “Email them.”
So, I did, if only to satisfy him. Shockingly, Mara not only wrote back, she eventually offered to publish Busting the Brass Ceiling. The book will be published as an e-book and POD (print on demand), with the possibility of an audio edition as well.
That doesn’t sound all that different from what you’ve got now, I hear some of you thinking. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Sure, the publication piece won’t change that much. But the promotion is not only in a different league, it’s in a different stratosphere. For starters, Open Road has a 1.3 million-plus subscriber list, with weekly deal newsletters targeting specific factions of that readership. They even choose the books they’re going to publish based on algorithms that compare their past successes to the manuscript in question.
I know what they can do from personal (or almost) experience. In 2015, my dad’s e-book The Last Jews in Berlin, which Open Road Integrated Media had released 33 years after its initial publication, hit a national bestseller list. Let’s hope that trend runs in the family.
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