By: Deborah Johnson Wood
When Creative Byline, a revolutionary web-based application that streamlines the process publishing houses go through to select new manuscripts to publish, went live last December the company had one publishing house on board.
To-date, eight major book publishers, including TOR, St. Martin’s Press, and Dutton Children’s Books, are using the system, and four more—Skirt Publications, Lyons Press, Outdoor Life and Globe Pequot—each a division of Globe Pequot Press, signed on last week.
The web site allows authors to upload manuscripts or samples for a small fee, have the manuscripts read, and then, if the manuscript is ready for an editor, to have a response from that editor in three weeks. Using traditional means of submissions, authors often wait months, sometimes over a year, to get a response, and they aren’t able to “shop” the book to other publishers in the meantime.
“Our statistics show that right now 88 percent of all authors’ submissions to editors get a response within three weeks,” says Brad MacLean, creator of the software. “We’ve had 300 submissions of book-length manuscripts, and have a couple that could be close to being accepted by a publisher, but we don’t have our first match yet.”
MacLean adds that the site has over 50 editors participating so far, and the list keeps growing.
As the field of publishing houses grows, so does the need for competent staff and MacLean has fulfilled that need by expanding the company’s contractor base by seven, including two salespersons based in New York who call on publishers.
Creative Byline’s office is located at Lakeshore Advantage, an economic development corporation in Zeeland.
Source: Brad MacLean, Creative Byline
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Deborah Johnson Wood is the development news editor for Rapid Growth Media. She can be contacted at [email protected].
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