ITW and self publishing - its own books and others

 

I have been tyring to post this at Joe Konrath's blog for 24 hours and sent it to him asking him to post it but its not showing up - so here's a response to just one part of a very heated discussion at his blog about MWA. ITW comes up several times and the facts about what we do and have done are not all correct - so here are the right facts.

I am not speaking for the ITW board here but I am a past ITW board member who has been involved in our publishing program and would like to clarify some points that have been raised.

 

ITW does not make all its money on books published traditionally.

 

In fact, we were actually self publishing before either Joe or LeeJ

 

In 2008, ITW did a unique publishing deal with Audible – breaking ground with The Chopin Manuscript – an original audio book which went on to win the Audio Book of the Year award for 2008.

 

 

ITW self published the ebook of Chopin in July of that year.

 

We are listed as the publisher on the Amazon web site and have been all along.  And we till make money on that book – the audio as well as the ebook version.

 

We also did a second original audio book, The Copper Bracelet, again with Audible. Both Chopin and Copper are unique publishing programs very important to ITW as creative endeavors and sources of income.

 

Also MIRA is only one of the traditional publishers ITW works with. We've also worked with Dutton for the YA anthology, ST. Martins for the debut anthology as well as Vanguard who went on to publish Chopin/Cooper in the print versions.

 

Lastly, as a self published ebook author (I did it back in 1998 when it was very unfashionable) it was critical to me as well as other ITW board members that we not exclude self pubbed authors out of hand.  Any one can absolutely apply. 

 

Comments

[Bob]

I must be missing something on that. According to ITW web site, an author must be published by a sanctioned publisher. I'm a member of ITW, but reading their site, it seems as is self-published can't become members right now. I imagine an author can apply to become a publisher at ITW, but it's a bit complicated.
I also did a blog post on ITW, MWA, RWA and SFWA and how they currently all block self-published authors. I use excerpts right from their own web sites.

[Lisaslovelifeinletters.blogspot.com]

Forgive me - what is ITW?