FAQs

The answer to this question comes down to the goals you have for your project. ETC Press is ideally suited to move projects from completion to distribution as fast as possible and to allow anyone who is interested in the project you’ve completed to get access to it.

This means you will have fewer hoops to jump through with your project, but it also means there will be some limitations on the design and outreach that a more traditional publisher might offer

We have a partnership with Breakpoint Books. We send a handful of copies of our books to them and allow them to handle all of our on-site sales at the conferences with which they work. If you have a conference you are attending, please let us know. What we can’t do is ship books directly to the conference. We can work with authors to do royalty-free bulk orders.

ETC Press isn’t able to give book advances. Instead, we have a revenue split on earned royalties with book authors and editors as follows:

• Sole Book Author – 15%
• Book Co-Authors – 20% split equally
• Sole Book Editor – 10%
• Book Co-Editors – 5% per editor, up to 20%

With our reduced pricing structure, we aren’t able to provide royalties for contributors in edited books, and we price our books and proceedings without any retail markup so there are not any royalties involved.

ETC Press doesn’t have a budget for marketing or public relations. We will work with the author to develop promotional assets such as digital images for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, work with Carnegie Mellon University’s marketing and communication team to distribute a promotional release and work with the author to engage with ETC and ETC Press audiences.

ETC Press doesn’t offer story or line editing services. In many cases, our authors have fully fleshed out ideas for their work when they approach us. However, we do provide feedback on the book proposal during our conversations with authors and read over the submitted texts during design and layout.

What about copy editing?ETC Press doesn’t offer copy editing services. We expect our authors to have that done before they submit the final project to us. However, we are friends with many copy editors, and we’re happy to recommend them to you.

ETC Press asks authors to submit a truncated version of book proposal for any new projects for two reasons.

The first is that our editorial board can better get a sense of your project so that we can best support you through the project together. The second is that it allows us to have a conversation with you not only about your project, but also the expectations we each have, so that we can make a more informed decision about whether to accept your book, and you can get the information you need to decide if we’re a good fit for your project.

ETC Press can be much more flexible and has a much quicker turnaround time on the projects we publish because we aren’t tied to legacy printing systems. This means we can go from accepting your project to publishing in just a few days (once you have finished all the writing, of course).

ETC Press can be much more flexible and has a much quicker turnaround time on the projects we publish because we aren’t tied to legacy printing systems. This means we can go from accepting your project to publishing in just a few days (once you have finished all the writing, of course).

ETC Press uses two kinds of technology to publish projects.

The first is layout and design applications that allow us to easily create books in multiple formats: print and interactive PDFs, and various eBook files. These applications work through templates that separate the content of the book from the design of the book, exactly like a content management system like WordPress does when you post something to a website.