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What is HPL Publications

HPL Publications started out as just a way to help the members for one of our affiliate non-profit partners, the Pagoda Writers. Years ago, publishing a book meant finding a publishing house who was willing to invest the time, money, effort, and resources into publishing an author's book. If the publishing house thought the author would sell thousands of copies of their book, the author would have a chance at getting published. Otherwise, not. Authors who were rejected by the publishing houses could publish themselves at something called a "vanity press", usually costing between $20,000 and $30,000 to do a print run.

Then publishing technology became easy and affordable. Basically, anyone with the skills can go onto KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing, an arm of Amazon, the #1 bookseller in the world) and upload their book to be printed on demand. (Until recently, only paperback books were published, but now you can also publish hardback books as well as electronic books.) Experienced authors with a following could still get an agent and a publisher, but now less-experienced authors could self-publish as long as they were good at technology. But new authors, or authors who weren't quite technical enough, were still left out in the cold.

Hundreds of "For Pay" authoring houses sprung up to meet this need for authors who weren't technical enough to publish themselves (or who simply didn't want to be "self published" since that often had a negative connotation for future books). Generally they charged the authors between two and six thousand dollars to publish their books. (Less expensive than the previous "vanity publishing" houses but still pretty expensive.)

While most of these authoring houses are legitimate and above-board, and provide additional services such as editing and marketing, Pagoda Writers organizers felt that thousands of dollars was a lot to pay when many authors just wanted to see their book in print, perhaps sell a few dozen and give away a few dozen more. Or, experienced authors were sick of giving most of the proceeds for their books to the publishing houses instead of pocketing them. (Author agreements with publishing houses often give the author less than 10% of the proceeds in royalties, whereas books published on demand give the author up to 70% of the proceeds.)

HPL Publications was born.

We advise authors with a real chance at a lucrative writing market to seek a real agent and publisher. But for most of us authors, we just want to see our books in print without being charged an arm and a leg - but we don't have the technical expertise to do it ourselves and/or don't want to "self-publish". That's where HP Publications can help.

For a reasonable donation to Pagoda Writers, a program of Health, Prosperity, & Leadership, HPL Publications will take your already-formatted Word document and already designed book cover (or use one of KDP's book cover designs), and publish your book. We can also apply to the Library of Congress for a Library of Congress control number and send one of the copies of your book to them. You can order as many copies as you wish on Amazon.

What we don't do is edit or market. Authors are expected to edit their own book (or pay someone to edit it for them - and we know lots of editors so just let us know if you need someone) and market their own book (or not - it's up to the author). These are services that authors might get from one of those authoring houses or from a full-fledged publisher. All we do is take the finished product and do the final stages of production so that you can order your book, or send out a link to others to order the book. If the author just wants an electronic book, readers can download it on a Kindle. If the author wants a paperback or hardback book, readers can order it on Amazon and it will be printed on demand and arrive a few weeks later.

If this sounds like something you might be interested in, please call us at 484-332-3331. Here is one of our order forms if you are interested.

Click here to see a list of some of the books that HPL Publications has published. (Ignore the "sponsored" books on this list. They are added by Amazon and were not published by us.)