Open Road Media partners with Dzanc to bring the backlist into the future

For a long time, one of the sorrows of my life was that my early backlist was out of print. Those books sometimes showed up on Ebay (and for either ridiculously high or low sums) and while those novels can be found in the library,  they weren't living their fullest lives out in the world. And that made me frustrated and unhappy.

Until Dzanc, partnering with Open Road Media, picked them up.

I'm thrilled to report that Meeting Rozzy Halfway, Lifelines, Into Thin Air, and Family will all be available as part of Dzanc's rEprint series this fall, which includes the likes of T.. C. Boyle, Abby Frucht, and me. And I'm even more thrilled to talk about Open Road Media in this blog.

Co-founded by former HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedmann 2009, Open Road Media decided to go back to the backlists, find books that had never been available as ebooks, and publish them to new audiences. And not only that, Open Road will be focused on really marketing these books. I particularly love that they develop a marketing plan for each book each quarter, and if that campaign is not as effective as they would like, why, they develop another one. The goal is to keep selling every author's work. Open Road partners with retailers, offering them promotional ideas, and it uses video as what they are calling their "special sauce," filming many of their authors, and pushing its content to venues like Daily Beast, Huffington Post, and more.

Open Road can bring out lost literary fiction, mystery, science fiction, and romance, and it will be publishing up to 15-20 new titles a year, Open Road Originals and E-riginals, which are printed either through print on demand or short print runs, such as The Salinger Contract, by Adam Langer. Some titles will also be offered as print-on-demand, including a never published manuscript from literary legend Pearl Buck.

So thank you, Dzanc Books. Thank you Open Road. And thank you Algonquin Books. Publishing can thrive with innovation--and we lucky authors (and readers) will worship at your feet!