Welcome to Turtleduck Press!

Welcome to the inaugural post of the Turtleduck Press blog! Here we hope to divert, horrify, amuse, and shock you (pick two). We’ll be blogging for your entertainment five times a month. There will also be free short stories going up elsewhere on the site at the beginning of each month when we’re not putting up longer works for sale.

Like many writers, we’ve been watching the recent evolution of the publishing industry with great interest, as well as a certain amount of quaking in our boots. TDP is an experiment in self-publishing and e-publishing – our attempt to navigate the changing landscape. With the model we’ve settled on for TDP, we’ve set out to address two of the biggest problems facing self-publishing authors: quality control and marketing.

For the quality control side, we’re requiring every TDP member to submit their works for approval by two or three other TDP members. If the work isn’t up to our standards, it doesn’t get approved until it’s fixed. Because our own names are only as good as TDP as a whole, we have a stake in making each other work for those approvals. I can recommend any of our products without reservation, and I’m sure that’s true for my fellow Turtleduckers as well. That means readers can have confidence that for every work with a TDP logo on it, somebody with a critical eye has given it a thumbs-up.

For the marketing side, we’re pooling our individual marketing power. Any one of us has a small reach. Together we have a…slightly bigger reach? Ahem. We’re all getting the word out in whatever ways we can, and we’ll be experimenting to find the most effective ways to reach the people who will enjoy our works.

We don’t think traditional publishing is dead. We don’t rule out pursuing it ourselves in the future, with other works that have broader commercial appeal. You might yet see our names in a bookstore or on a big publisher’s website. By then, we’ll have learned a lot from TDP – after all, these two paths are not mutually exclusive.

Where will Turtleduck Press take us? We’re not sure…but we’re curious and excited to find out, and we hope you’ll join us for the ride. If you have any comments, questions, or feedback, let us know. We’re listening.