Hello to Lynn and to everyone else on the thread --

I'm brand new to this discussion group. This is my first post :-)

Lynn, I'm really glad that you had such a positive experience with AuthorHouse. I just published my first book with them and I must say that the experience I had was not as pleasant. On one hand, my marketing Representative and my account Representative were extremely polite, professional and caring. On the other hand, the publishing company made so many mistakes during the galley process that I thought I was never going to have a book! They literally drove me crazy with their sloppiness.

I spent thousands of dollars to publish the book, partly because I'm in Canada, so I had to pay more for the currency conversion. I also spent a royal fortune for the expanded promotion package and the Newswire Plus package, but I think that the company moved the people from the proofreading department into the publicity department because I have yet to see any publicity!! I'm sure that it is just around the corner but like you, I now realize that the $1200/US that I paid for marketing alone will probably be in vain because the newspapers don't read this press releases. I've been doing extensive marketing on my own for the last several months anyway.

Having said those negative things about the company, I am very pleased with the final product. My book is all about the recovery process from total hip surgery. I will write more about it in another thread but if anyone is interested in checking out my web site, here's the location

www.sigridsrecovery.blogspot.com

It's nice to talk to a fellow author who chose the POD medium. Good luck to you! And best wishes to everyone else on the thread.

Sigrid

PS I'm planning to publish my second book with a POD printer called Lulu. They allow people to publish absolutely for free -- the only catch is that if you want an ISBN, you pay something like $35/US. And if you want an ISBN distribution program that will allow you to sell on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, etc, the cost is around $150/US. It's an incredible deal and the only downside is that you have to do all of the formatting yourself.