On Thursday, April 26th, 2007 Irene Watson spoke with Victor Volkman, owner of Loving Healing Press, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. As an independent press owver, he brings a lot of experience with publishing models and helps us navigate the muddy waters of POD publishers vs. traditional publishers vs. self-publishing and understand the tradeoffs and benefits of each model. Along the way, he talks about the one thing that all models have in common.
Victor began his writing career freelancing for publications such as the C++ Users Journal and Windows Developers Journal for about 15 years. In the mid-1990s, he published two computer programming books with a Fortune 500 publisher. Discouraged by lack of marketing support and low sales, he determined never to write again. A decade later, he launched his own self-published book to help promote the work of the Traumatic Incident Reduction Association, a non-profit organization dedicated to teaching psychologists and social workers brief and effective techniques for dealing with post-traumatic stress. He quickly discovered that there were many other authors who had helpful and effective techniques to share but could not get the time of day from publishers or agents. Thus was Loving Healing Press born in September 2003. As of today, the company has 24 titles in print and another 6 on the way before 2007 is finished.