Authors Access

On Thursday, April 19th, 2007 at 8:00PM EDT we spoke with Stanley Greenfield, president of Dial-A-Book, an enterprise which distributes more than 115,000 book excerpts to online bookstores and public library catalogs. Stanley spoke to us about how a self-published author or small press can get their book excerpts online quickly and painlessly.  He also educated us in the basics of foreign rights sales, territories, how deals are done, and what to expect.

Dial-A-Book, which produces an innovative service called “Chapter One” that delivers browsable excerpts online retailers and library catalogs. Its database contains excerpts of 115,000 books prepared with the permission of more than 1,200 imprints/publishers.  Stanley will be speaking to us this evening on book promotion tactics, creating and managing foreign rights sales, magazine publishing, and his three decades in the publishing industry.

Chapter One distribution capabilities form the basis for the new PublishersPortal.com service which guarantees the distribution, if they handle the book, of first chapters of books of participating publishers at: Baker & Taylor, Barnes & Noble, Books-in-Print, Buy.com, EBSCO, Ingram, OCLC as well as hundreds of library on-line public access catalogs (OPACs).

Stanley R. Greenfield was senior vice-president of the Ziff-Davis Publishing Company for many years. He acquired Information Access Company for Ziff-Davis and built the first on-line, X25, multi-magazine full text data bases. He served as president of its Franklin Square Subscription agency, the largest catalog subscription agency in the US.
 
At the Nicholas Publishing Company which he founded, he created and produced seven directories. Two received ALA “Outstanding Reference Book of the Year” designations. The National Directory of Addresses and Telephone Numbers (first edition, Bantam Books, 1975) sold more than one million copies of its annual editions.

During the late 70s, the Nicholas Publishing company was the sole representative of the People’s Republic of China for the acquisition of all scientific and technical bibliographic materials from the United States, including: serials, monographs, indexing and abstracting services, patents, U.S. government documents, judicial materials and commercial data bases. This function was performed with the knowledge and consent of the Departments of State and Commerce.
 
Mr. Greenfield served as president and publisher of Playbill, the Broadway theater magazine. He was founding publisher, The Corporate Board, The Journal of Corporate Governance. He holds a BA, in physics, from the Johns Hopkins University and an MBA, with distinction, from the Harvard Business School.
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