Liquid Silver Books and their journey to success.

 

Liquid Silver Books began operation in January of 2002, although it had been born in the imagination and taken through planning stages a year prior. Liquid Silver is an imprint of Atlantic Bridge Publishing which has been in existence since January of 2000.

As publisher of a long-standing e-pub, I have been involved in the e-publishing industry for a number of years and as my fellow e-pubs can attest, it was a fledging industry and for the most part still is. However, there have remained no doubts over these years that digital reading will be a major player in the years to come. I have had the experience of seeing the industry as a whole grow and although it is still not where we all had hoped it would be by now, it has indeed grown tremendously since its very earliest days.

Since I had all intentions and plans to remain within the industry until such a time that it was universally accepted as a norm, it also became clear that in the interim there had to be an avenue that would help keep the company solvent. In keeping with this thinking and also seeing from the very beginning of publishers offering spicier romances, the idea made sense. E-books, which were available for immediate download and of course digital, was a great medium for spicier/erotic romances.

We took nearly a year in planning to bring Liquid Silver Books into fruition and once we debuted in January of 2003, it immediately took off and we never looked back. We chose to launch Liquid Silver Books as an imprint of Atlantic Bridge instead of its own separate company because of our long time exposure in the e-publishing community.

From the beginning of our e-publishing days, we have watched e-publishers come and go. We saw great quality and not so great and unfortunately in the early years, the "not so great quality" was zeroed in on by critics and stuck. Because we saw such outstanding talent in the authors who had brought their work to us, we knew that in order for their voices to be heard, accepted and exposed, we had to produce the work in the best quality possible. That has remained our mantra and we go to great lengths to ensure that this takes place.

We also believe that the erotica romances so popular on the Web today will slowly shift into the mainstream romance and when it does, those books that have great stories and not just great sex, will be the ones that easily flow into that mainstream area. We believe in the celebration of physical love between a man and woman. Romance readers, for the most part, love the genre because it represents the desires all of us have when it comes to relationships…finding our soul mate, being loved with complete depth and of course living happily ever after. :) Yet, the physical side of a loving relationship is essential and again, all of us want to be desired by that special someone who loves us with all of their heart. So, escaping into these worlds of romance and going beyond the bedroom door, brings the reader totally into the characters lives. It is indeed a celebration.

We are highly selective with the manuscripts that we accept. Although we do publish two books per week, that is not what drives the train. At the present time we have plenty of books to publish two a week, but we also will publish less if there comes a time that the submissions do not meet our criteria. Many of our authors write subsequent books for us and that has been super as we have a number of prolific authors. However, subsequent books from present authors are not a given that we will publish them, they still go through our process of evaluation. We have recently changed our royalty structure and now offer royalties on a scale based on sales. We made this change to not only offer incentive to authors within the scope of their promotion, but also to share with our authors the success that we've realized over the last two years. The scale-based royalties are retroactive back to the first book we published. And since e-books never lose their "shelf life", those first books continue to sell. As we broaden our horizons and reach out further to people who haven't heard of e-publishing or our company, we gain more readers and that is simply why those titles which are a couple years old still sell and will continue to. :) We also have added the opportunity for advances to our present authors and that is something we are proud to be able to do. From the very beginning of our venture into e-publishing, we were so impressed and in many, many cases awed by the strength of the authors' work we read, that we wanted above all else, to bring their stories to the reading world. It is the authors who have made us, we have only been the vehicle to expose them.

Recently we debuted our Zodiac Series and have been very excited to see the enthusiasm and response to the series. Many of our present authors wanted a stab at contributing and the slots filled up fast. Each book consists of two stories and each book is approximately novella length. We were able to keep open four story slots and have opened that up as a contest for published and unpublished authors to submit to. Our authors have had a ball with writing these stories and to date Aries and Taurus have been released.

Liquid Silver Books will be at the Romantic Times convention in St. Louis at the end of April. We will be debuting our new jewelry line at RT and are extremely excited to do this. Serendipity plays a huge role in how things seem to fall into place when they are just meant to do so. In January of this year when Liquid Silver celebrated its two year anniversary, we were deciding what to offer as our gift to our readers. For our previous anniversary we had given away a 50 strand liquid silver necklace which got us thinking how super it would be if there was someone we knew who could design a piece of jewelry exclusively for us. It wasn't too long before we discovered one of our editors, Tina Burns, was a jewelry designer and had been so for some time. Raven and Tina stuck up an agreement and it was decided that Tina would design a line expressly for Liquid Silver and she started with our anniversary piece which was titled, "Silver Fetish". We have five other designs to debut during the RT convention and we are extremely excited about it. We invite anyone attending RT to stop by our vendor's booth in the Hospitality Suite to see the exclusive Liquid Silver Designs By Tina, and view this new line of jewelry.

Liquid Silver Books hosts an online forum community called SilverNet which has been open for a year. All of our authors, editors and artists frequent the forum on a regular basis so there is a lot of activity going on along with new releases and information of upcoming books along with excerpts of our authors' books. We invite everyone to drop in to see what is happening at SilverNet at http://www.liquidsilverbooks.net/forums.

Liquid Silver Books website: http://www.liquidsilverbooks.com

© Raven Moore - April 24, 2004 Issue of the Just Erotic Romance Review Newsletter

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