Before 1998, it was rare for established publishing companies to bid on self-published fiction. But in the last 18 months, thanks in great part to authors' ability to use the Internet to market their work, more than three dozen self-published novels have been picked up by major houses.

High-figure advances and full-page ads in The New York Times Book Review when the traditionally published version is released, the self-publishing stigma has been replaced with the status of bone-fide publisher. At least, that's what happened earlier this year to India Edghill, when St. Martin's published her previously self-published novel,  “Queenmaker: A Novel of King David's Queen”.  St. Martin's repeated the strategy this spring when it purchased James Conroyd Martin's  “Push Not the River”,  a story based on the authentic eighteenth-century diary of seventeen-year-old Countess Anna Maria Berezowska who has lost her family and sets out on a girl-to-woman odyssey that thrusts her into a world of love and hate, loyalty and deceit, patriotism and treason, life and death.

Both authors had desperately failed to get interest from agents or publishers when the books were in manuscript form. But there was no problem once the books had online attention and promising sales figures. So, the authors claimed, along with others, it can make sense to self-publish. And, according to one senior editor at Pocket Books,  who has purchased three self-published novels so far this year, there is actually an added bonus that comes with self-published works: "If they've sold, the author brings with their project an established fan base." And, it's just smart business to pay attention to the self-publishing successes. If an author, on her own, meets with reasonable success, a larger company has reason to believe it can build on that success and find a more significant audience. In some cases, it's even easier to sell a book to a large house if you've already racked up 5,000 to 10,000 sales and found the book's marketing niche. Pulp publishers when they are confident in knowing they have a savvy author as a real publishing partner, a success story to tell accounts, and a book that audiences respond to, is attractive an attractive project to a hard print publisher.

Generally Science fiction, romance, historical fiction, erotica, African American fiction and nonfiction titles have all been selling well but there is a big, big gap in the in the Literary fiction genre’. One major pulp publisher has stated that of all the author’s who have self-published books a year or two ago, 90 percent have now signed deals with us and other major publishers.

Self-publishing has become one of the quickest ways to land a book deal. You can almost boil it down to a formula.

For instance: From Good Morning America to the White House, book clubs are flourishing. And now businesses want them too. Wells Fargo already has one. So do sales and marketing executives in Minneapolis-St. Paul. And then there’s Chapter-a-Day, a Sarasota, Florida, company that builds and maintains online book clubs -- sending out book excerpts for libraries and book stores daily – and is getting as many as a dozen inquiries a week from corporations. In addition to the basic business book club, Chapter-a-Day, as we will according to our future plans, is soon going to offer a sales and marketing book club.

We actually get e-mails from authors asking if they could be part of our  Reading Room,  feature for this coming year, AND, we are responding by shortly including them on our website or launching them on our sister website:  www.4pointspress.net.  Our  Reading Room  feature will not only include their lists, but will also feature their latest book, permission to publish their excerpts and a link to their website, if they have one. The book excerpt is branded with the participating author’s company’s name and header on it and can include other links, information and written, original content that the client requests from us.