Local author Bobbye Terry and her co-author Linda DeLeon-Campbell have found their own way of doing business in the publishing industry. Although they were repeatedly told it could not be done, one of their books, “Mr. Wrong,” will be published in hardcover this month by the Gale Group, after first having been published online.
“Mr. Wrong” is the story of a widow who moves back to Virginia and begins working in the office of a childhood friend. She solicits his help to re-enter the dating scene and undergoes a transformation of sorts. “She is like the Typhoid Mary of the dating scene at first,” Terry says. “It is sort of a Cinderella story.”
As is Terry and DeLeon-Campbell’s publishing saga. “A lot of people are very weary of the electronic publishing industry,” Terry says. “They think it is a fad.” Consequently, books that are first published electronically often do not appear in hardcover.
Terry says she and DeLeon-Campbell chose to sell the rights to their books separately, anticipating it would be more profitable. After the book was published electronically, the authors sold the audio book rights and eventually the hardcover rights. “That is a different way to do business than what you normally do in the publishing industry,” she explains.
With the invention of electronic readers such as “Rocket eBook,” online publishing is becoming increasingly popular. Terry touts the practicality of electronic readers: People can download electronic books from the publisher’s Web site and save approximately 10 books in its memory. This could be especially beneficial for students who pay exorbitant fees for textbooks and carry backpacks full of heavy texts.
E-books may be the wave of the future, but Terry still sees the value of publishing books in the traditional manner. “I don’t think hardcover or paperback books will be obsolete in the foreseeable future,” she says. “There is still something about a real book.”
To promote “Mr. Wrong” in its hardcover form, the authors will be traveling to Philadelphia, Manchester, Conn., and New York for book signings. There will also be a book signing in Richmond at the beginning of
