She Posts a Guest Blog

Choices Publisher Chooses Green

By Guest Blogger Sandy Lender, author of Choices Meant for Gods

It's all the rage in the publishing industry: print your books with text pages that are some-odd percent recycled paper. It's good that J.K. Rowling is having her however-many-million copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows printed with partly-post-consumer-recycled paper. Luckily, she's not the only author sending press releases to Greenpeace announcing this environmentally-conscious public relations move. But what's her publisher doing on the front end to make Harry Potter green?

Considering everything I do for marketing and promoting Choices Meant for Gods is lavender, to match Chariss's eyes and the amethyst on her cheek, it may seem a touch odd that I'm suddenly spouting about how green the process was to bring the book to fruition.

The natural explanation: I'm also an environmentalist. It's sort of an obsession for me. I have more sea turtle conservation knowledge packed into my brain than can possibly be healthy for a human. And I'm willing to spout it to anyone who'll listen (or who is unfortunate enough to get trapped with me on a slow-moving bus). So there's no surprise that my marketing efforts included buying cloth bags with my book cover and my "some days, I just want the dragon to win" slogan emblazoned on them so people would use those instead of plastic bags. You see, the plastic bags end up in either landfills or our oceans, and the latter spells trouble for sea turtles who mistake them for yummy jelly fish.

A great thing that my publisher, ArcheBooks Publishing (http://www.archebooks.com/) does on the front end of the publishing and marketing process not only to save trees, but also to save production dollars, is use electronic files instead of paper files whenever possible. Bob Gelinas, co-founder of ArcheBooks, explained, "We only accept submissions at ArcheBooks electronically to eliminate the excess use of paper." Ninety-nine percent of the submissions that come through the mail on nice, bright paper, get rejected.

What more happens to keep ArcheBooks green? "We all work from virtual offices, thus there's no commuting and no carbon emissions from our cars," said Gelinas. This facilitates the use of electronic files throughout the editing, proofing, galley and printing cycle. To keep production green all the way to completion, Gelinas explained: "Since we use both digital and offset manufacturing, we only create as many printed books as people actually want. We don't print more than twice the demand, thus wasting paper."

Now the paper used for Choices Meant for Gods? I'm happy to announce it's acid-free. For those who are still uneasy about the trees that sacrificed it all to make Chariss's story available to you, there's an eBook edition available on the Archebooks site at http://www.archebooks.com/BookIDX/Indexes/Fantasy/CMG/CMGDesc.htm.

Tags: Choices Meant for Gods, Sandy Lender, J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter, Deathly Hallows, ArcheBooks, environmentally conscious, carbon emissions, sea turtles, recycled paper