The Holland Press
For Authors
A road that isn’t the conventional one
The Holland Press began as a home for one book. It was built as a house, and a house has more than one room.
If you have written a book — or are deep in the writing of one — and the conventional road does not fit: the agents, the query letters, the years of silence, the surrender of the work to people who did not write it — there is another way to publish. In the open, in episodes, in voices, before the readers you already have and the ones this house gathers.
What the Press brings
The format. Living Stories: your book released in episodes, in text and in recorded narration, while its readers follow along — and, through the Workshop, lend it their hands under clear terms.
The machinery. A page of your own under the Press’s roof, podcast editions on Apple and Spotify, cover and production handled. There is no part of publishing and printing that cannot be done from here.
The company. Every author in this house promotes their own work — and in doing so promotes the house, and every other author in it. Your readers find their books; their readers find yours. That is the engine.
How the audio works
Every book at the Press is heard as well as read. When your book is released in episodes, it can carry a voice in three ways — the choice is yours:
You read it. Your own voice, your own book — recorded wherever you are, on a phone or any simple recorder, an episode at a time. You send the recordings; the Press cleans, levels, and produces them, and publishes them as your author’s edition. This costs you nothing but the reading, and for many books it is the truest voice of all.
The Press voices it. If you would rather not narrate — or your book wants voices you do not have — the Press can produce it in generated narration, the way it produces its own. That narration costs the Press real money, charged by the character, so it is billed to you by the episode, as each one is made and released. Nobody pays for a whole book up front, and nobody is billed for episodes that never happen.
Your voice, carried further. By special arrangement, a likeness of your own voice can be made from recordings of your reading, and used to narrate the whole work — always with your written consent, and only ever for your book.
What you bring
The book — finished, or far enough along that its shape is real. And your own voice in telling people about it: this house runs on authors who show up for their work.
Arrangements are made in plain writing before anything is published, author by author. Bring your book and we will talk like people.