Your Book. Your Team.
Your Own Publishing Company
Unlike traditional publishing,
you retain creative control.
Our book experts have worked on bestselling books for Oprah Winfrey, Neil Patrick Harris, Vice President Al Gore, Martha Stewart, Netflix, Lemony Snicket, and many more household names.
When you work with Raab & Co, our publishing house is your publishing house. This means that our team of freelance editors, designers, illustrators, interviewers, ghostwriters, editors, proofreaders, fact-checkers, and stagehands is your team. We’re busy, but we are never too busy to pick up the phone when you call or answer your emails when you need us. Best of all, you don’t need to project manage, task manage, or micro-manage. Your dedicated editor and project manager relieves you of that stress and can be your sole point of contact throughout the whole process.
Our Designs
Voila! Your Book Cover Needs, Handled
Understandably, a lot of our new clients come to us majorly concerned with finding a great cover designer.
Most book designers limit your number of revisions, leaving you stuck with a book cover you’re unhappy with or exorbitant overage fees. Not Raab & Co., we iterate your designs until you have the perfect book cover.
Our team of experienced designers will handle all aspects of book cover design for you—including your audiobook and ebook covers. If you have some ideas, can share book covers you like, stock photos, or book cover art you've sketched on a napkin (hey, we all do it). We're happy to see your inspiration, but we can also handle it on our own. We usually do about 5-10 completely different book covers to get started. Once your and your team tell us which ones you like, we refine them over several more iterations.
Layout and Design You Can Count On
Bad cover design and bad layout are the reason self-publishing has gotten such a bad reputation. While Amazon KDP makes it really easy to publish your book—it also makes it really easy to publish a low-quality book. We don’t just copy and paste your manuscript into a design file and press print, we source photos, graphics, illustrators, infographic specialists, exclusive fonts, and create a custom template for every book. If you want your book to generate revenue or leads, it needs to feel expensive and high quality.
Many of our clients are distributing books at networking events and conferences, that’s why we are dedicated to books that are fun to flip through, even if they don’t read a word. That means custom designs, pull quotes, exciting fonts, custom graphics, and dynamic visuals. You don’t want your book to feel like a reading assignment when you hand it to someone, you want it to feel like a valuabvle trove of relevant advice and insight.
We love helping people tell their stories, but we love displaying those stories beautifully just as much. Our designers and creative directors will make you a book that stands out from the rest.
Our Method
Our self-publishing method is tailored to busy clients and we pride ourselves on our relatively touch-free process so clients can get maximal results with minimal effort. (That doesn’t mean you won’t have to put some work in! 😉)
Here’s what you can expect when working with Raab & Co.:
Step 1: The Goals
Every author and brand has different needs, goals, and expectations. Our initial discussion will help us get a sense of your personality and your goals. What are your goals for the book—professionally and personally? What books inspire you? Are you going to sell the book or give it away as part of a marketing blitz? Do you need marketing and publicity help? Do you want to do print-on-demand or print books in bulk? Who is your target audience? How involved do you want to be in the process? You don’t have to know the answers to all these questions; we’ll walk you through it!
Step 3: The Team
The majority of our books are niche. That means we don’t just assign any ol’ person to your project. Part of what separates Raab & Co. from other self-publishers is that we handpick vetted professionals who are passionate about you and your story. While there are often familiar faces in design and proofreading, editors and writers are a different story. Nearly all of our clients are subject matter experts, so that requires our editors and writers to also be experienced in the same field—whether that is finance, tech, leadership, or something entirely different.
Step 5: The Publishing
Whether you print-on-demand (POD) through IngramSpark and Amazon KDP or you decide to get fancy and print the book in bulk, we’ll handle it all for you—including e-books and audiobooks. If you’re doing POD, we’ll make sure your accounts are set up properly and all of the metadata is entered correctly so that as soon as the book is ready, we can click publish! If you’re printing in bulk, we will get quotes from the US, Canada, and China and run the details by you as well as offer our suggestions based on your goals.
Before you know it, you’ll have a bestselling, professional, and engaging book ready to share with your audience.
Step 2: The Proposal
After our discussion, we will make it official. We’ll propose a budget, timeline, and other creative details. Books are often more involved than people expect so it’s important we’re all on the same page about the process. We’ll outline what the project milestones are, what your responsibilities are, and what you can expect along the way. We’ll then sign a contract to ensure that you have in writing that the entire product, including the source files, belongs to you.
Step 4: The Work
Now the fun begins. We’ll share a project dashboard with you where you will be able to track the project’s progress and any assets you’re responsible for delivering. We’ll also schedule weekly calls so everyone is up to date and happy. Beyond those weekly calls, you’ll get emails with new files for your review and clear expectations about what comes next.
Complimentary Consultation
Have you ever tried to get a traditional publisher on the phone? It’s borderline impossible. You don't need a high-powered literary agent to get to us. And we won’t steal your royalties either (unless you want us to!). All you need to do is click the button.
Your Book is Already Written
Yes, our designs will attract eyeballs, but what about the words? Most of our clients are professional speakers and can talk at length about their work. That’s why the majority of our clients “write” their books over the course of a few phone calls with our editors. If you want to rent a cabin in the woods and type out a whole manuscript, go for it, our editors will whip it into shape. But if you’re a better talker than writer, just hop on the phone with us and we will talk the book out, transcribe the calls, and edit it all into a bestseller. This hybrid of ghostwriting and writing is a surefire book to efficiently write a fantastic book in your own voice.
There’s no reason writing and publishing a book needs to be difficult, we’re here to make it easy. We are experts at pulling expertise from existing content. If you have podcasts, webinars, YouTube videos, newsletters, white papers, blog posts, PowerPoint presentations, scribbles, journal entries, and other content already created, we will sift through it, organize, and edit it into a cohesive and engaging manuscript.
Book Editing At Its Best
Book editing can be a confusing process. There are proofreaders, line editors, copy editors, and developmental editors. But these are more than just human spellcheckers. We want you to sound your best so that your story comes across as clearly and excitingly as possible. We also want to retain each author’s idiosyncrasies rather than shove them into some premade style guide. Josh Raab’s grandfather used to say that you can tell a wine is good when you barely notice it, there is nothing sharp about the way it tastes. He applies that same goal to the book he edits.
You want to just understand the writer’s expertise and their viewpoint without noticing they are writing a book. We’ll rid your work of cliches, redundancy, confusing points, and other hiccups which can make the reading experience subpar. Sometimes we’ll cut out whole chapters or rearrange the whole thing to make it work right. We don’t stop until it’s perfect. At the last minute, our star proofreaders put on the finishing touches, making sure all the numbers in the table of contents are correct, all the citations are correctly formatted, all the grammatical rules are consistent, and that your book is ready for showtime.
World-Class Book Publishing
The publishing world has changed. So has book printing. As you know, brick-and-mortar booksellers aren't the only distribution channel anymore. Self published books are finding their way to fame through social media channels, Facebook ads, and acting as viral lead-generating assets.
Don't get us wrong—our printers are ready to deliver mass quantities of your book for events at your local bookstore and beyond. But unless you need super fancy books or are 100% sure you will sell thousands of copies, print-on-demand is the way to go. Most of our clients use Amazon KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) to be sold on Amazon. But more and more people are using publishing platforms like Ingram Spark to be not only on Amazon, but also Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, and global websites you have never heard of. These platforms also make your book available to bookstores, libraries, and universities. Either way, we’ll work to choose the printing option that works best for your budget and your master plan.
Digital Publishing Options
If your hopes of having a successful book involve tablets, Kindles, or other e-readers, Raab & Co. can help. After the design process is complete, the Raab & Co. team will create a custom e-book from your manuscript, and we do our best to bring over the exciting visuals and design that your book boasts. We quality control each book on a variety of devices to ensure whether it’s Kindle, Apple Books, Scribd, Kobo or any other digital distribution service, your book looks great.
If your book has any links or external references, we’ll make sure they are properly linked so the e-reader experience is engaging and functional. We’ll also support you for months after publication should there be any fixes, updates, or corrections you want to make to your e-book file. From start to finish we want to be your publishing concierge and collaborators.