A small press, on purpose.
Most writers need time at someone's actual desk, and a person who knows how a book actually gets made.
Cricket Hollow Press is a boutique publisher and editorial studio in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. I founded it so authors could stay with the writing, not spend the next year teaching themselves retailers, metadata, and ads. You keep your rights. You keep every royalty.
When I say publisher, I mean the unglamorous half of the work: a real edit, a cover that speaks to readers, files that print your book structurally sound, and the book that you sell online. Not an advance. Not a promise that stores will stock you. Not a list of writers under contract.
I have been writing for two decades. Nine of my books are in print. Along the way I have sat with dozens of authors and their pages; some with loose papers they carried under their arm, some with manuscripts drafted, and some in the last stretch of their last chapter. Before the press I spent nearly twenty years in senior communications at Fidelity, Bose, and Vistaprint. I know how the industry talks. I also know when that talk is a distraction from the sentence in front of you.
This press is small because it's my passion. I take only a few new projects a month so I can dedicate the time towards review and editing if necessary. I put the Cricket Hollow Press name on a book only when I can stand behind it.
If we work together, you work directly with me. I read the manuscript myself. I sit with every cover until you agree it reflects the book.
If you are not ready for that yet, two short guides show how I build a book and how I edit one.
I live here with my husband and our three children. The ocean is close. The work is the same as it has always been: make the pages true, then get them into the world without asking the writer to become a marketer overnight, but offering help instead.
If that is what you have been looking for and you have been silently writing your creative work and holding back from moving forward, I would like to read what you have and share my perspective.
Kellyann Erskine
"You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say."
The author owns the book
The press is paid for its craft, not for a slice of someone else's story. Your copyright, your accounts, your royalties.
Read first, sell second
No one should pay for production before someone honest has read the pages. That is what the $295 review is for.
Quiet outlasts loud
A restrained cover and a clean interior are still on the shelf when the trends are gone.
Work with me.
Begin with the Manuscript Review, or write and ask anything first.