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Call us at 682-540-7379
In a time when the publishing industry can be more fickle and unpredictable than Texas weather, stories that make a difference can get lost in the shuffle.
Trade publishers make decisions based on sales and market realities at scale. They want to see an author’s platform and a track record before considering their story. Many authors aren’t quite there yet, or they’ve been there, and they want more creative control and higher royalties.
We know and love both worlds—and we believe there’s plenty of room for everyone at the storytelling table. Readers just want to find books that will make a difference for them. We want to help our authors find those readers.
Our business model is perched between traditional and self-publishing, upholding the highest publishing standards while staying small and nimble enough to do things differently. As a boutique independent publisher, we’re here for the storyteller, the author with an idea, a dream, and a story they need to tell.
For every author we serve, we create the custom team that can bring together story, design, publishing, and strategy to create and promote books perfectly positioned for the difference they are created to make.
Who’s behind Five Crow Press
Melinda Folse
Founder and Publisher
Melinda has spent forty years getting other people’s stories told—in public relations and advertising, from junior copywriter to executive; in the equine industry as a writer and production director; and as communications director for a large downtown church, where she ran a team of writers, designers, producers and an AV director, sat on the executive team, and carried the congregation through an all-virtual pivot during COVID.
She has written or co-written seven books under her own name, including The Smart Woman’s Guide to Midlife Horses, Riding Through Thick and Thin, Clinton Anderson’s Lessons Well Learned, Choosing to Evolve, It All Belongs, You Don’t Know Sheep, and Grandmaster, which she co-wrote with Won Chik Park—the teacher who ranked her as a black belt. She has ghostwritten and collaborated on many more under other people’s names, which is its own kind of training.
She founded Five Crow Press for the stories that come to her—stories she believes can make a difference for someone, and that need a publisher when the traditional path is not available or not desired. That’s still the test. She reads every manuscript the press takes on.
When she isn’t editing, she raises Labradoodles and trains service dogs in Fort Worth, Texas.
Who you’ll be working with
There are five of us. That’s deliberate.
A big house assigns your book to whoever is available. We don’t have a whoever. Every book that comes to Five Crow Press gets the same five roles—two editors who work in different ways, a designer, a marketing specialist, and a publisher who reads every word. You’ll know who is working on your book, and you’ll be able to reach any of us.
We build the team around the book, not the book around the team. Not every project needs all five, and some need people we bring in—photographers, illustrators, researchers, indexers. But these are the five who will be in the room for yours.
Melinda Folse
Every book starts and ends here. The publisher decides what the press takes on, reads every manuscript, and holds the whole project—editorial, design, production, and launch—to one question: will this book make a difference for the reader it was written for?
Structure and voice
The editor who reads your manuscript as a whole before anyone touches a sentence—asking whether the structure holds, whether the story arrives where it should, whether a reader who wasn’t there will follow you. Then, line by line, whether every sentence sounds like you. It’s the most invasive and the most protective work we do, and it’s done with suggestions and reasons, never silent rewrites.
Copyediting and proofreading
The last person between your manuscript and print, and the one who catches what everyone else stopped seeing—the date that moved, the name spelled two ways, the Chicago rule nobody remembers. Unglamorous, exacting work, and a book without it announces itself on the first page.
Cover, interior and marketing design
A cover has about two seconds to tell a reader what kind of book this is and whether it’s for them. Our designer, an award-winning art director, works from a written creative brief built out of the actual manuscript—not a template, not a stock photo and a typeface.
Audience, launch and reach
Finding the specific readers a book was written for and getting it in front of them—a different job from shouting at everyone. Our social media marketing expert works out who the book is actually for, where those people already are, what the author can realistically do, and what the ninety days after publication should look like.
From one of our authors
I’ll never be able to thank Melinda and her team enough for helping me manifest a long time dream! Melinda made the process fun, and she kept me on track with deadlines and guidelines. I highly recommend her to anyone who wants to share hope and give peace and knowledge to others through their story. Just do it!!!!Janette Kurban, author of Haiku You
Five Crow Press is a proud member of the Independent Book Publishers Association
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