[Editor’s Note: In this answer, we’re talking about the internal workings of Huntington Press, publisher of the Las Vegas Advisor, so we thought we should also mention that we’ve been receiving an unusually large number of excellent questions via the Question of the Day pipeline for the past few weeks. As such, we’re queued up with answers through the end of October and with questions well into November. Please, keep submitting your questions, but be patient as we catch up to you.]
Profit per book fluctuates so broadly that it’s hard to pinpoint an average, and the best moneymaker is more information than we care to divulge. But we can say that Huntington Press’ all-time best-selling book, in terms of number sold, is Jean Scott’s The Frugal Gambler, with sales well into the six figures; it reached #2 on Amazon’s bestseller list, edged out only by that pesky Harry Potter.
(Jean has a new book coming out in the next few months: The Frugal Gambler Casino Guide; her first in a decade, it’s Jean’s ultimate statement on gambling, based on more than 30 years in the frugal trenches.)
As far as the acquisitions process goes, it’s wide open. "Regular" people approach us all the time. When we first heard from them, Jean Scott, Bob Dancer, Max Rubin, and Denny Griffin were unknown.
Others, such as Ian Anderson (Burning the Tables in Las Vegas), Lee Nelson (Kill Phil, Kill Everyone, Raiser’s Edge), Richard Munchkin (Gambling Wizards), Annie Duke (Decide to Play Great Poker), Michael Shackleford (Gambling 102), Michael Konik (Man with the $100,000 Breasts, Telling Lies and Getting Paid, Reefer Madness), and Bob Nersesian (The Law for Gamblers) were all at least fairly well known in the gambling firmament.
Las Vegas and gambling writers like Mike Weatherford (Cult Vegas), Bill Ordine (Fantasy Sports Real Money), Eric Raskin (The Moneymaker Effect), Bill Branon (Spider Snatch, Timesong), John L. Smith (No Limit, Of Rats and Men, On the Boulevard, Quicksilver), Barney Vinson (Casino Secrets, The Vegas Kid), and Cathy Scott (The Killing of Tupac Shakur) naturally gravitated to a high-profile local publishing company.
And some authors, such as Dan Lubin (The Essentials of Casino Game Design), Mark Shechner (Cherry Picker), and John Robison (The Slot Expert’s Guide to Playing Slots), surprised us by essentially coming out of nowhere.
To the question on how you get a book published by Huntington Press, we’re highly selective about what we acquire; our focus has narrowed over the years to books on gambling and the Mob. Like all publishing companies, we reject many more proposals than we accept; we field upwards of 50 serious proposals (and another 50 that don’t follow our guidelines) per year, while we can produce at most 10-12 books in that same period of time.
But ultimately, yes, anyone with a manuscript, or even just a concept, can send us a query letter and/or submit a proposal (click on Submission Guidelines at huntingtonpress.com). Publisher Anthony Curtis and editor Deke Castleman pride themselves on being accessible and approachable — and why wouldn’t they be? Within the scope of their publishing program, they’re always looking for the Next Big Idea.
