Buffalo Books: Owners speaks about publishing indie authors

By P.A. Kane
(Image above: Mark Pogodzinski and some of the books NFB has published)

The Buffalo Hive is taking a break from its Indie Author conversations this month to talk to Mark Pogodzinski, owner of NFB Publishing.  NFB Publishing is a small Buffalo-based press that caters to the indie author. On his LinkedIn page, Pogodzinski describes the mission of NFB:

“The central idea of NFB is community, not corporation. The author, the artist, the editor, the agent, all those involved working toward a common goal: to produce the best books ever or just a really good book. The author retains all rights to their intellectual property, as well as 90% of the royalties. We hope to provide all that is necessary for the author to flourish, including editing, design, and in some cases representation. NFB means no excess, no double-speak, no empty promises. The words on the page are the core, the author is the center, and the book is the goal.”

We talked to Mark about NFB, publishing, author experience, and where words, written by actual human beings, are headed in the world of Artificial Intelligence. For further information about the publishing process and to learn more about NFB Authors, check out Mark’s podcast at his YouTube channel.

PAK—Before we get into the business of publishing, can you give a little history of NFB? How long have you been in business? 

MP—About 12 years.

PAK—How many books/authors have you published? 

MP—Over 70 authors and nearly 100 books.
PAK—What inspired you to start a press?  

MP—Two things, actually. I had an awful experience with publishing when my manuscript, surely one of the greatest books ever written, came back to me from an editor with a different ending. I had an agents and a publisher, and was told this is how it is. I thought differently. Years later I had decided that if I wanted something different, I could make it. So that was the idea, that actual motivation to start the business was a personal loss and then need to do something. 

PAK—In your mission statement, you say NFB is community, not corporation. Explain what you mean. 

MP—A community of authors working together for the common goal of producing great books. Sharing resources and ideas. That was the idea. 

PAK—I talked to an area book store owner recently who would not shelve books by authors who publish exclusively through Amazon—they said Amazon was their competitors. Who are NFB’s competitors? 

MP—No one and everyone. I would say that giant hybrid publisher like Whale and Scribe are the most obvious competitors. 

PAK—What are some of the costs authors incur when publishing with NFB? 

MP—Flat fee of $650, but only after the author has approved a printed proof copy of their book. 

PAK—What advice would you give to both aspiring new authors and authors who have been in the game for a bit and aren’t having the kind of success they might have expected? 

MP—Our first audience is ourselves. If you are bored with your own writing, there is a good chance the audience will be as well. You should love your own writing first and foremost. As a man far smarter than me once said: “Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”

PAK—It seemed a few years back, there was a big trend in traditional and indie publishing toward vampires and paranormal phenomena. In what genre are indie authors finding the most success these days? 

MP—There are niche audiences out there for all genres. And with the advent of social media famous a writer can become an expert on a subject apart from their book, whether it be vampires, trains or anything else. Posting quick videos of on a topic is one way to build an audience; it may not result in book sales, but it does give a person a platform. 

PAK—If you became the Josh Allen of book publishing (I know this is subject to change week-to-week depending on how the Bills do), but if you were the MVP of the book publishing world and could magically change a few things for both yourself, as the publisher, and the author, what would those changes be? 

MP—Getting people to read. I sound like my mother. But with the current state of society, the ability to read and imagine is disappearing. I would want people to read text and use their minds to picture what the author describes, this can be on a phone. But the act of reading is rewarding, more so than passively watching something happen. 

PAK—I am a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants author. In school, at every level, I was also a terrible student of the mechanics of English. When teachers would start talking about subject-noun agreement, dangling modifiers, Oxford commas, I would check out and start drawing hockey goalies or look at some girl in a tight sweater who I hoped would have the opportunity to dump me someday. So, for me, and this might be a bit of heresy, I have found AI to be very useful, in a limited way. In my writing, when something sounds a bit wonky or the tenses don’t seem right, I plug the offending sentence or paragraph into ChatGPT and usually get a pretty good response that conforms to the Chicago Manual of Style. But beyond that, it doesn’t work so well. Would you agree, and what advice would you give authors who are AI curious? 

MP—AI is a tool as are a dictionary or a thesaurus. The days of using an actual dictionary or thesaurus are long gone. But AI can fill that gap. You can also bounce ideas off an AI program, granted the responses will based on available knowledge and not from a creative mind, but it can help. AI is not going away, so it’s best a writer uses it as best they can. 

PAK—Where do you see this AI thing heading? I write and publish the satire site BuffaloMud.com,  A couple of times, I’ve plugged in a couple of lines asking ChatGPT to write me a five-hundred-word satire about, say, a couple who find connection and love in hating the same things, or about the ongoing and endless desolation of Sabres fans. Chat spits back a response that’s instantaneous, but it’s always lame. The responses are bland, and they lack an edge. In the short time that ChatGPT and other AI programs have been around, have you noticed the quality of the content they produce improving?

MP—I suppose you at least leaned what you did not like. So that, in itself is some type of feedback. AI is a tool, it is not a writer and could not take the place of an actual human in terms of creativity. But it can be useful. 

PAK—Where can prospective authors reach NFB, and what kind of questions should they be prepared to answer about their writing projects?

MP—NFBPUBLISHING.COM.