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About Us

DartFrog is both an evaluator of existing indie books and a publisher of new indie titles. We were the first source that independent bookstores trusted to evaluate and select indie books for direct placement into stores. Books chosen by DartFrog now enjoy direct promotion to 75,000+ book clubs through our exclusive partnership with BookClubs.com and access to our own network of book influencers. Our wide range of publishing, editing, design and marketing services are geared to help independent authors succeed in a highly competitive marketplace, while our white label services are focused on helping indie publishers expand their production. 

Our Standards

Here are a few keys to determining whether your book will rise to the level of excellence we expect in a book.

Your book should be as polished as a traditionally published book from a major publisher. Many independently published books, especially self-published books, start at a disadvantage, because most people expect them to be sub-par. The professionalism of the binding, artwork, formatting, font choice…all of it matters a lot (the cover especially). If your book presents a solid first impression, customers are more likely to pick it up and take a closer look. If someone can tell a book has been self-published without even opening it, it will never succeed.

Editing is crucial and can’t be left to friends or relatives. Working with a professional editor is a must and we can tell quickly when an author hasn’t. But even if you do, we also urge you to check your editor’s work. If we find more than a few grammatical errors we will require that they be fixed before we can place the book into stores. We are tough on these types of issues because readers are even tougher, but also because bookstores are a professional environment in which your book will be competing against books from the world’s most renowned authors and publishers. If your book has more than a few small errors scattered throughout, it will reinforce the perspective that independently published books are sub-par and no one will want to read your book (or the sequel). So, do yourself (and your book) a favor and work with an editor who is brutally honest, sharp and meticulous.

Pacing matters. There is too much competition on the bookstore shelves for a book without excellent pacing to succeed. It needs to grab you from the beginning and keep you. This is another way that an editor can be of tremendous benefit.

When stories lack focus, they get stale quick. This is another way we can tell if an editor has been involved. There’s a real discipline to leaving out material that isn’t essential to the storyline. If we see extraneous content in a story, or a lack of focus in the storyline, we will reject it, because so too will customers.

Of course, reading is subjective. We all have genres and styles that we like. But at DartFrog, we don’t base an evaluation on whether we like the genre, or whether we would want to buy the book in a store. We base our evaluation on whether the story is well constructed, understanding that people have tastes in topics that are different than ours.

Our Team

DartFrog was founded in Vermont in 2015 and recently moved to North Carolina. But DartFrog has always been a fully decentralized team, even before the onset of the Zoom era. We are a global collection of book enthusiasts, with people in the USA (New York, Charlotte, Nashville), Australia, UK, Italy, and more. We meet together in a virtual space powered by Basecamp (which every author is given access to during the course of their project). Because of the various time zones we cover, project files are moving through our virtual space 24 hours a day. Each author has total access to the files (and accompanying discussion) associated with their project, and is also assigned a project manager who serves as their direct point of contact throughout the publishing process. 

Before DartFrog

DartFrog founder, Gordon McClellan, was working on his own books before that work evolved into DartFrog.  Learn More.