DartFrog Plus is a curated hybrid publishing program that includes editing, design, publishing & marketing. Authors are not required to have an existing platform. Evaluation of every manuscript is free and if invited to publish through DarFrog Plus, there is no obligation to accept. Below you will find information about some of the key people on the team, services included with all DartFrog Plus projects, pricing, and answers to other FAQs.
Gordon McClellan Content Director
Gordon is the founder of DartFrog Books and the author of the children’s chapter book series The Mailbox Adventures. In addition to managing DartFrog’s day to day operatons, he also oversees the content selection for all books published through DartFrog’s hybrid and traditional programs.
Mumtaz Mustafa Creative Director
Mumtaz is the Senior Art Director at HarperCollins, where she oversees both the design and audio design departments. Many of her book designs have made it to the New York Times best seller lists, and have won prestigious awards and accolades. Beginning Aug 1, 2023, Mumtaz will design the covers for all DartFrog Plus and DartFrog Blue titles.
The following services are standard to all DartFrog Plus projects:
A full proofread of the manuscript (up to 80,000 words) is included (if we like your story but it requires more than a proofread, we will tell you).
We manage the interior design & formatting process (for print & ebook). And all DartFrog Plus covers are designed by Mumtaz Mustafa, Senior Art Director at HarperCollins.
DartFrog will also create a custom banner for your book to appear on our website homepage and will create 3 posts about your book for our Facebook and Instagram pages.
Additionally, we will design A+ content for the Publisher section of the Amazon product page to give it a fully custom and polished feel (A+ Content is the term for product specific custom graphics that make your Amazon product page more visually appealing).
We provide an enhanced Amazon optimization for your book, which in addition to data on historical trends, also includes our selection of the keywords and categories that we believe will give your book the best chance to successfully engage Amazon’s algorithms.
We connect every DartFrog Plus book to our own network of book influencers who will read the story and share their honest opinions with their respective audiences. We guarantee at least 10 professional book influencers will review your book.
We promote every DartFrog Plus book to 73,000+ book clubs through our exclusive partnership with BookClubs.com. This promotion includes a direct link to the book in their email to all members (300,000+) on the first day of the three month promotion.
We also guarantee that at least 3 independent bookstores will order and display your DartFrog Plus title face front in a genre appropriate section of their store. Typically bookstores will also include the book in an email newsletter to its customer base. We will provide a photo of the book on display in the store, which you can then share on your social media.
We commission a professional review from Midwest Book Review, Kirkus, and Feathered Quill for every DartFrog Plus title. Reviews are submitted once the interior formatting is finished, in the hopes that we can add excerpts from a positive review to the cover before releasing the book. We also create a review campaign through Book Sirens to generate reviews from readers.
We write and distribute a press release for all DartFrog Plus titles and provide you with a distribution report of the outlets that picked the release up. We also create an interactive electronic press kit for you to use in your own outreach.
Each DartFrog Plus title is advertised in an Ingram catalog for the purpose of generating awareness among bookstores and libraries. The specific catalog we choose will depend on the genre of the book.
We list your book on Amazon, Smashwords (ebooks), and Ingram (which includes their partnerships with Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Gardners, Target, etc). This ensures your book will be available everywhere books are sold.
As a DartFrog Plus author, you earn a 100% royalty of all net income from the sales of your book. All royalties are paid to you by Amazon, Goodreads and Smashwords, and sales reports from each will be available to you through your own account on each platform.
Every DartFrog Plus author has an account manager that they can correspond with through Basecamp (the platform we use for all team communications), or by video call if a face to face meeting is needed. The account manager oversees the team working on your book, is your direct point of contact, and also manages the administrative tasks that are important to the publishing process (the assigning of ISBNS, Library of Congress registration, uploading files, etc).
DartFrog Plus
DartFrog's Curated Hybrid Publishing Program-
No payment or obligation with submission
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We will notify you via email of our decision
Frequently asked questions
Yes, we are currently accepting submissions.
Most importantly, the story must be engaging and well written. In some cases, if we think a story is good but needs more than the editing/proofreading included in the DartFrog Plus package, we will let you know and give you the opportunity to edit and re-submit or hire one of our editors to do the deeper editing for you.
Choosing a title is a collaborative process. Titles are very important to branding and SEO, so we will work with you to determine the best title for the story and the search engines.
We have a network of our own influencers who post on a combination of Instagram, TikTok and Goodreads. We vet them for the quality of their reviews and the engagement rate with their posts. They are all people who built their own followings by posting about books, and when they review your book, they do so on their own channel to their own audience.
We have no control over what the influencers say, which is in your interest as the author. Honest reviews are the only reviews you want, even if they are not 100% positive. The influencers we work with built their followings by sharing their real opinions on books, and is exactly what they do with the books we send them.
We do ask each influencer before assigning a book if it is one they would like to read. In this way, we try to align the influencer with the book as best we can, and weed out any influencer who may not be intersted in a topic. We do guarantee that at least 10 influencers from our network will read and review your book.
Yes…and don’t let anyone tell you differently! For books that require special printing features like foil stamping, embossing or custom endsheets, offset printing is still the only option. But the vast majority of books in the retail trade market do not need special features like that. They need good quality paper, excellent binding and durable cover material, which POD provides.
The technology is now to the point where it is virtually impossible to tell the difference between a POD book and an offset printed book. The print pricing is the same as well.
Where there is a massive difference is flexibility. With a POD book, if we find a typo after launch or we want to add a new review or award emblem to the cover, we simply update the file and all books sold from that moment forward reflect the updated file. No more wasted books or books in a warehouse with a typo that can’t be fixed. In fact, there’s no more warehousing of any books with a POD approach, all of which is better for the environment.
Unless you need special printing features, there’s really no reason for books today to not be POD.