Who is “Honored Abilities”?

The Wakeup Call of Publication, by Aerias Hurd

At the age of 14, I wrote my first book, “Dreaming”. I was in high school at the time, so I would come home every day with my composition book and get straight to work on the manuscript. The overall process of writing the book didn’t take me long; I completed the book in about three months – yes, three months. Then, after taking Journalism and later moving on to be on the newspaper staff as a feature-writer, I began thinking about having my very own publishing business. I spent many hours printing out how-to articles and learning as much as I could about printers, publishers, how to make business letterheads and business cards; pretty much everything. In fact, I took in so much knowledge that I ended up with a 3-inch binder full of this information, which I still have to this day!

Let’s fast forward to the publication time period…at the age of 18, a company by the name of Xlibris reached out to me to publish my manuscript for, “Dreaming”. This was my first time publishing anything, so I really had no idea what to expect. Well, I spoke to my publishing representative once, she took my money, and I never spoke to her again. I was then moved over to an author representative who spoke to me on two occasions; once in reference to my cover. During this conversation about my cover, I was told that I had three template options, and was asked what my favorite color was; when I told them blue and green, these became my cover colors. I was never asked what color I wanted the cover to be, nor what my vison was for the cover design. Instead, I was confined to a template. Wait, it gets better!

My manuscript was written with WordPad and saved on a floppy disk (this was when the world still used floppies, and my family couldn’t afford Microsoft Word until my second semester in college, so I did my best with what I had). I was able to convert my WordPad file into a Word document on college campus since I was now a student assistant at Lamar University. I sent Xlibris the Word document with all my final changes, but apparently at some point in the process, the files got mixed up. My author rep sent me an official copy of my book, I made sure to look everything over, and I approved the manuscript because everything seemed fine at this point. I hosted my first book signing three weeks after the publication and this was when everything turned into a disaster…my book was full of spelling and grammatical errors! Imagine the embarrassment on my face to be in college for journalism and on the college newspaper staff, only to find my first-ever publication to have a bunch of errors like this.

The good news here is that people still purchased my book, and I sold enough copies to earn my investment back and then some. The feedback from the buyers was, “the publisher should have this…”, “the publisher should have that…”, and so on. Most people actually looked at my book as a well-written story, despite the errors from an 18-year-old trying to make a way and a name for himself.

Xlibris did nothing to rectify the situation, and to this day – almost 20 years later – that book is still published with those errors. I ultimately decided to leave it like that and use it as an example for what you get with one of those companies that doesn’t care about you or your book; one that has no problem cashing your check but fails to provide even the most basic level of care to ensure the success of you and/or your publication. Ultimately, this experience is literally the reason I started Honored Abilities – we do things differently here…the right way.

Honored Abilities includes standard proofreading and editing in all publication packages, and a customizable design for not only the cover, but the internal pages. To take things a step further, in an effort to boost awareness and success, we also added a podcast for all new authors. To top it off, we ensure that international distribution is in place for you, and we get your publication on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Walmart, and many more online distribution platforms.

Self-publishing is not easy. You can pick a big-name company that claims to be the best with a bunch of ads and paid reviews, or you can choose a smaller, local, small business like us that actually goes the extra mile because we care. Not only am I a published author, but so is my Vice President; we know what it’s like to publish and we know the struggles that come with it.

I have created a brand and a platform that allows you to have something you’re proud of. As the saying goes, a book is judged by its cover, so let’s make sure it is a good one! It’s my hope that you give me and my team the chance to show you how amazing it feels to be a successful author. That would truly be our Honor!