The Savvy Self-Publisher
DEBRA ENGLANDER is a New York City–based freelance editor, writer, and book coach. She managed a business-book program at John Wiley & Sons for nearly seventeen years and previously worked at Money magazine and Book-of-the-Month Club. She has written about business and books for numerous publications, including USA Today, Good Housekeeping, and Publishers Weekly.
GROWING up with a father who was a serial entrepreneur, Ethan Senturia always knew he would pursue a career in business. He graduated from the prestigious Wharton School of Business and became a credit analyst at Lehman Brothers. However, he was miserable working on Wall Street and quit his job in less than a year. Not long after, he cofounded Dealstruck, an online business-lending platform that lasted three and a half years before falling apart. In his book, , which he self-published in December, Senturia chronicles the rise of the company and its fall, a failure due in part to what he calls internal missteps as well as the external influences of a tricky market. Part memoir and part guide, is not just Senturia’s own story—the challenges he faced in starting his own company, and what it looked like to watch that company go bust—but it’s also an effort to help prepare other entrepreneurs striking out on their own, to pass along the wisdom he wished he had known when he was first starting out. Senturia has sold more than seven hundred and fifty copies of the book and has been featured on the local NPR affiliate in and the . I spoke with Senturia about his path to publication and why he chose to self-publish. For some perspective on publicity and marketing, I talked to Tim Burgard, a senior editor at HarperCollins Leadership, an imprint that specializes in business books, and publicist Annie Jennings, founder of Annie Jennings PR.
