About Ken Arnold Books

Welcome from Ken
As a publisher for more than forty years, I believe books should inspire, enlighten, and make you laugh out loud. I founded KenArnoldBooks to publish necessary books that are a pleasure to read.

Working together, my wife, Connie Kirk, and I offer intelligent books that are provocative, profound, and downright hilarious. Our publications are filled with heart and soul, humor and hope. Whether writing books of progressive spirituality, fiction, humor, poetry, personal journeys, environmental passion, or social and political advocacy, our authors are deeply engaged with the human condition.

We invite you to browse our list, read excerpts, and order your book directly from Amazon.com. We also invite you to explore our website, learn more about our authors and artists, read and contribute to our blog, or take part as an interactive contributor or as a member of our on-line audience. Above all, kick back and relax with a KenArnoldBook.

What We're About
KenArnoldBooks is a new independent publishing company located in Portland, Oregon, that uses today's digital print technology. (Visit Shelf Awareness to read a discussion of Ken's views on digital printing in Robert Gray's weekly column.) By capitalizing on an innovative business model through a partnership with BookSurge and Amazon.com, we print and distribute our books through Amazon.com as they are ordered.

What that means to you, the book buyer, is that you always know where to find one of our books. You can learn about what we are publishing here, on our website, and then be confident that it will be waiting for you with one click to Amazon.com. Our books are never out of stock, need never go out of print, are never sold out.

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The New Publishing Model
In an industry crippled by high overheads and inefficient distribution controlled by one or two major corporations, we do not have to play guessing games about how many books to print, leaving a wake of unsold books in the warehouse sea. We do not have to price our books to pay for corporate profits and unsold inventory.

We use the web to market our books, relying on the new social networks that are driving twenty-first century communication models. KenArnoldBooks is not only a publishing company; it's a community of authors and readers that gathers here at kenarnoldbooks.com. Experts are calling this model Publishing 2.0, which is a way of saying that we are innovative, flexible, web-based, cost-efficient, and technologically savvy.

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The Consumer Advantage
When you order a book through Amazon, you are paying for quality goods at reasonable prices. All of our books are listed with Amazon as soon as they are ready to print--not three to four months later. You order on line and the book arrives in the mail, the same way every book you order from Amazon is handled. You don't have to hop in your car, schlep to the store, and stand in long lines juggling your shopping bags--and then hear those dreaded words, "We don't carry that book but we can special order it for you." (But if you want to order one of our books from your favorite local store, our books will be available for special orders from Lightning Source, another digital print company associated with Ingram.)

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The Author Advantage
* We offer authors standard contracts and pay competitive trade royalties quarterly.
* Our authors are actively involved in publishing and marketing their books.
* Our books are professionally designed with four-color soft covers and classic interiors.
* We market through the web and to major media, capitalizing on the trend toward consumer "search and purchase" on line.
* We do provide short run printing for select author events, promotional purposes, and our partner bookstores.
* Our authors are both widely published and promising first-timers.
* Our books will often be too risky or unusual for commercial publishers.
* We do not waste money on agents' fees, warehouse space, returns, or high overhead.
* A book with KAB can enhance consulting, lecturing, and workshop opportunities, creating "brand" recognition.

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About Ken Arnold
Ken Arnold is a deacon in the Episcopal Church (retired), a playwright, poet, and author of books in religion who has been a publisher in university and religious publishing for over forty years. Most recently he headed Church Publishing Incorporated, the publisher for the Episcopal Church. He was also a founding partner in the web-publishing/consulting firm, The Pubcomm Group, in the late 1990s. Currently, he serves on the board of The Friends of Ooligan Press at Portland State University. Ken's acquisitions interests include poetry, fiction, Japanese culture, progressive spirituality, the environment, and books on culture, religion, and politics.

In 1979, Ken was a fellow at the Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, where he developed She Also Dances, which was cited in Best Plays of 1983. He has also published poems in numerous national magazines and three books on spirituality: On the Way (Church Publishing Inc.), Night Fishing in Galilee (Cowley Publications/Rowman & Littlefield) and Circle of the Way (KenArnoldBooks).

Married to Connie Kirk, he lives in Portland, Oregon and has two adult children, Nick and Ruth.

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