Title: Love Factually: For Single Parents (& Those Dating Them)
Author: Duana Welch, PhD
Publisher: LoveScience Media, LLC, Eugene, Oregon
Available locally: Black Sun Books, 2467 Hilyard Street (541-484-3777); J. Michaels Books, 160 East Broadway (541-342-2002)
Available online: lovefactually.co
By Daniel Buckwalter
Daniel Buckwalter; photo by Randi Bjornstad
To think that the Love Factually brand almost never had the global reach it has today.
Dr. Duana Welch had just moved to Eugene from Texas with her husband and son in the summer of 2015. She had previously taught psychology at the University of Florida, California State University, Fullerton and community colleges around Austin, Texas. Welch especially enjoyed community colleges and hoped to land a spot on the faculty of Lane Community College.
For reasons many and varied, that didn’t work out, but there are no hard feelings.
Instead, Welch followed up her 2015 book Love Factually: 10 Proven Steps from I Wish to I Do with her second volume, Love Factually for Single Parents (& Those Dating Them), published earlier this year. The Love Factually brand is now in five languages, and Welch has e-books ready for download with more on the way.
It has been a journey of faith and self-reliance. This journey is ongoing, too (more on that later).
“I am passionate about what I’m doing,” she says during an interview at Vero Espresso House in Eugene.
In Love Factually: For Single Parents (& Those Dating Them), Welch writes in three parts about the divorced parent and the challenges facing him or her.
Part One, “Getting Ready for Love,” deals with forgiving the ex-spouse, facing fears and protecting the children. Part Two is “Mastering The Mechanics of Dating,” and Part Three is “Making The Choice: Getting Closer, Breaking Up, Moving Forward.”
Welch writes science-based data condensed into bite-sized, easy-to-read bullet points. She also writes — and takes pains to emphasize the point — that for all the technological advances we have in the palm of our hands, human mating rituals have not kept up. Not even close.
“The human mating ritual is based on a genetic legacy handed down from ancestral humans, not modern culture,” the author writes. “This is terribly inconvenient, because our genetic change is glacial, but our culture can turn on a dime. It’s left us with caveman-and-woman psychologies when it comes to mating – even when it makes no sense.”
Welch gives special examination to each of the topics in her e-books. To date, there are five of them available for download on the Love Factually website, ranging from identifying and breaking free of abusers to how to write an online dating profile. There will be 20 to 24 spread out over two years when she is done. She describes these e-books in the interview as “nimble and responsive” for the reader who is busy with his or her life.
They also were born out of necessity.
Almost a year ago through a reader, Welch became aware of a woman in Britain who was using the Love Factually brand name to sell her own book. After the shock of that revelation came the resolve to fix the problem. Welch retained an attorney. A cease-and-desist letter was crafted.
“There’s not a clear division of brand in the internet,” says Welch, but she believed she had common law protection. “And I expected above-board behavior.”
Welch received a lukewarm response from the British publishing house, something along the lines of “We’ve done nothing wrong, but we won’t use the title in the United States.” So the e-books were created, in part, to get her name and brand more to the forefront.
This also began a flurry of more legal activity Welch is reluctant to comment on because of its ongoing nature, except to say, “They thought I was the little guy and they could step on me.”
It’s not the first time Welch has had to stand up for herself and her brand name. Indeed, the Love Factually brand gained permanent traction in 2017 when she was brave enough to turn down a fairly lucrative deal from a large publishing house, Hachette, based in New York City.
At the time, her first book was doing well under the LoveScience Media name, then based in Austin, Texas. Hachette, in a deal brokered by an agent who approached Welch, promised greater resources for a rebranding and relaunch of the book as well as a $40,000 advance (not a small sum for a first-time author).
“Something felt off,” Welch recalls. So she took the Hachette “deal memo” to an attorney for inspection. The attorney asked Welch if she was willing to walk away from a bad deal. She was, and she did.
For starters, Hachette’s proposal would have meant a lull of perhaps two years before another relaunch, effectively killing momentum that the book already generated.
Then there was the matter of control over the brand name and all future work by Welch under the Love Factually name — she would have had none. “The advantage goes to the publishers,” Welch emphasizes.
So she doubled down. Authors sign contracts with publishing houses to just write and not worry about the business aspects. Leave the business element to the suits, in effect is what they say.
“You’re better off wearing more hats,” Welch says. “You have to be a business person. I enjoy the business side of publishing.”
That includes hiring editors, experts in the field who carefully vet everything she writes. It also includes hiring artists to design covers, attorneys to keep a legal eye out, and herself relentlessly (and cheerfully) beating the publicity drum because, as Welch explains, publishing houses don’t do publicity.
“People never read books they’ve never heard of,” she says.
The Love Factually brand and its many insightful tips for men and women in search of lasting, meaningful relationships should have an advantage in avoiding that problem.
