by Unknown
If you have the slightest doubt—in fact, even if you don’t—please, please, please go to Preditors & Editors, which is the internet’s #1 resource for scam agents, editors, publishing houses, editorial services, and pretty much anything else you might need to know to make sure you’re signing with someone legitimate, whether it’s an agent, a publishing house, or an editorial service.
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Misty Massey
*wild applause* I spoke to a high school group recently, and this question came up. One young woman wanted to know how much it had cost me to publish Mad Kestrel, because she had been trying to convince her mother to spend $4,000 to get her book "published," but her mother thought she could find someone cheaper. Eek! :-)
Who Pays Whom: Part 2, Vanity Presses
C.E. Murphy
Last time I talked about editors, agents, and editorial services. This time I’m going to talk about the evil side of vanity publishing, and I’m going to use Chris Branch’s comments as a springboard. Chris wrote to me, saying:
"Regarding paying to publish your own book, I guess it’s clear that no writer wants to do this, but maybe the thinking goes like this (DISCLAIMER: I know this is wrong—or at least idealistic—I’m just justifying for argument’s sake why it might be easy to think this way):
As a writer, I have a product to sell, and I have to sell it in order for the money to "flow toward the author." So, who is my customer? The tendency is to say: the reader. But wait, all I have is a manuscript and a handful of rejection letters. I can’t sell that to the reader; what I need is a book. The responsibility for turning my manuscript into a book lies with the publisher. If they would just do their part, then the money could start flowing. This might lead me to conclude that turning my manuscript into a book is a step I can do myself and cut out the middleman. Sure, I might have to pay for it, but hey, some-times you’ve got to spend money to make money. The self-published book might not sell as many copies as a traditionally published one, but it can’t be worse than the zero copies that are being sold when all I have is a manuscript."
Chris’ thought process sounds quite logical. Now let me explain why it’s wrong. :-)
The most basic wrongness about this belief is the idea that ultimately your books are going to end up somewhere that people will be able to buy them.
They won’t.
Occasionally a local bookstore can be harangued into carrying a copy or two of your vanity press book, but mostly they won’t touch them. They will not be available on Amazon (although you could set yourself up as a seller, I suppose). The only people who will buy them are your family, except your family largely expects you to give them the book. You could go the door-to-door route, but really, that’s not what you’re imagining, is it? When you say, "My book has been published!" you want people to be able to go to the bookstore and buy it, not for you to be hoofing around the neighborhood trying to sell it like it’s a vacuum cleaner.
What this means, in essence, is that you will have spent a thousand, or five thousand, or ten thousand dollars on books that will fill up your garage. I suspect most people can see the flaw in this plan right away. And I’m sorry, but that’s the reality of vanity press publishing.
Worst of all, if you go to the trouble to get a table at a local convention or conference and spend the whole weekend hard-selling your vanity-press book in an attempt to drum up some sales, what you will end up with at the end of the weekend is a conference full of people who are trying very, very hard not to meet your eye, and who will go away from the con wincing and muttering, "Did you get stuck talking to that guy, too?"
This is not really the image you want to leave behind. Overall, I cannot emphasize enough what a bad idea vanity press is. I truly do believe that if you write a good book, you will in time find a traditional publisher for it. The vicious truth is that if you can’t find a publisher, there are one of two things working against you. The first of the two things is actually positive:
You’ve written something that’s genuinely too hard to categorize and publishers just don’t know what to do with it. If this is the case, chances are very good you’ll be getting rejection letters that say, "This is actually quite good and we can’t figure out how to sell it." Having an agent will go a long way toward helping to alleviate this particular difficulty. So will writing another book and trying to sell it instead. If you’re getting rejections that say, "Sorry, we don’t know what to do with it," you have talent and will sell. Just try something else.
The second of the two things is somewhat less positive:
You’ve written something unpublishable. Not because it’s genre-defying, but because it’s bad.
The vast majority of vanity-published pieces fall into the second category.
Now, there are times and places for vanity press publishing. The collected family recipes, for example, so everybody can have a copy, is a good reason to do vanity press or Print On Demand. Generally people aren’t under the impression that the whole world would like to buy a copy of the family recipes, so yeah, that’s a good use of the system. But if you’re trying to create and sell the great American novel and you want to become rich and famous (or at least moderately well-known and paid), you don’t want to go the vanity route.
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Faith Hunter
Catie, on the whole I agree with you. I know several people who went the vanity pub rout and went broke doing it. One guy even spent his son’s college fund (nearly $40,000) and ended up selling less than a hundred books. On the other hand, there are the very few success stories like Kathy Wall, who self-published her first mystery novel, lives in a touristy small town spot that is featured in her novels, is so well liked that all the businesses in the town recommend her books, busted her butt for three years proving that she could sell, and got picked up by St. Martins. She is still with them, still busting her butt, still selling books.
Will many other people make money doing this? Do other writers have parents who will dedicate their entire lives to selling their books? Do they have money to push their books and a venue that will carry them? Probably not.
Avoid the vanity press idea. Even POD vanity press is not worth it. Bookstores hate them.
David B. Coe
I feel that I need to add here for those looking at Faith’s comment and Catie’s essay that in essence the two of them are saying the same thing, even if they appear to disagree. Catie is absolutely right: vanity press is a bad way to go. It’s almost impossible to make money, and rightly or wrongly, most professionals, including not only writers, but also agents and editors, will look at your self-published book and assume it wasn’t good enough to be published any other way. The fact that Faith can point to a few exceptions (and yes, there are others) only serves to reinforce the point. The stories of people actually breaking through via vanity publishing are so rare that they have become the stuff of legend. Thinking that your self-pubbed book will make you the next Christopher Paolini is just as realistic as thinking that the book you’re trying to publish traditionally will make you the next J.K. Rowling. Could it happen? Yeah, sure. But basing a career plan on that hope is a little like basing your household budget on that Lotto ticket you just bought.
Who Pays Whom: Part 3, Print on Demand (POD)
C.E. Murphy
This time I want to tackle POD, or Print On Demand.
First off, to steal a phrase from Laura Anne Gilman, "POD is a process, not a publishing style." This means that the book you’re ordering isn’t created in the physical world until you’ve ordered it.
Once upon a time I would have categorized POD as solely a vanity press thing, something which was largely there to bilk writers out of hard-earned money by promising they would print your book just as soon as someone ordered it! Of course, with no publicity, no books on the shelves, no word of mouth, it wasn’t very likely your book was going to get ordered, even if you’ve already paid to get it "ready."
I think the Internet Age has chan
ged that significantly. I still believe that POD can be part of a vanity-press scheme, but at this juncture I’m going to trust that our readers understand what’s bad about a vanity press, and instead I’m going to talk about what’s good about POD.
1. It can make otherwise out-of-print books available to readers.
One writer I know got critical acclaim for her first novel, great reviews for her third, but the second didn’t do as well. The publisher made the decision not to reprint the second in large numbers, but did make it available through POD, so if a completionist wants to pick it up, they’re going to be able to find a copy.
There are also downsides to it—if you’re a professional, you want to make sure there’s some kind of caveat in your contract regarding how many POD sales over what period of time constitutes in or out of print, because otherwise your rights may never revert back to you—but it can potentially be a helpful scenario. This use for POD is seen with some regularity by university presses and small presses.
2. It can help a small business reach an audience it would otherwise be unable to afford to.
Evil Hat Productions, a small press RPG company run by friends of mine, is a great example of this. Evil Hat has taken advantage of the POD technology to create independent role-playing games and gaming guides that they don’t have to warehouse, thus saving an enormous overhead cost. They’re not making vast amounts of money, but they are making enough to continue forward, which is quite an achievement.
3. It can make self-publishing, with no press at all, a viable possibility.
I say this with some caution because by and large I believe right down to my toes that if you’ve written something good enough, you will find a traditional publisher for it. I’m reluctant to press the idea of self-publishing.
That said, Magical Words has readers who’ve spoken up about their own self-publishing decisions, among them a poet, a self-proclaimed hobbyist, and one who has decided to become his own publisher after receiving encouraging rejections from traditional publishers.
For any of them, POD could be a viable choice. The poet had books made up as gifts, but could use (for example) lulu.com’s marketing tools to potentially reach an audience beyond the friends and family he initially made the books for. (I have to admit, with no prejudice meant against the poet, that may be the most viable publication scheme available for poetry. It’s not exactly a profitable market . . .)
The self-publisher and hobbyist could potentially use the same process to reach an audience without the outlay of costs that a vanity press generally demands. There is room for this kind of publication—but it requires a lot of marketing and forethought to make money.
For total disclosure, let me confess to having a print-on-demand product myself: a 2010 Ireland calendar. For further total disclosure, let me also mention that I’ve sold exactly one copy. To a friend. And that’s with advertising on all my various sites. :-)
Lulu and other POD systems like Zazzle (which is what I’m using for the calendar) do take a percentage out of sales, because they have to make money somewhere for this to be a viable scheme. But they take their percentage out of sales, not from up-front costs; there’s no way I’d have tried the calendar thing if I had to put money up to do it. (That would be vanity press in its evil form. We shall consider POD to be vanity press in its good form. At least in theory.)
So in a nutshell, I think POD can be pretty damned cool. There are probably about a million applications I haven’t touched on here, but I hope I’ve covered the ones most relevant to people considering a career in publishing.
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Faith Hunter
Catie, I am so glad you addressed this. My AKA has several backlist novels out in POD format with a small press. (I/she got the rights back and resold.) I still sell a goodly number a month and get a pleasant royalty check two times a year.
Because so many traditional presses are going to POD with their backlists, having a good agent keeps the rights revertible. In my current contract, if a backlist sells less than 300 copies a year, I get rights back, which was negotiated by my agent. Another good reason for a good agent! When I get them back, I’ll POD them through the small press.
David B. Coe
I’m having out-of-print issues with my first trilogy—the first book is still in print, but not books #2 or #3. Crazy I know, but that’s how this business works sometimes. We’re trying to get them back in print on a POD basis, but are wary, of course, of the reversion issues you bring up here. This is the wave of the future: Warehousing is becoming more and more expensive and POD is becoming easier and easier. I expect to see more of this in coming years, along with smaller print runs. And as a result, reversion rights clauses are going to be-come more contentious issues in contract negotiations.
Axisor
What do cover-art rights do when the book rights revert and an author takes the book to POD?
C.E. Murphy
The cover art belongs to the publisher, not to you, so it goes back to the publisher when the novel rights revert to you.
Creating A Web Presence
C.E. Murphy
Here’s the thing. Me, personally, I’ve had a website since (holy jeez) 1994. I’ve had a blog since before that was a word, since about 1998 in the loosest sense, and fairly regularly since about 2001. I have a personal site (mizkit.com) and a professional site (cemurphy.net), which basically only has career-relevant news on it, and which is meant to provide information to people who really don’t care what I had for breakfast. Still, there’s content there—short stories, teasers, book covers, even a book I wrote a decade ago—so hopefully it’s enough to keep people interested and coming back. But there was nothing there to draw new readers in until I had books on the shelves and people had an external reason to come looking for me.
There are people whose blogs have helped them launch a successful fiction writing career; John Scalzi’s Whatever leaps to mind as a primary example, as does Cory Doctorow’s BoingBoing, or Wil Wheaton’s WWdN. The thing is, though, that they all had something to say or do that was of interest to people outside of their writing ambitions. BoingBoing is a repository of Cool Stuff; WWdN is, among other things, the story of a guy we all grew up watching on TV struggling to put together a life that encompassed both that kid we watched on screen with the self-defined "just a geek" he grew up to be. Whatever’s tag line is "Taunting the Tauntable," which is certainly a theme that appeals to a lot of people. Critically, all of these sites are done well enough that people not only come back for more when they discover them, but they’re inclined to point other people at them.
A moment of truth: I didn’t know at all whether Magical Words would have an audience. There are a lot of writer blogs out there, both group-based and individually run. I thought it was distinctly possible that we could throw a blog and nobody would come. I’m exceedingly pleased that people have come, and that we’ve gotten ourselves a community here, but I honestly didn’t know if it would work. What makes it work, I imagine, is that we are authors who pretty much know what we’re talking about with regards to the publishing industry and writing. If we were unpublished writers with stars in our eyes, people might come to watch our journey, but for all the published writers out there who are trying to impart kernels of knowledge, there are a whole lot more unpublished people whose journeys can be watched—or not.
I think to try to get an audience you have to at least start with the "If you build it, they will come," attitude, but you’ve also really got to provide, somehow, something that people want. You have to post regularly so that there’s continuous new content to keep people coming back. You have to say to your blogger friends, "Hey, can you mention I’ve started a blog," and hope they do it. You put meta tags into your page layout, and hope there are people out there looking for what you’re doing.
Actually, the whole thing is a lot like selling a book, now that I think about it. "All you have to do is write a really good book." "All you have to do is provid
e something people want." Great. No problem. We’ll get right on that, shall we?
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David B. Coe
To be honest, I didn’t know if Magical Words would work either. That it has pleases me no end, but I had my doubts.
I think that the key, as you say, is similar to that of writing. You have to want to do this stuff anyway. You have to want to blog and have a website, and to hell with the world if they don’t look. It’s like looking for a date: if you stink of desperation, if everything you do has "Look at me!" written all over it, you probably won’t attract people. If you’re confident and you remain true to yourself and your interests and just do it, you’ll be successful. Because success will be the act of creating the blog or website, rather than the hit count you get . . .
Faith Hunter
Catie, this is a very detailed and info filled essay. I can add only one thing, directed only at the newly published writer. Network with like-minded people and with people who are just different enough from you to add spice. And, if possible, with people who are a little further along in their writing careers.
Working with people is so very helpful, as at this site, working with Catie, Misty and David, means that I don’t have to come up with something interesting to say every day. (Okay, some people say I am interesting only once a month or so, but I try to ignore them.) I can even take off a week or two if needed for personal or writing purposes, and the site still draws readers.