Writers, Don't Be Vain

by J. Lea López

One of the questions and concerns I see most often over at Agent Query Connect is that of vanity publishing. An author is excited that they found PayMe Publisher online, and this is finally their chance at publication! So they ask the AQC community for any personal advice or recommendations regarding this publisher. Usually it takes only a quick look at the publisher's website for another member or moderator to realize that PayMe Publisher is a vanity press. If you've been reading my posts for any length of time, you know that I'm not usually one to make always or never statements, but here's where I make an exception. When it comes to vanity publishers, don't do it.

Money flows to the author

This is a basic tenet of publishing. In traditional publishing, the publishing house may or may not pay an advance, but they pay the author royalties on book sales. They do not charge the author upfront fees for editing or marketing or anything like that. They are invested in the success of your book, and they take a cut of your royalties to pay for those services and hopefully make a profit upon publication.

Vanity publishing operates in the exact opposite way. The fictional PayMe Publisher mentioned above will have publishing packages that include a lot of official, fancy, and impressive sounding things that might sound, to a writer, like everything you could ever ask for from a publisher. Those packages also come with a hefty price tag, and they're couched in the typical sales language where you can upgrade to an elite or gold level package for even more stuff! You end up paying the publisher to publish your book. There is no submission process usually. They will take any book given to them and publish it. Once you pay for your package up front and your book is published, PayMe Publisher will continue to take a percentage of your royalties, and that percentage is often the same as if you'd been traditionally published. So you're getting the same percentage of sales as with a traditional publisher, but you've also paid a nice chunk of change to the vanity publisher up front. So what exactly have you gotten for that money? Nothing that you couldn't have gotten for free with a traditional publisher.

This doesn't even begin to touch on the sometimes terrible contracts you have to sign with vanity publishers, or the predatory practices of some vanity publishers like Author Solutions. I highly recommend David Gaughran's blog for a ton more info on Author Solutions and why you should steer clear.

Self-publishing "services"

With the rise of self-publishing, there has also been a rise in companies offering self-publishing service packages to assist authors who want to go that route. Unfortunately, many of these are simply vanity presses in disguise. You still pay a big chunk of money for the same types of services (book formatting and cover design, mostly, but they'll break that out into all the small individual parts so it sounds like you're getting more for your money), and your ISBN will still be branded with that publisher's name, you may not get editing services for what you're paying (such as with Writers Digest's Abbott Press), and many of them will still take a portion of your royalties for the length of your contract.

I've heard some people try to equate self-publishing with vanity publishing simply because the author is paying out of pocket for the necessary services. I'd like to give those people a swift kick where it hurts, because it's not the same thing. If you want to self-publish, you are going to pay out of pocket for editing, proofreading, cover art, and so on. But when you truly self-publish, you are your own publisher, and you are not obligated to those service providers once the transaction is complete. A publisher pays their cover designers and editorial staff and others up front, too, without waiting for royalties on the book. The lines may be a bit blurry since you and the publisher are the same person when you self-publish, but that is the same function you are performing when you pay for services. Once those services are complete, you, as the self-publisher, receive all profits from the sale of your books (minus and percentages withheld from distributors or retailers).

So let's recap.

Traditional publishing = Publisher covers all upfront production costs, then takes a percentage of royalties for the length of your contract to cover those costs and make a profit. You may get an advance, and then you earn a percentage of royalties after the amount of that advance. You pay nothing out of pocket.

Self-publishing = You act as your own publisher. You pay one-time fees to contractors for your editing, cover art, and other production costs. You retain all monies paid to you by retailers. You pay contractors once for the same services a traditional publisher pays their employees to perform. After that, you pay nothing out of pocket.

Vanity publishing (and many self-pub service companies) = You pay them for production costs, like book formatting and design. You may or may not receive editing as part of your package, so you pay for editing. Once they have done everything they said they would do for their fee, you continue to pay them a percentage of royalties for the life of your contract.

Vanity publishers are counting on you to be uneducated about the way publishing works, or impatient to wait for traditional publicaiton, or too scared/unwilling/busy to learn how to shop for quality contractors to do the work needed to help you self-publish. Then they present their pretty packages and say, "Here, we'll do it all for you.. for a price." But for the most part, that price is not worth it.

I know that as authors, seeing your name right there on your book, which is for sale at all major retailers is an intoxicating thought. But don't rush. Don't be vain. Don't fall prey to vanity publishing.

J. Lea López is an author who strives to make you laugh at, fall in love with, cry over, and lust after the characters she writes. She also provides freelance copyediting focused on romance and erotica as The Mistress With the Red Pen. She welcomes online stalkers as long as they're witty and/or adulatory. Kidding. Maybe. Check for yourself: Twitter, Facebook, Blog.

SUBJECTIVE is Not a Dirty Word

by J. Lea López

How many times have you heard this: The publishing industry is so subjective. Probably a lot. Maybe enough to make you want to tear your hair out and wonder if, by subjective, someone is trying to tell you you'll never be published. I know people for whom publishing being a subjective business is a reason for hope, and others for whom it is a reason to despair.

After all, it isn't really that much of a leap from subjective to sheer luck, is it? I'm sure many writers feel that way. The thought that you just have get lucky enough to find the right agent or editor at the right time, with the right manuscript, in the right market can certainly be disheartening.

But I don't think it's quite so random as that, and I really believe that the inherent subjectivity of the publishing industry should be a source of hope more often than not. While I'm still unagented and unpublished as far as my novels go, I recently had an experience in subjectivity that I hope will be as inspiring to you as it is for me.

Last week I received a rejection letter that made me giddy with joy.

Wait a minute. Hold up. Giddy with joy??? From a rejection? Yep, you read that correctly. A small press editor was reading my manuscript as the result of a contest. At first it was a partial, then a full. Naturally, I was pretty damn excited to see where it would go. A week and a half after I sent the full, I got her response. (I was impressed with her response time!) I've already said it was a pass, but it was one of those ones all writers covet and hope to receive - the kind with feedback.

She told me what she loved and didn't love, and the exact part of the manuscript that didn't quite do it for her and ultimately resulted in her passing on it. But she liked my writing and encouraged me to submit again with other projects. How could I not want to frame that letter and hang it on my wall?

It's also important to note that this editor requested the manuscript after reading my query and first 150 words in a contest. This was the same 150 words that was the first page I submitted to an agent and editor panel at the Baltimore Book Festival in September. No one on the panel liked that first page. No one. Including an agent who was on my potential to-query list.

It was that first page that got the interest of an editor, and even though she did pass on it, the positive things she had to say reinforced my faith that there is a good fit for my manuscript out there. As harsh as it may sound, we have to remember that despite striving for our own unique voice and style, putting our own twists on plots and characters, we are still not SO unique that finding an agent or editor to take on our projects is a literal crap shoot. If we were really that unique, finding readers wouldn't be easy either.

The publishing industry is subjective, so make sure you know and love your story and that you can stand by it. It will take work, and sure, it might even take a tiny bit of luck, but there is an agent and/or editor who will fall in love with your writing. Without a bit of subjectivity, publishing would be terribly boring and homogenous, so worry not.  

Subjective is not a dirty word. I know all of those already, trust me. *wink*

J. Lea López is a writer with a penchant for jello and a loathing for writing bios. Find her on Twitter or her blog, Jello World. She has had some short stories published, most recently in the anthologies The Fall: Tales from the Apocalypse and Spring Fevers.

GET YOUR QUESTIONS READY

In an upcoming post, From The Write Angle contributors will answer your questions. What's it like to "get the call" either from an agent or a publisher? How do I get my MS in to Hollywood? How do historical writers do all of that research?

What are your questions for our contributors? Keep an eye out for our upcoming call for questions.

Haste Makes Waste

by Sophie Perinot

“... the race is not to the swift”

Ecclesiastes 9:11

I am not ordinarily the bible-quoting type. This bit of Ecclesiastes, however, addresses a problem I’ve been seeing a lot lately. On-line writing communities have been overrun by the hasty. Perhaps it was always this way and I just failed to notice it. Perhaps technology has made us less patient even as it makes it easier to act instantly on our impulse to share what we’ve written. Whatever the reason, most of the advice I’ve doled out in the last couple of weeks can be boiled down to this—“slow down!”

I remember completing my first manuscript. It was a spectacular feeling. As you type your last words you can’t imagine any better feeling. But there ARE better feelings to come—like the feeling of signing with an agent, and the feeling of inking your name on a publishing contract. If you rush to take a newly minted manuscript to market you will not get to feel those bigger highs. You may turn your beloved tome (the one you’ve poured your heart and months or years of your life into) into nothing more than a pile of waste-paper.

Here are a few things to remember in your heady rush to share what you’ve written:

1) If your manuscript is not done agents don’t want to hear about it. You’d think this would go without saying. You’d be wrong. Just last week someone asked about querying an unfinished manuscript in an on-line forum. Fact: getting an agent is a long shot—as in single-digit percentage long shot. Why would an agent who receives hundreds of query letters a week EVER ask to see an incomplete manuscript? Even if the premise is brilliant there is no guarantee—until the book is done and the agent can read it—that the execution will live up to it. “Ah,” you say, “but the agent won’t know my book isn’t finished. Querying takes a while and while my letter is sitting on all those laptops I’ll wrap up the writing and editing.”

ACK! If you were here I would stab you with my letter opener (yes, I still have one.). First off, it is not uncommon to get a quick response to a gripping query pitching a concept that seems highly saleable. Second ...

2) The first time you think you are done with your book you are SO NOT DONE! In fact, the second time you think you are “done” you probably aren’t either. It’s not just YOU, it’s every debut writer. I could have sworn my first manuscript was done after I’d edited it twice and received feedback from a couple of beta readers. Boy was I wrong. It took three additional critique partner reviews, the removal of several sub-plots and the clipping of over 30,000 words (yeah that’s right 30k+) before I was actually done. In this market—with publishing in flux and publishers feeling risk adverse—your manuscript had better be spit-shined and nearly flawless before anyone who matters has a look at it. Every time you send out your manuscript prematurely you are wasting an agent name from your list.

“But,” you say, “I thought my agent would offer editorial suggestions and, eventually, the editor at my publishing house will as well.” Very true (notice how I am putting the letter opener back in the pencil cup). When you sign with an agent you are often standing on the tip of the revisions iceberg. But cutting corners in your personal edits on the theory you can make all the improvements at once is a mistake. You can’t get to the next round of edits without this one. Editing is a part of writing—often the biggest part. Your attitude towards it needs to be “early and often.”

When you finally have your manuscript edited to perfection, you are set to query. But again, hold your horses ...

3) Easing into the query process gives you the best chance of querying successfully. Remember how you thought you were done with your manuscript and you weren’t (see last point)? Well, chances are when you mail/email those first query letters out you’ll discover your letter isn’t ready either. There is really only one way to gauge whether your query letter is in good shape—see if it gets requests. If your letter isn’t up to the job it is better to find that out after you’ve sent twenty letters than two hundred. Send a couple of ten-letter trial batches out to a mix of agents from your A & B lists. Wait until you’ve got responses (or 2-3 weeks have passed at which point you count the non-responders as “not interested”) and if your rate-of-request isn’t in the 10% to 20% range revise your query. Repeat. The time to send out query letters as quickly as your mouse-hand can click is once your letter is topping the 20% request-rate mark.

You are going to meet with a lot of rejection on the way to being agented and/or published. Everybody does. If rejection makes you impatient, you stand a good chance of selling yourself and your manuscript short. Remind yourself again and again ...

4) How quickly people can read your book is NOT the ONLY goal to consider. As writers we want an audience. As writers with completed, polished manuscripts we want an audience NOW (now, now, now! do you hear me?). After months of editing and weeks (or months) of querying nearly every writer has the following thought: “I don’t care who publishes my book or how many people read it, I just want somebody other than my mother to see it.” Before the rise of self-publishing this thought wasn’t particularly dangerous because, unless you were going the vanity route, there was no easy way to just “get the book out there.” Now you (the writer) need to impose your own cooling off period and make certain you understand your personal goals for your book. Ask yourself, HOW BIG do you want your audience to be? Will you be content if two-dozen people read your book in the first year? If two hundred people do? How about two thousand? Ten thousand?

If you want thousands of people to read your book then you probably want to pursue the sometimes glacially slow agent-to-major-publisher route. Now before everyone attacks me, I am not saying that self-published or small-press published books can’t reach thousands of people, I am just saying the odds are longer. If you rush to self-publish or publish with a small press and then are disappointed with the number of readers your book gets, there isn’t much you can do. You can “start over” and try for an agent and a deal with one of the big 6, but you will need a new manuscript to do that.

Let’s say you do decide to self-publish ...

5) Professional looking self-published books take time. You can decide to self-publish your book today and have it available on the internet tomorrow, but chances are it wouldn’t be well presented. Nor well promoted. If you are going to do everything yourself—editing, cover-design, layout, promotion, advertising—you are going to need a plan, and good plans take time. You will also want to invest time in the pre-publication process (design, editing) to maximize you chances of success.

Getting back to Ecclesiastes (I do like things tidy) people run races to WIN. The ultimate prize in writing is a published book with a significant fan-base—significant enough that you have pecuniary reasons for writing your next book. It takes slow, deliberative thought and action to reach that goal. This is a marathon, not a sprint. Behave accordingly.

Sophie Perinot is an author with Penguin’s New American Library (NAL). Her debut novel, The Sister Queens, is on sale now at bookstores (brick-and-mortar and virtual) everywhere. You can connect with Sophie at http://www.sophieperinot.com/, on Facebook, or on Twitter.