HorsesMouth
08-03-2005, 09:15 PM
I am the nefarious Michael Alan that Victoria Strauss points out is suspiciously the author of three of four forthcoming Mine Falls Press books. Sorry to take so long to join the conversation here, but Google didn’t find the postings on this board until yesterday and we didn’t know whom to thank for the attention.
It interests me that there was so much speculation about Mine Falls Press – but no one seems to have thought of simply sending us a note to ask what we are about. Marty thinks we are running an old DIMENOVELS scam, Victoria suggests we are questionable, and oh so witty Brit Richard bothers to declare in two separate postings that he was oh so bored – yet we’ve had a surge in full length viewings of the trailers that has been fun to watch (yes, we can actually track that kind of thing).
So who is Mine Falls Press? A couple of years ago publisher Janice Schad and I started a group called CurrentDraft to offer a support and critiquing forum for a dozen local writers in the Tewksbury Massachusetts area. I developed and funded the CurrentDraft.com web server technology that let editors and critiquing partners offer line-by-line comments on manuscripts of works in progress (I’ve spent a lifetime homesteading on the digital frontier creating interactive technology).
Our group had some talented writers, several published. Collectively we had sent out over a thousand “query letters” to prospective literary agents to no avail. Every month or so a query letter from one of us would result in an invitation to spend $50 in postage and copying costs to send a 400 page manuscript to some agent or other who would sit on it for six months and more often than not fail to acknowledge that he or she had even received the package.
About a year ago several of us lost patience with the process. Was it possible that none of us were talented enough to even merit a reading of our work by an agent?
A little research showed the problem: publisher conglomeration. Random House acquired over 70 publishing houses in recent years – Bantam, Dell, Ballantine, Doubleday, Dial, Crown.... Random House itself is one of over 70 corporations owned by Bertelsmann AG which in turn is owned by Groupe Bruxelles Lambert, Bertelsmann Stiftung, and the Mohn family. I don’t know who owns the Mohn family, but you get the idea. It’s corporations owned by corporations owned by corporations all the way up – and every convoluted corporate layer has executives hanging on to a bottom line with white-knuckles. It looked to us as if the publishing industry had turned into a cabal of accountants bent on minimizing marketing risk and focused on celebrity and multi-million dollar projects.
We launched little Mine Falls Press about a year ago with the intent of financing the works of emerging authors using a creative formula that has taken longer to get started than we hoped. If we are running a scam it’s a pretty slow moving one since we have never taken a penny from any of our authors (or anyone other than the readers who have purchased a copy of The Wheelwright’s Son) in all this time. We do have a distributor (Baker & Taylor), but there is no denying that sales have been modest. Promoting books is a tough town.
Our formula was to raise funds to publish new works by exposing new authors and their manuscripts to potential underwriters who would fund the printing and promotion costs in exchange for a share of future royalties. The elaborate www.MineFallsPress.com (http://www.minefallspress.com/) web server has the technical mechanics to support such an arrangement (again, my programming effort). The server allows writers to make submissions without postage, copying, or other costs. Editors search the Query Pool for projects they might want to support in exchange for a 2% royalty (paid by Mine Falls – our formula allocates a full 12% royalty to our potential authors and since we don’t require agent representation the writer gets to keep the full amount). Editors partner with Authors (at no cost to the Author) to prepare the manuscript for publication and then recommend projects to a small publishing committee which in turn recommends projects to potential Underwriters.
A quick glance at the online Query Pool shows that we’ve solved that part of the problem. No more endless query letters to lists of overwhelmed agents who return “Too busy to look at your work” scraps of paper in SASEs. We’ve interested some talented part-time editors who can take on projects without giving up their day jobs. Despite several encouraging meetings with potential underwriters, we have not yet attracted sufficient backing for the available projects – a disappointment to be sure.
With regard to the book trailers, they were simply part of our ongoing search for ways to efficiently promote small works from new authors. But a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. The trailers have taken on a life of their own. Writing the scripts, gathering the images and sound effects, stitching it all together into a small story turns out to be an exciting creative effort in itself. Just as not everyone enjoys eggs benedict, not everyone loves the trailers – but hundreds of people have watched our little trailers to the very end in the last couple of weeks and we’ve had some very positive feedback.
We’ve organized a little production venture (www.TrailerMill.com (http://www.trailermill.com/)) to produce very low cost trailers (a few hundred dollars a trailer versus $5,000 - $10,000 a trailer by other suppliers) by having authors write their own scripts and find their own images. We do the programming work and produce a Flash file that can be effortlessly added to authors’ websites.
Are we small? Yes.
Are we naďve? Probably.
Are we the place to go if an established publisher is willing to actually promote your book? Probably not.
Are we a vanity press, POD, subsidized press,...? No.
Are we crazy to be spending our own money to pursue this dream? Pretty likely.
Are we scamming anyone? You decide.
Michael Alan
It interests me that there was so much speculation about Mine Falls Press – but no one seems to have thought of simply sending us a note to ask what we are about. Marty thinks we are running an old DIMENOVELS scam, Victoria suggests we are questionable, and oh so witty Brit Richard bothers to declare in two separate postings that he was oh so bored – yet we’ve had a surge in full length viewings of the trailers that has been fun to watch (yes, we can actually track that kind of thing).
So who is Mine Falls Press? A couple of years ago publisher Janice Schad and I started a group called CurrentDraft to offer a support and critiquing forum for a dozen local writers in the Tewksbury Massachusetts area. I developed and funded the CurrentDraft.com web server technology that let editors and critiquing partners offer line-by-line comments on manuscripts of works in progress (I’ve spent a lifetime homesteading on the digital frontier creating interactive technology).
Our group had some talented writers, several published. Collectively we had sent out over a thousand “query letters” to prospective literary agents to no avail. Every month or so a query letter from one of us would result in an invitation to spend $50 in postage and copying costs to send a 400 page manuscript to some agent or other who would sit on it for six months and more often than not fail to acknowledge that he or she had even received the package.
About a year ago several of us lost patience with the process. Was it possible that none of us were talented enough to even merit a reading of our work by an agent?
A little research showed the problem: publisher conglomeration. Random House acquired over 70 publishing houses in recent years – Bantam, Dell, Ballantine, Doubleday, Dial, Crown.... Random House itself is one of over 70 corporations owned by Bertelsmann AG which in turn is owned by Groupe Bruxelles Lambert, Bertelsmann Stiftung, and the Mohn family. I don’t know who owns the Mohn family, but you get the idea. It’s corporations owned by corporations owned by corporations all the way up – and every convoluted corporate layer has executives hanging on to a bottom line with white-knuckles. It looked to us as if the publishing industry had turned into a cabal of accountants bent on minimizing marketing risk and focused on celebrity and multi-million dollar projects.
We launched little Mine Falls Press about a year ago with the intent of financing the works of emerging authors using a creative formula that has taken longer to get started than we hoped. If we are running a scam it’s a pretty slow moving one since we have never taken a penny from any of our authors (or anyone other than the readers who have purchased a copy of The Wheelwright’s Son) in all this time. We do have a distributor (Baker & Taylor), but there is no denying that sales have been modest. Promoting books is a tough town.
Our formula was to raise funds to publish new works by exposing new authors and their manuscripts to potential underwriters who would fund the printing and promotion costs in exchange for a share of future royalties. The elaborate www.MineFallsPress.com (http://www.minefallspress.com/) web server has the technical mechanics to support such an arrangement (again, my programming effort). The server allows writers to make submissions without postage, copying, or other costs. Editors search the Query Pool for projects they might want to support in exchange for a 2% royalty (paid by Mine Falls – our formula allocates a full 12% royalty to our potential authors and since we don’t require agent representation the writer gets to keep the full amount). Editors partner with Authors (at no cost to the Author) to prepare the manuscript for publication and then recommend projects to a small publishing committee which in turn recommends projects to potential Underwriters.
A quick glance at the online Query Pool shows that we’ve solved that part of the problem. No more endless query letters to lists of overwhelmed agents who return “Too busy to look at your work” scraps of paper in SASEs. We’ve interested some talented part-time editors who can take on projects without giving up their day jobs. Despite several encouraging meetings with potential underwriters, we have not yet attracted sufficient backing for the available projects – a disappointment to be sure.
With regard to the book trailers, they were simply part of our ongoing search for ways to efficiently promote small works from new authors. But a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. The trailers have taken on a life of their own. Writing the scripts, gathering the images and sound effects, stitching it all together into a small story turns out to be an exciting creative effort in itself. Just as not everyone enjoys eggs benedict, not everyone loves the trailers – but hundreds of people have watched our little trailers to the very end in the last couple of weeks and we’ve had some very positive feedback.
We’ve organized a little production venture (www.TrailerMill.com (http://www.trailermill.com/)) to produce very low cost trailers (a few hundred dollars a trailer versus $5,000 - $10,000 a trailer by other suppliers) by having authors write their own scripts and find their own images. We do the programming work and produce a Flash file that can be effortlessly added to authors’ websites.
Are we small? Yes.
Are we naďve? Probably.
Are we the place to go if an established publisher is willing to actually promote your book? Probably not.
Are we a vanity press, POD, subsidized press,...? No.
Are we crazy to be spending our own money to pursue this dream? Pretty likely.
Are we scamming anyone? You decide.
Michael Alan