[Packager] IC Romance

jennontheisland said:

http://icromance.com/index.html

Someone asked about them on another forum. My response:

IC Red Flags.


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Clever. Thanks for sharing.

From the "Unguided Ghosts" section (my bolding):

We cannot write contracts that give the writer on-going rights or royalties on their work or derivatives of their work, nor can we guarantee that all or some of the title will ever go into print; or, if it does go into print, it will not be under your legal name, or in the form of its original submission (i.e. we will consider your submissions to be ghostwritten). If the work is accepted after submission, we offer a one-time nominal payment covering all rights to the work and its derivatives, across all publishing and media formats.

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My guess: they don't just buy all rights, they buy copyright.

For the "Guided Ghosts," I'm guessing it's a work-for-hire arrangement.

- Victoria

This is rather odd, and I wonder if they have ever actually bought any books. I can think of three categories of people who use ghostwriters.

1) People accomplished in some other field (William Shatner, Fabio) whom it might superficially seem would be able to write in a genre (SF, romance), but who are actually not writers.

2) Accomplished writers whose name has become a brand, and who for some reason can't or won't keep up with the demand for their brand.

3) Publishers who own a "writer" who isn't actually one person, but actually just a set of styles and a brand, similar to above.

These guys can't really be any of the above, can they? And one thing all three groups have in common is that they know lots of people who are well qualified to write their romance novels. Heads of corporations writing their autobiographies might have to look around for the right ghostwriter, but I think we can safely say that Fabio knew lots of good romance writers whom he could hire before he started writing his own books.

Anyone else have any ideas which I might have missed?

Harlequin certainly buys tons of books to fill their category lines, but if they want a book with particular style elements to be written, and then to be published under a particular name, they know many writers who can help them. I didn't think that many Harlequins were ghostwritten though, although I could be wrong.

I would be amazed if Harlequin used this kind of middleman. They don't need to and they would not benefit from doing so.

I agree. I can't imagine what kinds of publishers ICRomance caters to (if indeed it caters to any), but I'm betting they're not on the order of Harlequin.

And another thing. If you're going to establish a reputation as a packager (which is really what this endeavor sounds like, not ghostwriting--it suggests cluelessness that they are describing themselves in terms of ghostwriting), you don't keep the names of the publishers you work for anonymous, as ICRomance claims to do in their FAQ. Who you work for is your resume, and establishes your credibility. Without that info, there's no way to know whether the company is hooked up with Harlequin or Light Sword Publishing.

- Victoria

Or if there are any publishers at all.

Unimportant said:

My assumption was that big romance houses like Harlequin buy ghostwritten romances to fill their category lines, and IC was one of their providers. I've no idea if this is actually the case.

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This is absolutely not the case. HQ gets many more competent submissions than they can use. If they have a particular topic/subject/area/subgenre in which they want a book, they turn to one of the folks who is already publishing with them.

Every single romance publisher I'm aware of (and I'm aware of most of them--even the new startup epubs) get more submissions from writers in the traditional vein than they know what to do with. I've never heard of an in-house or continuity project that wasn't handled with authors already in the house or simply with a call for submissions dealing with a certain subject.

One possibility of this here is that this is a startup effort for one of those bloggy-type sites that get their real cash from pageviews and adverts. I've seen them all so far under nonfiction subjects of general interest, where the site collects reprintable articles or employs short-piece writers to create short articles that appear laid out on pages with multiple spaces serving up targeted advertising. The general idea being to make the money through page-views and clickthroughs, with the article serving to add nominal value and search engine relevance.

I could easily see this as a venture to collect copyright-free material to create a "fiction-zine" style site under which the main money would be made from advertising. The initial outlay of "nominal fee" means the fiction could be kept, recycled, derivatived, etc. as long as necessary to generate "new" content to keep users coming back to view more ads.

So....what's the point then? I don't get their logic here, or how this is even an attractive incentive. This is the kind of thing that could break one's brain.