Carina Press

brainstorm77 said:

I wonder if they really read the full manuscript...

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It doesn't always require a read of a full ms to give it "careful consideration" sometimes content that just isn't what they're looking for or plot holes can leap right out of a synopsis or first chapter.

I got the same 'R' on my choose your own adventure novella after about the 11-12 week mark. Not a big sting as this was an experimental venture for me, never having written (or read) cyoa, but all is not lost. I really, really like one thread of the adventure so I think I'll paste it together and go with it.

(not to submit to Carina, of course, since the form R does not in any way suggest a revise and resub)

I'm going to wait before subbing anything else... Just to see how things pan out for them.

why full rights?

I could not find anything on their web site about rights so I asked. Here is what Angela James, Executive Editor, wrote back " [FONT=&quot]We do not contract only digital rights, but request full worldwide rights within the contract." Can someone explain this to me? If this is an e-publisher, why do they require worldwide rights? Doesn't this mean that an author that signs this contract can never attempt to have their work published in print without the permission of Carina Press? I understand that they will be spending money to edit and perhaps promote. Is this kind of transfer of full rights normal for an e-publisher to request? And there's that sticky word 'request'. Does that mean these rights are negotiable?
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iwannabepublished said:

" [FONT=&quot]We do not contract only digital rights, but request full worldwide rights within the contract." Can someone explain this to me? If this is an e-publisher, why do they require worldwide rights?
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Wanna, when uploading an e-book, say to Amazon's Kindle, they ask which rights you have, US/Canada, worldwide, etc. It's a simple click. That means anyone in the world can order your e-book for their Kindle. I assume it's the same for all the online databases.

Print rights are a whole other banana, and those rights are negotiable. If the publisher doesn't have worldwide distribution or the ability to sell the foreign rights [and there is a whole psychology to this], it makes little sense to insist on retaining those rights.

[FONT="][FONT=Verdana][COLOR=Black]Doesn't this mean that an author that signs this contract can never attempt to have their work published in print without the permission of Carina Press? [/COLOR][/FONT][/FONT][/COLOR][/QUOTE]
If their contract is strictly for e-rights, then you still retain the print rights -they're two different animals. But beware, there is some danger in having two different publishers. I suggest you read a [URL="http://behlerblog.wordpress.com/2010/05/27/i-want-to-keep-my-e-book-rights/"]blog post[/URL] I wrote last week on this very topic. It's a bit in reverse of your particular boggle, but the general information still applies.

I understand that they will be spending money to edit and perhaps promote. Is this kind of transfer of full rights normal for an e-publisher to request? And there's that sticky word 'request'. Does that mean these rights are negotiable?

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I'm not quite sure what you mean "full rights." Worldwide e-rights isn't unusual because the online e-book sites go worldwide. Think of the nightmare when telling someone who clicked into Amazon.com to buy your e-book but happens to live in the UK. Without worldwide rights, they can't have the e-book.

Anything in a contract is negotiable, but you have to be aware of the advantages and disadvantages of making one decision over another.

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iwannabepublished said:

I could not find anything on their web site about rights so I asked. Here is what Angela James, Executive Editor, wrote back " [FONT=&quot]We do not contract only digital rights, but request full worldwide rights within the contract." Can someone explain this to me? If this is an e-publisher, why do they require worldwide rights?[/FONT]

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Because it's Harlequin and that's part of their boilerplate contract that has been carried over to Carina.

brainstorm77 said:

I wonder if they really read the full manuscript...

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When Harlequin says full rights, most times they mean FULL rights, including those rights not yet invented. (I kid not -- there is a line in the contract that says something like that. So whatever the ebook of the future is...I dunno, hologram books or something...that hasn't been invented just yet...those rights are granted HQ in the boilerplate contract. TV, audio...FULL rights.)

Susan G.

Susan Gable said:

When Harlequin says full rights, most times they mean FULL rights, including those rights not yet invented. (I kid not -- there is a line in the contract that says something like that. So whatever the ebook of the future is...I dunno, hologram books or something...that hasn't been invented just yet...those rights are granted HQ in the boilerplate contract. TV, audio...FULL rights.)

Susan G.

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Good grief, how whack is that?

Also note that in the Carina blog, it's been stated that while they are right now a e pub, print books may become a reality in the future.

priceless1 said:

Good grief, how whack is that?

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No other publisher on the planet could get away with that kind of grab, I know.

brainstorm77 said:

Also note that in the Carina blog, it's been stated that while they are right now a e pub, print books may become a reality in the future.

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Every new e-pub says this.

jennontheisland said:

No other publisher on the planet could get away with that kind of grab, I know.


Every new e-pub says this.

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I'm talking about Carina and what they have posted. And that is a generalization that I am not inclined to believe. There are e pubs are are strictly that and have no intention of ever going into print.
As for contracts and HQ, I suggest that if an author is not please with the way HQ does business, don't sign with them.

Based on all of the above comments it seems to me an author would be boxing him/herself into a corner if they went with Carina Press. Carina would own all of the rights and even if your e-publication did well you might never see it in print. And there's nothing you can really do about it. Unless, of course, they really do go through with the idea of going to print and even then your book might not be selected. I haven't had anything published yet and I guess e-publishing is better then nothing but I still would like to be able to see my book on a shelf, at least my own. By the way Priceless1, I did read your blog and it is very enlightening.

If you are epublishing, you are epublishing. So IMHO you are putting yourself in that box deliberately and have no basis for complaining that had hadn't realised what kind of box it was. Epublishers vary on which rights they take and which they always, often or sometimes exploit. If you epublish first the odds are most publishers will not want print rights only, but there are exceptions and I suppose you could self-publish it. Bottom line, if you want to print publish it would pay to tackle that goal first and foremost.

"Epublishing is better than nothing"

Wow.

I wrote a post, walked away, deleted it, wrote another, walked away, and decided to go ahead and post after a few edits.

I understand that many people have this point of view, and further that many people believe that *any* print publication is superior to epub.

And that's fine. Meanwhile, I and thousands of others will collect royalty checks for our work from a niche that is expanding even as other publishers are cutting authors and titles.

Seriously, I don't understand why someone with a negative attitude towards epubbing would even be in the Carina Press (Harlequin's explicitly digital imprint) thread in the first place.

But just in case it was ignorance, not rudeness: Many people write stories that are unlikely to see print publication due to length, theme, or some other element of the story. Other people need to earn money from writing a hell of a lot faster than traditional publishing can possibly offer. For us, digital publication is our first choice, not our last choice.

Should you ever find yourself having written a contemporary erotic novella with a parallel universe plot, you won't even bother with New York.

Amen, Kathleen. E publishing is not only legit, it's gaining immense respect. At the agent workshop at RT, agents like Ethan Ellenberg, Miriam Kriss and Jim McCarthy all listed e-pubbed books (with legitimate e-publishers, not self-pubbed) as acceptable credits in a writer's publishing history.

Might want to do some fact-checking before you start talking about e-pubbing being better than nothing or implying that these aren't legitimate publishing credits. E published novels pay the mortgage on my house--which is something that a lot of "real" authors can't say.

**stares down at the now-open can of worms**

I guess epublishing is better than nothing? No - I did NOT just read that, did I?

Regarding the "epublishing is better than nothing" issue, I suspect a big part of it comes from the books not being on bookshelves, which means the author has to explain to friends and family that the book is only available online, which the clueless will interpret as being not really published. Add in the scads of micro-epublishers whose books will never be read except by the authors' friends and family, the way big publishers have been treating ebooks until very recently (as either a threat or an afterthought), and the DRM wars and high-priced readers that have caused a lot of people to shy away from ebooks, and no wonder even a lot of writers think of epublishing as second best.

I suspect it also has something to do with genre. Erotica and romance readers have been early and enthusiastic adopters of the ebook, while other genres are still lagging a bit behind.

Speaking of which--to nudge my post back on topic--Carina's emphasis seems to be really strongly on romance/erotica. That's natural, I guess, considering they're a spin-off of Harlequin, but I had hopes that their SF/F ebooks would be worth reading. I sent them a fantasy manuscript a few weeks ago, but I don't think it's got enough romantic elements to interest them. I've been checking their blog posts on and off, and almost every single book they've announced has been romance in one way or another.

One quarter of the 38 launch titles are not romance.

An additional five titles are SF/F Romance, meaning there is a romantic relationship at the heart of those stories - which I would argue is true of many of Robert Heinlein and Anne McCaffrey's works.

Just over a quarter of the launch titles are erotic romance.

I don't know about the breakdown of the acquisitions since then, though.

So yeah, heavily tilted in favor of the genres already embraced by ebook readers, but a healthy chunk isn't! Everyone's hoping to grow the market, not just cannibalize existing audiences.

Selah March said:

Some hard numbers from an epublished author.

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Good link, thanks.

Selah March said:

Some hard numbers from an epublished author.

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That's interesting, and awesome for that particular writer, but I don't know very many people who can crank out 35 books in five years. I'm a fast writer, but if I manage one full-length book (meaning 75-125k) and one novella (under 75k) a year, I feel like I'm doing very well.

michael_b said:

Saanen,

Thanks for the update on what they really seem to want. It's probably hard for them to break the romance/erotic romance mold over there considering who is behind them and what their editors are used to accepting.

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Oh, well, it was just a guess based on what I've seen on their blog and website (for one thing, their guidelines state "We expect to publish a majority of romance and erotic romance"). KathleenD says above that 1/4 of their launch titles are not romance, although I couldn't find that information on their website (not that I looked very hard). They're going live for sales next week, I think, so hopefully they'll have good stories in the SF/F line that aren't just romances with blasters or dragons.

Saanen said:

That's interesting, and awesome for that particular writer, but I don't know very many people who can crank out 35 books in five years. I'm a fast writer, but if I manage one full-length book (meaning 75-125k) and one novella (under 75k) a year, I feel like I'm doing very well.

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You consider anything under 75K a novella? The thing is some people do write fast; I know many who do. I suggest reading the thread on writing speed in the Novels section. It shows the variations of people and how fast or not they write.

Well, I write fantasy, so it's hard to find markets for anything under about 75k (many publishers won't even look at fantasy novels under 100k). I do realize lots of writers are extremely fast, but I still don't think most writers can manage 35 books in five years. Even if the books are more novella length--say 25k each for simplicity's sake--that's still a total of around 875,000 words, or (if my math skills aren't failing me completely) about 175,000 words a year. I don't doubt that it's possible for some writers to keep up that kind of pace and still produce well-written books, but I don't believe most writers can.