Tayen Lane Publishing

Abderian said:

I don't know who this publisher is, but maybe someone else does so they can be named and shamed.

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Did you try a Google search on a sentence or two from the comment?

It's this publisher: http://www.tayenlane.com/submissions/

Abderian said:

Still gobsmacked here. I think they seem to be confusing turning up to a job interview with actually doing the job and having no idea how much you'll be paid. And the tone!

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Even at a job interview, you have some idea of the payscale (you know whether it's hourly or salaried, and you have some idea of whether it's minimum wage or 60k/year).

Heaven forbid that an author would be so presumptuous as to want to know whether an anthology pays enough to make it worth their bother before they submit!

blog promotion?

Hmm...new publisher with already five imprints. That tells me they have no focus and probably no idea what they're doing or specializing in

I love their We at their about page:

Tayen Lane Publishing was founded in 2012 by career entrepreneurs, writers, editors and digital media professionals, who sought to challenge the status quo. We do this by publishing provocative, outside of the mainstream, next-level books, across a range of genres, from fiction to non-fiction. We believed it time for an evolutionary change of direction. We certainly hope that after reading our books you will agree.

Translation: We have no previous professional experience worth mentioning in the industry.

From their submissions guidelines:

Please send your query letter or book proposal as a PDF document.... Submit the query (letter of introduction) in the body of the email and not as an attachment

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Can a PDF document be in the body of an email?

Though we understand the popularity of the Romance genre, Procyon Press seeks smelling salts as opposed to opiates and lotus leaves.

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What does this even mean?

I wasn't impressed by the typos in the blurbs either.

Queen of Swords said:

What does this even mean?

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I'm guessing:

"We want books that wake readers up, rather than books that induce a dream-like state (and our opinion is that romance books do the latter)."

Tayen Lane Publishing was founded in 2012 by career entrepreneurs, writers, editors and digital media professionals, who sought to challenge the status quo.

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One of the "career entrepreneurs" is Kermit E Heartsong, four of whose books are published by Tayen Lane:

https://plus.google.com/+KermitEHeartsong007/posts

His less-than-inspiring YouTube vid about Tayen Lane's Affiliate Programme reveals that the company itself won't be doing any marketing to speak of:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMc6BOqs22o#t=21

Clicking "Affiliates" on TLP's website brings up a rather odd "expanding list of our affiliates and links" including the Library of Congress, Ingram, Hugo Award and the Pulitzer Prizes:

http://www.tayenlane.com/affiliates/

Oh, look at us being all cutting edge and transgressive by saying romance is boring... like every pretentious tosser on the internet does normally without knowing a damned thing about it.

All the job interviews I've gone to, I knew the rough pay being offered because it was in the advert for the job. Some jobs, they wanted to talk through the pay deal as part of the interview, so I didn't have to actually get the job to know. Employers understand that pay is a factor for applying. So it's not like publishing is strange for wanting to know rough pay rates before acceptance. No one wants to go through all that before discovering there is no pay, and their time was wasted.

The whole bit about challenging the status quo and next-level books makes me suspicious of the pay rates, as this sounds rather like, "We do it for the love, not the money... and so should you." Authors need to eat and pay their rent. There's nothing wrong in admitting that.

I'm about to sign a contract with Tayen Lane.
The Managing Editor, Kermit Heartsong, liked my work on Opednews and asked for an updated anthology. The terms, including payment, are clearly laid out in the contract, and they were willing to make some changes, though not all, that I asked for in the contract.
The only thing that bugged me a little bit was the clause that says if, in their opinion, I don't adequately deliver what's required, they have the right, though not the obligation, to hire someone who will. That seems a bit open-ended to me and I tried to get that altered to simply canceling the contract in that case, but they wouldn't change that and said "If you're not able to provide the required information, we will find an individual qualified to do so. There is a logic issue here with the Author not wanting to fulfill this part of the contract and then having the right to determine, negotiate, who will. We can't agree to this and hope that it will never come to this point."
I've never heard of such a clause. Have you?
They don't pay much; they are a boutique publisher. But they do perform marketing (the affiliate program has been phased out), and they sent me 2 prior press kits when I asked, which look reasonably good.
I do wish Amazon carried their actual books and not just their Kindle versions.
But of course, my book will be a best-seller, so that won't be a problem

Scott Baker said:

I do wish Amazon carried their actual books and not just their Kindle versions.

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I'm puzzled. Doesn't Amazon carry anything with an ISBN?

Amazon

Oh, there they are...you have to search for Tayen Lane specifically and then click to see ALL results, before the book versions show up. Otherwise it's all Kindle e-books. How odd!

Scott, the clause you mentioned would be a breaking point for me. It's one thing for a publisher to insist on right of first refusal for related works. What this publisher wants is to apparently OWN the property. If you are not selling them all rights to your story, this could be a problem. Them saying 'we hope it doesn't come to this' probably means they think it very well could happen at some point.

I could be wrong. I hope they treat you and your mms well.

Scott Baker said:

The only thing that bugged me a little bit was the clause that says if, in their opinion, I don't adequately deliver what's required, they have the right, though not the obligation, to hire someone who will. That seems a bit open-ended to me and I tried to get that altered to simply canceling the contract in that case, but they wouldn't change that

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Ya think?

Yeah, I'd run, not walk, away from a company offering a publishing contract like that.

Doesn't this become, in effect, a work-for-hire contract, where you no longer own or have any control over your work?

Not to mention, no focus whatsoever.

--Ken

Debeucci said:

. . .

Translation: We have no previous professional experience worth mentioning in the industry.

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I assume that this is a clause related to editing? So if they request edits, and you don't satisfactorily provide them, they're saying they can hire someone who will?

If that's the case, I would say this is a "run, don't walk" situation. The only time I've agreed to those sorts of clauses is when I'm doing work for hire, because the client owns the rights upon delivery *anyway*, what do I care what they do with it? But in those situations I also specify that my name is nowhere near the piece, and that I am not liable for reduction in payment for the additional fees, assuming I have made a good-faith effort to correct the issues they've raised.

Scott Baker said:

The only thing that bugged me a little bit was the clause that says if, in their opinion, I don't adequately deliver what's required, they have the right, though not the obligation, to hire someone who will. That seems a bit open-ended to me and I tried to get that altered to simply canceling the contract in that case, but they wouldn't change that and said "If you're not able to provide the required information, we will find an individual qualified to do so. There is a logic issue here with the Author not wanting to fulfill this part of the contract and then having the right to determine, negotiate, who will. We can't agree to this and hope that it will never come to this point."
I've never heard of such a clause. Have you?

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That sounds really weird when it's not work-for-hire. How does this work exactly? A collection of your work has random pieces by other people? They put them in under your name, so it looks like you wrote them? It makes me wonder what else is non-standard in the contract.

It can be hard to turn down a deal when it's got to the contract stage, but if you have any doubts about the contract, you should. A vague statement that they don't like to enforce the bad contract terms isn't protection. If you signed it, they can enforce it.

Scott Baker said:

The only thing that bugged me a little bit was the clause that says if, in their opinion, I don't adequately deliver what's required, they have the right, though not the obligation, to hire someone who will.

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At your expense, I'm guessing?

With the caveat that I haven't seen the contract or the clause you're referring to, this kind of language is not uncommon. Often, it appears in a Revision clause that's appropriate in a nonfiction contract, but should be deleted from a fiction contract.

Wherever it appears, however, it's not a good thing, and it's not hard to see how it could be used abusively if you and the publisher disagree on editing. If you don't deliver a satisfactory manuscript, the publisher should have the right to refuse to publish, but they shouldn't be able to hire someone else to take over your work.

but they wouldn't change that and said "If you're not able to provide the required information, we will find an individual qualified to do so. There is a logic issue here with the Author not wanting to fulfill this part of the contract and then having the right to determine, negotiate, who will. We can't agree to this and hope that it will never come to this point."

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This sounds like a classic instance of a publisher trying to persuade a nervous author to ignore contract language. "Don't worry," they say, "it'll probably never happen." Well, what if it does? The bottom line of the author-publisher relationship isn't what the publisher tells you about the contract--it's what the contract actually says. It's extremely unwise to sign a contract in the hope that its literal provisions won't be fulfilled.

Would you be willing to post the whole clause here so I could take a closer look? I'd also be willing to look at the entire contract and give you non-legal (I'm not a lawyer) commentary. My email is beware [at] sfwa.org.

- Victoria

Unimportant said:

I thought the smelling salts bit meant they wanted end-with-a-kiss, no sex type romances, but since I don't write romance I don't know the code words.

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Hey, I thought the 'smelling salts' meant they wanted Regency.

Just to semi-conclude the Tayen Lane thread, I did wind up publishing with them. There is too much to go into here, but I would not recommend them (for one thing, they still owe me 9 of my 10 free author's copies, from March. I have excuses aplenty, but only 1 author's copy book). However, for better or worse, my completed non-fiction work "America is Not Broke!" is on Amazon now: http://amzn.to/1Ihcc54 as well as on the Tayen Lane site: https://tayen-lane.squarespace.com/america-is-not-broke
The publisher has not gotten the book into stores but you can look inside it on the Amazon site, and I hope you will. Ultimately, it's the book that matters, not the publisher.