Taken from Elsewhere
I'm going to copy in a fairly long post of mine from the old board, from another thread there. While it's mostly about another publisher (one that I hope no one here is contemplating), I've got some general stuff about publishing that I think might be useful, and I don't think it should be buried elsewhere.
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Let us look at Denison "Denny" Hatch, PA author and apologist. In his article,
About U.S. Book Publishing and PublishAmerica I believe we have the ur-source for a great deal of the nonsense that PA's Infocenter regularly spouts.
Hatch is a real writer, with serious publishing experience (mostly in the 1960s-1980s).
In the late '90s he wrote a book about Priceline.com:
The priceline.com book is a business how-to title, but more a case study than anything else. My regular publishers were not interested; it did not fit their list.
I sent it to Bloomberg and Wiley who turned me down. Suggested it to a Norton senior editor who said, "This is not my kind of book."
By its looks, he's got a specialized non-fiction book with a defined niche. He's gotten some rejections. So he goes with the fast acceptance from PublishAmerica. So far, he says, he's satisfied.
Fair enough, he's a big boy and can make his own decisions.
As the author of a specialized non-fiction niche book, he's in one of the few places where a self-published author can make significant sales. Mr. Hatch is an expert in direct-mail marketing -- he's written several books on the subject -- so he knows something about marketing. If anyone is going to succeed at PublishAmerica, he's the guy. And if he'd left his comments at that, I wouldn't have a thing to say about his article.
But now he's generalizing his experience to areas where it isn't applicable, and his comments are likely to mislead new authors who are considering PublishAmerica.
Am I happy with PublishAmerica as opposed to a traditional publisher? So far, the answer is an emphatic YES.
I note that he made that remark before his first PA royalties would have come in. Interesting that he said "as opposed to a traditional publisher," when PA spends so much time and makes such efforts to call themselves a "traditional publisher." But more on this anon.
"Traditional book publishing is very efficient at one thing and one thing only: creating landfill. Otherwise, it is the most screwed-up, wasteful, and depressing business model ever cobbled together by people who should have known better and done something to change it."
Mr. Hatch is doing an elaborate version of "all these people are just stupid."
Come, come. Traditional book publishing is very efficient at one other thing: Getting books into the hands of the reading public. What this statement clearly establishes is that Denny Hatch doesn't understand how publishing works. He's looked at a set of complex interlocking non-intuitive systems, and decided that the only reason publishers do things the way they do is because it's never occurred to them to try anything else.
Part of what's going on in publishing is that publishers are running their advertising and product distribution through the same channel. Books are self-advertising. There's no such thing as a 100% success rate on any advertising message.
In the case of mass market publishing, they're also piggybacking on existing distribution systems. There are associated costs, most notably stripped books, but piggybacking is cheaper than putting together a dedicated system to reach non-bookstore outlets.
"The one-word profit killer-Returns" Denny says, noting that returns have been around since the 1930s, but not noting that publishing has apparently been conducted profitably every year since, and not noticing that even today bookstores have tiny profit margins. If you want to put a bunch of bookstores out of business, end the return system. That won't increase book sales. The returns system means there are lots more bookstores, and lots more books get shipped to them. Remember: A book on a shelf isn't just a product for sale. It's also an advertisement for itself.
Denny then gives an example of how returns work -- but it's an extreme and untypical example:
* A bookstore orders 20 copies of ABC by Sample A. Sample on a 60-day net payment arrangement.
* Of those 20 copies, 4 sell within 40 days, leaving 16 in inventory.
* Bookseller pays for the 4 copies it sold (at a discount of somewhere between 40% and 55%), and returns the unsold 16 copies.
* Bookseller then orders 4 copies to keep in inventory.
* Over the next 40 days bookseller sells 1 copy, leaving 3 in inventory.
* Bookseller pays publisher for the one sold copy and returns the 3 unsold copies.
* Bookseller orders 1 copy for inventory.
Under this cockamamie business model, the publisher has shipped to the bookseller 25 copies in three shipments; the bookseller has returned 20 copies two shipments; the publisher has been paid for five copies that were sold and has 15 copies sitting in the warehouse gathering dust. Yes, the bookseller pays for return shipping. But the publisher has printed books and paid for all the handling and warehousing. Profitability is impossible.
Of the twenty books printed in the example he gives, five have sold. That's a 25% sell-through he's showing. Under that cockamamie example, author "Sample A. Sample" would be well-advised to change his name and his agent, grow a beard, and move to another state before he tries to publish anything else. More typically, paperbacks see a 60% sell-through. Hardcovers get a 70% sell-through. Everyone makes money, everyone's happy.
Sell-through can dip to 50%, and people won't be as happy, but they'll still be making money.
Publishers know there are costs associated with publishing a book. Distribution and shipping are among those costs. They plan for them, budget for them, and set prices to cover them.
If profitability is impossible, how is it that publishers demonstrably make profits?
As the
Author's Guild reports, "returns have never been important enough to cause fundamental economic trouble."
Here's what the returns policy really gets you: More bookstores can open in more towns. More writers can write more books, and more marginal books can be published. Readers can find a wider selection on the shelves.
A realistic example? The bookstore orders five, sells three, returns two. Those two hang around the warehouse. They may be shipped to another bookstore, or they may be remaindered.
Denny worked in publishing, he's been an author, he must know that the story he's presenting is bogus. Why is he putting out bad information? Perhaps one reason he's slagging off the returns system is because PA doesn't do returns. He's trying to present this as a
good thing.
In the real world, what a no-returns policy does is kill any chance PA authors might have had of getting real bookstore distribution.
So how do publishers make money?
* One way is to sign up guaranteed best sellers by Stephen King, Michael Crichton, Bob Woodward, Andrew Weil, J.K. Rowling, or Princess Di's butler.
If there really is a "guaranteed" best seller it's the best-kept secret in publishing.
Before he sold his first novel,
Carrie, Stephen King was a guy living in a trailer in Maine, working nights in an industrial laundry and selling short stories to men's skin mags. Rowling was a single mother living on the dole in Edinburgh. Crichton was a newly graduated MD, unknown by anyone outside of his family and friends. How did the publishers who bought those authors' first novels know they were "guaranteed best sellers"?
By the time you know some author is a bestseller, they'll have top-gun agents who will have raised their asking price to right around the maximum the publisher is willing to pay. Not only that, but their current publisher will have their next several books signed up already. Suppose I ran a publishing house, and I wanted to guarantee a best seller. Could I say, "Well, I'll just publish the next Harry Potter novel"? No, I couldn't. It isn't for sale to me at any price.
As to the celebrity books -- they're a tiny part of the market. Three to seven percent. When they do well, they provide cash to pay for smaller works by less-well-known authors.
* Or they shoot craps and get very, very lucky, as they did with Hillary Clinton and Laura (Seabiscuit) Hillenbrand.
Why didn't Denny put Hillary in the "guaranteed best seller" category? To Laura (
Seabiscuit) Hillenbrand you can add Charles (
Cold Mountain) Frazier, Nicholas (
The Notebook) Sparks, Jennifer (
Good in Bed) Weiner, and every other published novelist with two books in your favorite bookstore.
Spotting likely books is why editors get salaries and have job titles. When one is shooting craps, the man who understands the odds and knows when to fade the shooter has an edge over the man who doesn't. An even better analogy for publishing would be professional card-counters playing blackjack.
As one major poker player puts it: "Your job is not to win hands. It's to make good bets." That's what real editors and publishers are doing. They're trying to make good bets. Not every bet succeeds. Not every hand they stay with to the end will win. But if they do it right, they'll make money.
* Or they come out with a hot subject, such as Soctt Berg's biography of Katherine Hepburn that made it onto bookstore shelves less than two weeks after she died.
Berg's biography of Hepburn had been written (and sold) years before. It wasn't released until after Ms. Hepburn's death, at her request.
Denny should have put Princess Di's Butler and Bob Woodward in this category.
* Or they have a series, such as Norton's Aubrey-Maturin nautical adventures by Patrick O'Brien that keep attracting new readers and continue sell year after year (with serious help from Peter Weir's film version of Master and Commander starring Russell Crowe).
The Jack Aubrey series was popular long before there was a movie. Russell Crowe was only five years old in 1969 when the first book came out. In fact, O'Brien died in 2000; the film was released in 2003. That series isn't popular because there was a movie; the movie was made because the series was popular. So add to that "crap shoot" above, Patrick (
Master and Commander) O'Brien.
Who made the Jack Aubrey books sell? The readers, that's who. Readers who found the books in bookstores. Fully returnable books. Readers who recommended the books to one another. That's what really did it. Readers buy books for the same reasons you do.
* Or they build up a critical mass of special-interest titles that appeal to specific markets (e.g., titles on cooking, automobiles, boats, gardening, health and fitness, crafts, music, etc.)
Specialized non-fiction will sell to those who want that specialized information. People don't buy nonfiction books by publisher. They buy them by interest, by recommendations from knowledgeable sources, or they can recognize the sound of expertise. Publishers can specialize too. That means that their editors know What the Foo about the subject, and will know if an author is talking rot, or providing information that isn't readily available elsewhere. It's always about the reader.
And wait one red-hot minute here. All the books Denny has been mentioning are sold under the same returns system that he just got done saying made profits impossible. If the returns system alone is the problem, you don't address it by running different content through it. The only way his examples can be profitable is if their sales patterns are significantly different from the example he gave at the beginning.
How do publishers actually make money? They know books and they know readers. They know them as well as they possibly can. That's why they can publish some very odd books by unknowns and still keep the lights on. This isn't just a game of chance, it's a game of skill.
My first job was in book publishing-writing press releases and getting authors on radio and television-for the trade book division of Prentice-Hall. The year was 1960, during which 15,000 new titles were published. Today, 150,000 new titles are published every year, so you will quickly realize that all across the country, book warehouses have walls bulging and floors sagging with unsold books (a.k.a. future landfill).
What Hatch fails to mention is that book sales have gone up as the number of new titles have gone up. Books are no longer selling in 1960 quantities. The number of bookstores has increased by an order of magnitude. More people are buying more books than ever before.
My first boss in the business, children's book publisher Franklin Watts, was a hard living, hard drinking ex-traveling book salesman who used to storm into the office every year on his birthday and announce loudly, "Do not wish me many happy returns! There is no such thing as a happy return!"
Mr. Watts was just making a publishing joke about "many happy returns." He wasn't formally denouncing the returns system, and it's absurd to read him as though he were.
PublishAmerica doesn't have any traveling book salesmen, hard living, hard drinking, or not.
For a bookstore to stock just one copy of every new book published would require an additional 3-1/2 miles of shelving every year-and that is spine out.
For the full cover to be displayed would require 14 miles of shelving. Stacked on top of each other, these 150,000 books would be the equivalent of 14 Sears Towers. Bookstores have access to this avalanche of titles and they can be special ordered and delivered in as little as a day or two.
Ah ha! The origin of PublishAmerica Infocenter's infamous "15 feet of new bookshelf each and every day" meaningless statistic! Many books are published, and yet it's observable that books find space on shelves. Remember that in the example that Hatch himself gave at the start of his article, the net change in bookstore shelving required was zero, and five books were sold.
Bookstores don't try to stock one copy of every new book published. A good number of those books aren't meant for bookstore sales in the first place -- law books, book club editions, encyclopedias, textbooks, catalogs, reference books, etc.
For the rest of the titles, bookstore managers and chain store buyers choose how many of which ones they want to stock in their stores, then keep a close eye on which ones are selling. Chain buyers live and die by their weekly sales figures.
What you should remember is that taken as a whole, all trade books are intended for bookstore display. If you take the set of all trade books and all bookstores, most of them get that display. (And not just in dribs and drabs, one here, two there, if the author comes in and begs.)
Books with longer print runs have more copies on more bookstore shelves. Books with shorter print runs have fewer copies on fewer bookstore shelves. About the same percentage of each run is shelved.
Reality check: Hatch is saying that it's impossible to achieve what we can observe for ourselves is happening every day.
While titles come and titles go, bookshelves remain.
In the immortal words of publishing guru Dan Poynter, "Bookstores are a lousy place to sell books."
And if, like Dan Poynter, you're self-published and self-promoting, it's probably true. Here perhaps we see the origin of Miranda Prather's astounding comment, "It's a common myth that bookstore placement equals sales."
Publishers distribute their books to bookstores because
that's where they sell best.
Bookstore placement is great for sales -- really, the best starting point known. Lack of bookstore placement kills sales for commercial trade books, particularly novels.
If bookstores aren't a good place to sell books, name me another venue that will sell twenty thousand copies of your book in a year.
Authors are a publisher's major asset. Without authors, the publishing industry would not exist.
So how do publishers treat aspiring authors?
Quite simply, we are treated like dirt.
The odds are that an unknown author sending in a query to a book publisher by mail or e-mail will get no response. Or a brush-off answer such as, "We do not accept unsolicited material" or "We only accept manuscripts from recognized agents."
Remember that "We do not accept unsolicited material" means "Send a query first," and "We only accept manuscripts from recognized agents" means "Get an agent." If you're hearing either of those lines, it means you didn't follow that publisher's guidelines.
Worth noting is that 80% of books sold to major publishers come through agents. The other 20% of the titles that major publishers print the authors sell on their own.
While we're at it, having a publisher tell you that they don't want to publish your book isn't the same thing as treating you like dirt.
Oh -- and authors aren't a publisher's major asset. Publishable manuscripts are.
Those publishers that do encourage authors to send in manuscripts throw them into a "slush pile" where they sit for weeks or months until some supercilious twenty-something who could not write his or her way out of a paper bag gives it the once-over and sends a rejection slip. For example, my manuscript languished in the Wiley slush pile for over a month.
In fact, the idea that a writer's work is confined to a "slush pile"-as if all unpublished manuscripts were "slush"-is, to me, truly offensive. Another offensive term book publishers use to describe an marked-up manuscript proofs: "foul matter."
I'm sorry for his sensibilities. (Though I find it amusing that he described what he was doing from 1976 to the late '90s as "writing junk mail." Isn't the term "junk mail" offensive to direct mail advertisers?) All unpublished manuscripts aren't slush. Only unsolicited ones are.
But back, for a moment, to that "supercilious twenty-something who could not write his or her way out of a paper bag." Remember who your readers are. They'll include supercilious twenty-somethings who can't write their way out of paper bags, standing in front of a bookshelf at Barnes&Noble trying to decide on a book to read during their lunch hour. Feel fortunate if they give your book the "once over." Be respectful of your audience, my friend. They're paying your bills.
More on those first-pass slush readers: Regardless of their age, their sympathy, or their writing ability, they're sorting out the books that are obviously unsuitable (the epic poem submitted to the non-fiction house, the hard-core porn to the Christian inspirational publisher, the book by a schizophrenic who is unable to form complete sentences, etc.) and handing the remainder off to experienced editors.
In short, traditional publishers are snotty and patronizing to authors unless your name is Ken Follet, or Tom Clancy.
I can just see the scene at the Naval Institute Press when the manuscript for Tom Clancy's first novel arrived:
Editor One: "Ha ha! I have given this book, The Hunt for Red October, the once-over. Quick, fetch the snotty rejection slip!"
Editor Two: "Be respectful! That's Tom Clancy! Soon he will be a best seller!"
Or over at Everest Books:
Editor One: "Look at this book! The Big Needle by Simon Myles! A tawdry crime thriller. Doesn't he know that I am a supercilious twenty-something who can't write? Let me reject it in a patronizing manner, then brew up a cup of tea!"
Editor Two: "Be respectful! That's Ken Follett writing under a pseudonym!"
In sober fact, when new slush readers first come in contact with slush, after their eyes get back to normal size and they catch their breaths, they realize that they're much better writers than they thought they were.
Denny's argument isn't with publishing, it's with the English language. He doesn't like the word "slush"? My heart bleeds. He doesn't like the term "foul matter"? That's production-speak for pages with pencil marks on 'em; it has nothing to do with the quality of the words on those pages.
What he's doing is playing with word associations in an attempt to create a false impression. While he may not be ignorant of the real meanings of those words, he's betting that his readers are.
If you're taking the word "slush" as an affront, and failing to read the submission guidelines, and can't tell "we don't want to buy your book" from "we think you're dirt," perhaps you shouldn't be giving advice to new writers.
The overall impression that Mr. Hatch gives is that he thinks a publisher's editorial department doesn't exist. That there can't possibly be people who can judge a book's saleability, so it must be pure chance that Bloomsbury spotted both J. K. Rowling and Susannah Clarke.
Editors work, day in and day out, year after year, on books: Editing and packaging and selling thereof; and yet (according to Denny) they can't possibly calculate the probable sales of a new author's book.
Why are publishers forever wanting to know what other books this new book is like? It's not because they think all books should be alike. It's because there are sales figures on those other books. They want to be able to tell the printing plant to print 5,000 copies, or 50,000, or 500,000.
We move on to a section called "
About Agents," where we learn that agents are horrible, except for his agent, who was a prince among people. (This is much like folks' attitudes toward lawyers: Lawyers are money-grubbing land sharks, except for their lawyer, who stands one notch below Superman in his defense of truth, justice, and the American way.)
What's wrong with agents according to Denny? They try to get their authors the best deals they can. Wooooo! And what's wrong with that?
According to Hatch again:
...many a deal has been queered by an avaricious agent trying to hold a publisher up for a big advance. And my guess is that 90 percent of all books never earn out their advance.
A deal queered by an avaricious agent? No. Not unless the agent gets huffy and walks away. Otherwise, the agent asks for the sun, moon, and stars, the publisher replies with a small non-metallic asteroid, and after that it's all dickering.
The agents who queer "many a deal" don't stay in business too long. Minor quibble -- it isn't 90% of all books that never earn out their advances, it's 70%. This would seem bad enough, but you must understand that its entirely possible for a publisher to make a profit on a book that doesn't earn out. All that "Didn't earn out" means is that the publisher paid a higher-than-contracted-for royalty rate. If I can be allowed to make my own guess, the books that didn't earn out by twenty bucks far outnumber the ones that didn't earn out by twenty thousand. Best sellers cover a lot of shortfalls.
This, though, may well be the origin of PA's claim that most books don't pay royalties. It's because the separate royalty checks only come after the book earns out -- that is, earns royalties in excess of the advance already paid to the author. What you need to remember is that the advance itself is a royalty payment -- paid in advance. Publishers like to set the advance equal to what they think the author's final earnings will be. The higher the advance, the more they expect to sell. This should make you wonder exactly how many copies a publisher expects to sell if they set the advance at $1.00.
There's another reason Denny may be trying to poison new writers' minds against agents: Legitimate agents won't touch PublishAmerica.
However, publishers and authors must beware of agents. They make money only when they sell something and get a commission. If an agent represents an author to a publisher, his aim is to get as fat an advance as possible-money paid up front against future royalties.
Yes, that's how it works. But a good agent isn't always going to aim for the biggest advance, period. There are lots of other considerations. An agent will try to get the best deal with a publisher who will publish the book well. That isn't always the highest advance.
Now on to
page two.
Denny gives a pretty good description of offset. Then he immediately gets himself in trouble when he moves on to POD.
First off, what he's describing isn't Print On Demand -- it's digital printing technology. Keeping the terms equivalent is one of the basic requirements of comparisons.
A radical new printing process has been devised whereby books can be printed economically one at a time on a giant photocopy machine that requires little or no set-up time.
The word you need to watch out for there is "economically." Mr. Hatch wants you to think it means that digital printing technology can print books as or more economically than offset presses. They don't. The current generation of digital printing technology prints books more economically than last-generation digital printing technology, and it prints them more economically than an offset press would if you used it to print five copies. When you're printing books in any kind of quantity, offset printing only costs a fraction as much as digital printing technology.
Print on Demand has been around since the days of monks hand copying manuscripts. Digital printing is faster and more economical than those monks. Digital printing isn't faster and more economical for printing commercial quantities of commercial trade books than an offset press. By a weird coincidence your competition for trade books, the books that wind up in bookstores, is using offset presses.
A great many forces are at work trying to stop this extraordinary development (e.g., book printers, binders, paper companies-all of whom stand to lose a lot of business if the book publishing industry goes to POD (Print On Demand). What is more, the book trade stands to be turned on its ear if POD is widely accepted.
This paragraph is ... deeply mistaken ... from start to finish. Papermakers don't care how ink gets transferred to paper. Their interest stops the moment the paper leaves the mill. Printers and binders aren't worried; they know they're in a different line of work and digital technology isn't their competition. If readers suddenly decided to buy books sight unseen and wait days or weeks to get them, that would certainly turn the book trade on its ear. There's no reason to believe that's going to happen.
Yet in terms of inventory management, this is efficient. It saves money, saves trees, saves gasoline (books being transported to and from warehouses). Without question, this is the future of book publishing.
Without question? Doesn't take me two seconds to question it. Print on demand doesn't save any of those things; it probably costs more. It's a business model based on a technology that has no economies of scale. It was designed to do a few copies at a time. There's a real use for that. But digital print technology as we know it now is not going to supplant offset printing and a distribution system that sends millions of books to thousands of stores.
All the digital printing equipment in the country right now couldn't keep up with one week's demand for one current bestseller -- and there are a lot of bestsellers hitting the bookstores every week. There are a lot more books hitting the stores that aren't bestsellers, but will sell just fine and turn a small profit just the same. Digital printing technology is not the wave of the future. At the moment, it's like e-books: a small but interesting component of the future.
As Dan Poynter says, "Print on Demand is not a way of printing; it's a way of doing business."
You don't need to quote Dan Poynter: You can
quote me. Print on Demand is a business model. You could conceivably Print On Demand with linoleum blocks. Digital printing is a technology.
Do traditional publishers use the Print on Demand business model? Depends on how you look at it, but ... if they figure a particular title will sell 5,000 copies, they'll tell their printers to run off 7,000. If they figure the title will sell 50,000 they'll tell their printers to print 70,000. If the publisher is wrong, and there's more demand, they'll tell the printer to run off more. (That's what the terms "second printing" and "back to press" mean.)
Do they use digital printing technology? Sure, when it's faster and cheaper than doing some job on an offset press. Otherwise, no. Remember that Print on Demand isn't the same thing as digital printing.
Until recently, the entire publishing industry looked down its collective nose at authors who published their own works. Self-publishing was given the pejorative sobriquet of "vanity publishing."
What's this "until recently" thing? As of this morning the entire publishing industry (right the way down to individual bookstore owners and readers in the street) continues to look down its nose at vanity publishing.
Never mind that Rogers & Hammerstein and the Gershwins used to produce their own musicals, that a many actors and directors formed their own production companies to create their own films, or that politicians spend quantities of their own money to get themselves elected.
And isn't that startlingly irrelevant? Shall we mention plumbers who are expected to bring their own tools to the job too?
For some reason a vanity author was (and is) considered slime.
No, not slime. Just a vanity author.
Further, vanity publishers-who operated under the old offset printing model-tended to be terrible shysters. They would charge an author for the setup, for printing, for binding, and for storage-often with a 500-book minimum. A year later there might be 400 copies left in the warehouse, whereupon the publisher would write the author and say that unless the author wanted to buy these 400 copies, they would be turned into landfill. But the author had already bought and paid for the 400 copies! The publisher was going to charge double. Most authors did not know the difference, could not bear the thought of their work being trashed, and paid up.
So? No one has said that going with a vanity press was a good idea. (I note, in passing, that Mr. Hatch knows one vanity publisher very well: Before he founded PublishAmerica, Willem Meiners ran a straight-up vanity press, Erica House. Is Mr. Hatch describing Mr. Meiners' business practices?)
No one reads slush for fun. No one reads slush twice without getting paid to do it. Why not? Because most times those books suck. Even if vanity-printed books don't suck, the fact that they look like other sucky vanity books the reader has seen means the reader won't go near them.
Vanity presses cheat their authors, play with their ignorance, and prey on their dreams. Granted.
However POD now has two meanings: (1) Print on Demand and (2) Publish on Demand. Print on Demand has been previously discussed. "Publish on Demand" means an author is paying to have a book published. POD (Print on Demand) is good; most traditional publishers are using it for back titles-printing as needed. POD (Publish on Demand) is held by many in the same low esteem that vanity publishing was years ago.
It looks like we've found the original source for this particular piece of PublishAmerica Infocenter twaddle. PublishAmerica is the only operation that uses these definitions and makes this distinction between Print on Demand and Publish on Demand.
Print On Demand and Publish On Demand are actually interchangeable terms. The only purpose for promulgating this nonexistent distinction is so that PublishAmerica can claim that whatever bad things you've heard about POD publishing operations apply only to the other kind of POD.
Now the article moves in for the kill:
Enter Publish America
PublishAmerica is the brainchild of two disaffected entrepreneurs. One of the partners is Larry Clopper, a laid-back, bearded American who unsuccessfully tried to get two books published and became roundly disgusted with the publishing world. The second partner is an enormous, larger-than-life Dutchman named Willem Meiners who can speak with passion about books and publishing at one moment and can turn around and rip off a Bach fugue on a church organ or cocktail music on an old upright piano. Both Clopper and Meiners had a vision that they wanted to do something would enable unpublished authors to see their books in print.
Nothing that Denny's said about Willem and Larry is pertinent to their publishing expertise.
What we have here seems to be two guys who couldn't get their books published, so they founded their own vanity press. That's been a pretty common pattern since digital printing technology has lowered the startup cost.
The problem has never been that unpublished authors can't get their books into print. The problem is that some authors write books with insufficient appeal to the reading public for them to be economically viable. PublishAmerica can put those books in print. What it can't do, and doesn't try to do, is get them read.
Founded in 1999, PublishAmerica takes no money from authors with the exception that we can buy from them our books at a discount.
And that's the real kicker, isn't it? That's one heck of an exception. Breezed over in that one line is the heart and soul of PublishAmerica's operation.
Authors love their own books and will tell everyone they know about them. They plus their friends and relations will, on average, buy around 75 copies of their book if there's no other way to get it. PublishAmerica knows that if they do a cheapjack job on production, use modern digital printing technology with its super-low setup costs, and price the books high enough (considerably higher than other comparable books printed on the same digital presses), they can make a profit off those 75 copies.
That's the beauty of it: No matter how good or how bad their books are, PA is bound to make money. The authors plus friends and relations are always going to buy enough copies for PA to make a tidy profit. Under those circumstances, it's not necessary for PublishAmerica to get reviews, bookstore distribution, and library placement -- and, in fact, they don't. They don't even try.
When the author buys his own books, the business model is pure vanity press. Old-style vanity presses needed the author to buy 500 copies to make their profit? PA's figured out how to make a profit on fifty.
Otherwise, the principals are pathologically averse to taking cash from their authors-even to the point of refusing to sell or recommend publicity and promotion services-for fear of being labeled a Publish On Demand company.
Odd that Mr. Hatch should use the word "pathologically." But listing publicity and promotion services isn't what makes a press a vanity press. It's selling books primarily to their own authors that makes a press a vanity press. They refuse to offer or recommend publicity and promotion services because they don't care about sales. Sales are a bother and a distraction. They don't even care about being labeled a "Publish on Demand" company (a term they made up themselves). The thing they want to avoid being called is a vanity press, although that's what they are.
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Update: PublishAmerica currently links to publicity and promotion services from their web page.
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PublishAmerica has no aversion to taking cash from their authors. They put excessively high cover prices on their books -- effectively, a surcharge -- and wait for the authors to pay it. They routinely send mail to their authors urging them to buy their own books. That's where they get their income. It certainly doesn't come from retail book purchases.
So when Publish America told me the book had been accepted, I went to the Website to see who they were and what they did. The featured book that day was 1001 Ways to Market Your Book by John Kremer. I knew Kremer to be a first rate book promotion guy and figured it PublishAmerica was okay for Kremer it was okay by me. I signed with PublishAmerica.
Mr. Hatch submitted a book to a publisher that he hadn't checked out? He only looked at their website after his book was accepted? Since PublishAmerica isn't listed in Writer's Market, how did he find PA if
not from their web site?
Denny somehow failed to notice that John Kremer didn't publish with PublishAmerica.
1001 Ways to Market Your Book came out from Open Horizons. All that PublishAmerica had done was link to Kremer's book.
You wouldn't think a man who'd worked in junk mail all those years would make a mistake like that. For one thing, the business he was in doesn't attract naive do-gooders. For another, direct mail specialists are all about paying attention to the tiny fine details of their advertisements, because they can chart the effectiveness of one detail vs. another by tracking the response percentages of each variant of the same mailing. These are the guys who know exactly which shade of blue used to print the "signature" on a letter will bring in the most responses.
So, here we have a published author shopping for a new publisher, who uncritically buys into that publisher's misleading ad, and fails to notice that John Kremer, whom he professes to admire, is not published by them.
If he's being disingenuous he's dishonest, and you shouldn't take his advice. If he's being honest then he's not too bright, and you still shouldn't take his advice.
The contract I signed: I receive a $1 good faith advance. Standard royalties. Split 50-50 extra rights (books clubs, mass-market paperback, film, TV, etc.). PublishAmerica arranges for the ISBN# (the standard book identification number registered with the Library of Congress) and gets it listed on Amazon.com, BarnesAndNoble.com and all the other online book selling services.
The ISBN comes from Bowker. The copyright is registered (at the author's expense) with the Library of Congress.
What's *not* registered with the Library of Congress is the book's CIP (Cataloging-in-Publication) data. This is the coded information the Library of Congress assigns to other publishers' books, to be printed on their copyright pages for the use of librarians. It's extremely difficult to make any library sales without one. PA lies about this, but the reason they have no CIP data is that the Library of Congress won't issue it to books published by vanity presses. Not only will PA authors not see their books in bookstores; they won't see them in libraries, either. (Standard exception: Author goes in person, gets down on his knees, begs.)
PA's royalties aren't standard. Standard royalties are calculated on the book's cover price. PA calculates royalties on the book's net price. There's no way that Denny Hatch, a published author, wouldn't know that.
PA's 50-50 subrights split is illusory. Their books sell in negligible quantities, and they make no effort to market their subrights. There'll be no book club or mass-market editions. How often have you seen movies or TV shows based on a PublishAmerica book? They might as well write in subrights splits for sales to alien planets, or serialization on cupcake wrappers. Doesn't matter. They're not going to happen.
What do PA books really get? Same thing every other vanity press book gets: Listings at Amazon and BN.com, on the publisher's website, and on other online bookselling services. And when you're talking about an unedited unreviewed unheard-of book by an unknown author, sales from online stores are as close to nothing as you can get.
The company will also send the author two finished copies of his book. And that is basically that. All books are first published as trade paperbacks. If the title has legs, it might get hardcover treatment. The contract promises that book orders will be fulfilled-either by them or by the central book printing and fulfillment company, Ingram. Books that are ordered can be delivered within a week. And, oh yes, PublishAmerica will not take returns.
And that basically is that. The word "published" slides in under its very minimum definition.
"If the title has legs"? I assume he's talking about the Independence Books imprint. As of this morning, PA has 7,674 books listed at Amazon. Of those, exactly six have those "legs." That's a terrible record. That's eight one-hundredths of one percent of all PublishAmerica books.
In the autumn after Denny wrote his article, Ingram, which is the largest book distributor in the country, stopped stocking POD books -- including PublishAmerica's. If success was desperately hard for PA's authors to achieve before, it was now something close to impossible. Months later, PA has still not acknowledged that Ingram's change of policy was a disaster for their authors.
The author pays nothing to get published. However, the process of editing, copy editing and legal vetting (if necessary) are up to the author.
That doesn't sound too bad, unless you know how much a good edit costs. A very clean manuscript with no structural problems might get edited for a three-figure sum, but four figures is what most PA authors are going to be looking at -- unless they skip over all the editing, copyediting, proofreading, and other pre-press production work.
One interesting thing about Denny Hatch's remarks here is that on its website, PublishAmerica says it edits its authors' books, and you'll find a huge number of PublishAmerica authors who believe that their books will be, or have been, edited.
PA doesn't actually edit. Hatch is quite right in saying that if you want your PA title properly edited you'll have to pay extra to have someone do it; but that unhappy fact is not known to the general run of PA authors.
In addition, publicity and promotion are up to the author, which sounds at first like a huge disadvantage compared to being published with a traditional publishing house.
That sounds like a huge disadvantage ... because it is.
The most an author can do in the way of publicity and promotion is less effective than the least you can expect a conventional publisher to do for your modest first novel. If a conventional publisher puts out a novel that sells 2,500 copies, everyone nods sympathetically, says well, it is a first novel after all, and prepares to do better with the author's second novel. If a PA title sold 2,500 copies, they'd declare a national day of rejoicing.
The other difference is that the author who's being published by the conventional house will spend the next year writing another book. The PA author will have spent it doing promotion, and is out of pocket for all the associated expenses.
For those PublishAmerica authors, the path is always a steep uphill climb. PA doesn't take returns. They don't offer the full standard bookseller's discount. The cover prices are higher than comparable books. The book's packaging -- its cover design, cover copy, all those little fine points that help a book insinuate itself into a reader's hands -- is perfunctory. And among people who know bookselling and publishing, the publisher's reputation is terrible. They know PA stands for "Publish Anything."
It would literally be easier for these authors to get bookstores to take their books if they'd had them run up by a local printer with no pretensions to being called a publisher.
However, a publisher with 600 titles a year is able to give each title about half a day's worth of publicity. In actuality, each title gets much, much less, since the "big books" by the "star authors" (those in which the company has invested the most money) get the major attention by the publicity department. Any non-best-selling author gets back-of-the-hand, perfunctory treatment by publicity departments and had better figure on doing his or her own promotion or the book will die.
First, he's skewed the figures, the same trick he tried earlier with his example of returns. His numbers here only work if you assume the publisher only has one publicist. 600 titles in a year is a large publisher, not a small one. I find it hard to believe that a large publisher would only have one person doing publicity. At a real publisher about half the staff is in the publicity and marketing departments. Second, a good publicist handles multiple books every day -- writing a press release for one, sending out galleys for another, excerpting quotes for a third, setting up a signing for a fourth. The concept of a half-day of publicity per title is nonsensical. Nobody calculates publicity in those terms. Third, publishers put their resources where they'll do the most good. This doesn't usually include lavishing huge amounts of hype on a nice modest little first novel. However, it doesn't mean no effort is made to promote them. Every best-selling author once published a first novel. Describing the efforts made on behalf of such books as "back-of-the-hand perfunctory treatment" implies a degree of callousness publishers don't feel. Fourth, publicity is only one aspect of the book's promotion. A real publisher has a real catalog, and a real sales force to sell the books in it. No PA title ever gets that.
Remember, what the conventional publishing industry would consider a very modest sales record for a very modest book, PublishAmerica would regard as a complete miracle. And in their case, it would be.
Denny Hatch should know all this ... after all, his first job, he says, "was in book publishing-writing press releases and getting authors on radio and television-for the trade book division of Prentice-Hall." Therefore, I conclude, he's deliberately lying.
A first hand example was the case of my third novel, The Stork which got no reviews. In desperation I surveyed the major reviewers across the country who replied that they had never heard of the book and had never received a copy for review. It turned out that on the day the publicity department was to work on my book, a new publicity director took over. In the transition, none of the labels were generated and sent to the warehouse. I was devastated. Two years of my life were shot.
No mailing labels were sent to the warehouse? As in, mailing finished copies out to reviewers? What happened to all the advance copies that should have gone out a month or two or three earlier? And why didn't the person responsible for generating the labels take care of it the next day, or the day after? This story does not add up.
But let's assume it was true. What it tells us is that there was a screwed-up situation that day at Morrow -- and that that wasn't normal. You don't have a publicity department screwup if you don't have a publicity department.
If true, it's an example of bad things happening to good books. And bad things do happen. But it's also an example of how your worst day at a major publisher will be better than your best day at PublishAmerica.
I bet that when Denny complained to Morrow about his book not getting sent out for review, that the answer that came back wasn't "don't take that tone with us," and a note than any future correspondence from him would be discarded unread. Furthermore, I'll bet that his book (a hardcover) was distributed to bookstores all over the country. I also notice that it went to mass market paperback a year later, and was optioned for film. And I'll make one more bet that the advance check was substantially more than one dollar.
I'd really like a look at the front and back covers of the Jove paperback edition. I'd be able to see whether there were any quotes from reviewers. Interesting question, eh?
But let's say his story is true. He assumed that review copies would be sent out in advance of publication. With real publishers, advance reading copies and review copies are expected. With PublishAmerica we know that won't happen.
The result is that PublishAmerica is closing in on 5,000 titles in print and legion of proud, enthusiastic authors is running around the countryside busily promoting their books. Where traditional publishers have to sell 5,000, 10,000, and sometimes 15,000 of a title before they break even, PublishAmerica needs sales that are a tiny fraction of that amount.
Not to be confused with the legion of bitterly disappointed authors running around the countryside complaining to the legal authorities, the press, and anyone else who will listen about the shabby treatment they got from PublishAmerica, the false advertising, the broken promises, and the verbal abuse. The only true part is where he says PublishAmerica only needs sales that are a tiny fraction of conventional publishers' sales. They do indeed. That's why their authors are running all over the countryside trying to sell books, while PA sits on its collective arse and does nothing to help them.
Instead of making authors feel like dirt, PublishAmerica is in the business of making authors feel good about themselves, their work and their value on this planet.
This is assuming that publishers make authors feel like dirt. If so, you have to wonder why so many people want to be authors, and why they occasionally dedicate their books to their publishers and editors.
But does PublishAmerica make their authors feel good? The answer is, it does. Some of them it makes rapturously happy. This lasts right up until the point when the book comes out. Then they discover that bookstores won't stock it, self-promotion won't sell it, reviewers won't touch it, and that all PA will do is sneer at them for not reading their (extremely deceptive) contract closely enough, and for thinking that anyone was going to want to buy their book in the first place.
PA's most fervent supporters are their authors. Their most fervent detractors are also their authors. The divide between the two is clear cut: the detractors' books have been out for a while.
PublishAmerica shouldn't be in the business of making authors feel good about themselves. They should be in the business of selling books to the public. As far as making authors feel like dirt, shall I quote one of the typical boilerplate letters PA's "Author Support Team" routinely sends to authors who question any aspect of PublishAmerica's business model?
Dear XXX:
Do not address us in such a tone. Your facts are wrong, your accusations are wrong, and your insinuations are wrong. Worst of all, and most unusual of all, you call our integrity into question.
The content of your statements is so unusual, so far from reality, and so very bizarre, that we will not stoop to even respond to them. The word libelous would be appropriate. Suffice it to say, that everything you say is simply, factually, wrong, and is easily proven to be so. Whomever gave you this misinformation is very pathetically misinformed.
Your request is denied, and we will expect your apology.
Thank you,
Author Support Team
[email protected]
Oh, yes. And unlike traditional book publishers, whose publicity departments schedule book signings and then forget to have books at the venue, all the books were there for us to sign.
Sound of hollow laughter. If PA couldn't get the books in place for a signing where the company's owners were in attendance, well, that would be beyond lame.
Actually, in the world of legitimate publishing, one of the biggest causes of signings where there are no books to sign is authors who are doing their own publicity. Manufacturing and shipping the quantities of books America's bookstores require is an industrial process. Inexperienced authors will schedule signings the day the book is scheduled to be released, not realizing that though there are now some copies, there aren't yet cartons and cartons available, or if there are, they may still be in transit.
This is a different problem from that experienced by PA authors who set up signings. In their case, the company takes the order for the signing copies, has the author pay for them (including shipping) in advance, promises they'll arrive in time for the event, then blows it off. The books may arrive weeks later. This has happened repeatedly.
The one hang-up to vast distribution of PublishAmerica titles is the no-returns policy.
There are two other hang-ups: Very high cover prices and short discounts.
But the royalty statement from my last book from a traditional publisher stated sales of 2,400 copies and returns of 3,000. Not pretty.
Only 5,400 shipped, 3,000 of them were returned, and none of those went back out on reorders? That's painful.
When those low orders came in, the publisher didn't cancel its announced pubdate and try to re-sell it in a later season, so they clearly understood it to be a small book. What one has to understand, then, is that having no returns system wouldn't mean those 3,000 copies would have gone out and stayed out. It means the book would never have been published in the first place. Who's going to eat the cost of those extra copies? The bookstores? No way. They have to stay in business. And it's no use saying that in a different system those 3,000 copies would never have been printed, because there's a big per-unit cost difference between printing 2,500 copies and printing 5,000 copies. If the publisher had only printed 2,500 copies, they'd have been obliged to charge more for the book, and it would have sold even worse than it did.
Somewhere along the line, somebody has to take a chance. Taking returns means the publisher is the one making the bet. And that's only right, because he's the one who picked the book out, and packaged it, and did the advance sales work on it. So now he's out there saying "I'll bet you'll love this book. I bet it'll sell. I'll bet your customers will come back to see if there are any more like this one. I bet it'll do better for you than whatever book would otherwise occupy that piece of real estate. And what will I bet? The author's advance. The editor's salary. Production, art, sales, marketing, publicity, printing, shipping, and all the associated distribution costs. And if I'm wrong, you can send it back free of charge."
Every book is a risk to somebody. If a publisher refuses to take returns, the risk has to land somewhere else. But on whom? Not the bookstores. If you think you can't get published now, try getting published in a system where every book that comes into a shop is a potential loss for the owner. "Proven sellers" doesn't begin to cover it. Alternately, the risk could be displaced to the authors. That's where PA offloads it. That's what vanity publishing is all about.
I shake my head when I hear PA authors rhapsodizing about how PublishAmerica has "taken a chance" on them. That's exactly what PA hasn't done. Their model has PA making money no matter how badly your book tanks. They don't have to choose which books to publish; the only customers they count on are the people who'd buy a copy of that title if half its pages were upside-down. They take no risks at all.
PublishAmerica has a particularly slick line of marketing patter, selling their services to aspiring authors. Denny Hatch is a professional marketer. He knows Willem and Larry personally, and went on a junket to Iceland with them. I wonder if we've just met the guy behind the infamous "Facts and Figures" page, the "Partnership with the New York Times" letter, and all the rest of PublishAmerica's marketing efforts.
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