Dertie,
The best way to get an FAQ is to go to the following page:
http://www.tatepublishing.com/submit.php
Yes. That was interesting. It's written with a great deal more attention and vigor than the sales copy on your published books.
On this page you can simply request information only and receive the FAQ. Also, on the bottom of our publishing services page it tells you to request more information to learn more about author investments and provides a link to the correct page to receive the FAQ. Here is that page:
http://www.tatepublishing.com/services.php
Also interesting. You engage in far too much handwaving about your distribution and marketing practices. Reading between the lines, I judge that most of your distribution handwaving is there to camouflage what I take to be the true state of affairs: almost none of your customers' books get shelved anywhere but the Ingram warehouses.
I have evidence to support that interpretation. I found it on your own site, on the
Tate in the News page. Take this press release you issued:
"Marriage" Book Picked Up by LifeWay.
LifeWay Christian Stores has agreed to offer and promote Tate author, Craig Gleerup's new release: The Type of Marriage That Endures. The chain will feature the book for the "Back to School Promotion for New Arrivals" in time for the July 30 promotion kickoff. Congrats to Craig and thanks to LifeWay for offering this great book on lasting relationships!
If having one book stocked by one bookstore chain merits its own press release and exclamation-pointed congratulations, then the rest of your books aren't normally being picked up by brick-and-mortar bookstores.
Moving on to
Scott Allen Franke Featured on BookWorld Shelves:
Book World – Marshfield, Wisconsin
Book World currently has two displays in their store of Scott Allen Franke's book Walking Your Predestined Pathway. They have copies on hand to pre-sell prior to his book signing event on June 17th.
Again, if getting an author's book onto a single bookstore's shelves merits a press release, it's not a normal event.
Mr. Aartemann's Crayon by Alan Daugherty:
“Mr. Aartemann’s Crayon” is currently on sale at Good Shepherd Christian Book Store in Bluffton, as well as the Korner Kupboard in downtown Huntington.
Same point: if it's only available at a couple of the author's local bookstores, you don't have brick-and-mortar distribution. I'm also betting you made the author do all the work of placing it with those stores.
I Am Shadow: One Dog's Story by Mavis Hinton, reviewed in the
Greensboro (NC) News and Record:
Hinton has had book signings at several bookstores. At Barnes & Noble in Winston-Salem, a customer said ... [anecdote skipped]. The book can be purchased online at Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com, to name a few sites.
She held a signing at her local Barnes & Noble, but you can't buy her book there? You clearly don't have a distribution deal with Barnes & Noble. You just have the same minimal deal with Ingram as every other vanity publisher.
Grandma Nola by Mitchell M. Olson:
You didn't just pick up your business model from other vanity publishers; you picked up your phrasing, too. That's the same misleading description the rest of them use.
Let's move on. We're not done with this page yet. You next discuss the availability of your books:
It is important to remember that Tate Publishing doesn't just provide or ensure availability of our products to book stores. We actually stock product with stores and distributors. Self-publishers will claim they provide availability, but the product is rarely accessible and must be ordered after a purchase has been made. At Tate Publishing we work to guarantee availability, and if a distributor or vendor ever runs out of stock, we resupply them immediately. We do not supply as an on-demand or self-publisher would after a sale or request has been made for a title.
Have I mentioned that your copywriting sucks? Anyway. All you're saying here is that you use conventional short-run printing, and that you warehouse copies of your titles, rather than using Lightning Source as the pure PODs do. You can afford to print copies in advance because you're charging your authors thousands of dollars to publish their work.
We use traditional methods of supplying vendors and accept returns 100% of the time.
It's easy to promise you'll take returns when almost none of your books get onto bookstore shelves.
I'm guessing that you offer your titles to the big secular chains and to the "Christian bookstore" retailers, but that almost none of them get picked up. Now, real publishers are distressed when one or more bookstore chains pass on a title. There's a good chance they'll yank it from their schedule, and rethink and re-package it. That's because they make their money by selling books. No chain distribution, no decent sales; no sales, no sense in publishing the book.
The reason it isn't a disaster for you to have the bookstores pass on your titles is that you're charging your authors for publishing their books: you make money no matter what happens. You can afford to publish anything -- and from the look of your site, you do.
(Note for future reference: boasting that you publish 4% of your general-interest submissions pretty much amounts to an admission that you're running a vanity operation. No way is 4% of
anyone's slush pile commercially publishable.)
All this, and yet we're still not finished with this page of your site. We still have to look at the part about marketing.
What will you do to market my book? Tate marketing works hard every day to give our authors the very best penetration into the marketplace through book signing events at major bookstores such as Barnes & Noble, Borders, Hastings, and many other locations. Why try to do it yourself when you can work with a highly trained marketing staff that knows this industry and knows what it takes to sell books?
What they need is marketplace penetration through brick-and-mortar distribution. If they don't have it, signings aren't going to do them any good. In the meantime, thou prevaricating, hypocritical, whited sepulchre of a full-time professional liar, thou, are you never moved to tell your brothers and sisters in Christ how very easy it is to get printed and bound books made up, or to talk local bookstores into taking a few copies and hosting a signing? You're doing next to nothing for them, and you're charging them through the nose for doing it.
Your personal marketing representative will partner with you and with Key Marketing Group to set up book signing events and obtain media coverage and book reviews. Tate Publishing has great relationships with buyers and store managers at Ingram, Borders, Barnes & Noble, Family Christian, Lifeway, Amazon and others who make decisions on what books are carried in their stores and on their websites.
You may have great relationships with store buyers, but you don't have a regular distribution deal that gets your books into their stores on a regular basis.
As for that great media coverage the author's "personal marketing representative" is going to arrange: woot, I surely am impressed. I see from the news clippings page (that thing just goes on being useful) that Tate has gotten its authors placement in the
Roseville Press Tribune, Lubbock Avalanche Journal, Baptist Messenger, Valencia County News-Bulletin, Winter Haven News Chief, Scituate Patriot Ledger, Kingwood Community Newspapers Online, Riverside Press-Enterprise, Vernon Times Record News, and the all-important
Lake News -- to name but a few.
Almost all of the stories are in the same vein: "Local resident publishes book." Like a local bookstore signing, local human-interest coverage is not hard to get. I'm more surprised by how many of the stories listed on that page are the original press release, with no publication cited. Tate couldn't get those authors a few inches in their local paper's human interest column? They're not half trying. And then there are the "news stories" quoted from sites like Independent Professional Book Reviewers, which is an outfit authors can hire to write "reviews" of their books, or Bookideas.com, an obscure site where amateur book reviewers can post their work for free. It's better to leave off the source entirely, and just look careless, than to cite sources like that, and look clueless.
Granted, there are some bits of real coverage listed on that page, but they're all for books that have inherent interest. If you were Wilt Chamberlain's highschool basketball coach, or if you got Oliver North to write a foreword for your memoir about being prosecuted for committing atrocities in Vietnam, you can get the media's attention. The test is whether your personal marketing representative can draw their attention to less obvious properties.
I am glad you are involved in these posts and actually the page on our publishing services page is a result of feedback from Victoria and some of her friends. It is important to remember that we offer different types of contracts and it is better explained in a thorough FAQ, verses general statements, that is why we provide it.
That's okay. I can nail you on the contents of your site as it stands.
We are set up as a traditional publisher for retail distribution,
You're a 95% vanity operation.
our product is warehoused and sold traditionally and we have agreements with Barnes & Noble, Borders, Hastings, Family Christian Stores, Mardel Christian Stores, Berean, and all of the other major retailers.
They'll take an occasional title from you when they feel like it. The rest of your books sell through Ingram.
All Tate Publishing product is 100% returnable and all expenses are paid by Tate Publishing.
As noted earlier, that's not difficult when most of your books will never be seen in brick-and-mortar bookstores that aren't within easy driving distance of the author's home.
We have great relationships with distributors, wholesalers and retailers that far exceed any POD or vanity press.
That's practically the definition of setting the bar low.
Enough for now. Maybe I'll finish up later.
