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Dragon Soul Press

laynecalry

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Hello Everyone, I am fairly new to absolutewrite forums, though I have known about you all for over a year now. I have been trawling for a few days and weeks now trying to accustom myself to everything. I do want to ask a question, though. I am a self-published author, and I have done well. However, for my bigger project, a Series I want to come out, I have thought about sending off a query to a few small printing press. There is one that I have found, but I am unsure of its validity. I have another author and editor friend who has been a bit of a mentor and he has been guiding me through the process. He told me that if a printing press charges they are usually not legitimate. That being the case, this small town publisher I have found does charge and seems to be a bit of a vanity publisher. I was wondering if it would be possible to look into it. I would think that you would be able to get more headway and learn more than I would, being that your knowledge is more extensive than my own. I hope that I am wrong and it is a legitimate company because it would be nice to allow others to live the dream of being an author and published. https://dragonsoulpress.com/
 
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Round Two

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Hello Everyone, I am fairly new to absolutewrite forums, though I have known about you all for over a year now. I have been trawling for a few days and weeks now trying to accustom myself to everything. I do want to ask a question, though. I am a self-published author, and I have done well. However, for my bigger project, a trilogy I want to come out, I have thought about sending off a query to a few small printing press. There is one that I have found, but I am unsure of its validity. I have another author and editor friend who has been a bit of a mentor and he has been guiding me through the process. He told me that if a printing press charges they are usually not legitimate. That being the case, this small town publisher I have found does charge and seems to be a bit of a vanity publisher. I was wondering if it would be possible to look into it. I would think that you would be able to get more headway and learn more than I would, being that your knowledge is more extensive than my own. I hope that I am wrong and it is a legitimate company because it would be nice to allow others to live the dream of being an author and published. https://dragonsoulpress.com/

You're getting some terminology mixed up.

A printing press is the machinery used to produce a book.

A publisher is the company who acquires, edits, produces, and sells a book.

This particular company, presenting itself as a publisher, shows no actual experience as a publisher, seems to be selling services, and likely can't do anything for an author except make the author spend money for no benefit.

If a publisher's website is geared towards writers (like this one is), it's of little value to an author hoping to be published in the traditional sense of the word.
 

Gillhoughly

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Rule #1: If they want your money, they are NOT your friend.

To find a legit commercial publisher go to a bookstore, find books similar to yours, and write down who published them. Look them up, follow their submission guidelines.

To find a legit agent, look for authors with books similar to yours, look up their websites, and they will usually mention who represents them. Look up that agent and follow submission guidelines.

Expect rejection. It is part of the job. No one escapes.

But prior to sending your book out, get it beta-read by other writers. AW has the Share Your Work forum. When you have made a certain number of posts, you can put up excerpts of your work and get feedback. Tweak your work or do a full rewrite, whatever is necessary to hone your craft. You want to submit your BEST work to them, after all!

Being a writer means you are opening a small business with a specific product. If you don't know the basics of how to sell that product you can get ripped off by the sharks in the pool. This takes work and research, but it is not rocket science. There are no secret handshakes, no mystery passwords, just solid work. You can do that.

Understand that selling your book is not like selling a car. You can't just offer it to a publisher or agent and expect them to snap it up just because it is available. It has to be something that will make them money. They are not a service, but a business looking to score a profit. If their profit comes from selling books in stores, that's what you want. If their profit comes from selling themselves to writers, they are not your friend.

At this point you need to put a pin in your search for a publisher for the moment and educate yourself about what's out there so you don't get ripped off. You came to the right place. You can teach yourself how to spot the bad guys in a New York minute, it just takes a little reading.

Start here:

https://accrispin.blogspot.com/2007/05/victoria-strauss-learning-ropes.html

[url]https://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?20586-How-Real-Publishing-Works/page14


https://absolutewrite.com/forums/sh...ps-about-avoiding-dealing-with-scammers/page4
[/URL]
 

Harlequin

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This group is soliciting new authors in a "pitch contest" via FB, and possibly twitter too.

#PITCH COMPETITION ALERT:


Let's have a competition. Pitch your unpublished manuscript in the **comments below** for a chance to have it submitted to Dragon Soul Press. A maximum of three will be chosen. Competition closes on August 24th at 8pm EST.


*ALL GENRES.*


They are very new and I can't find any information on the founders, their goals/connections, how their publishing works, their contracts, nothing. Meanwhile, their pitch thread is filling up with SFF hopefuls (sigh).

Nothing really out of the ordinary, just another small press who don't know what they're doing (in a sea of similar) but thought I'd list here because they happened to come up on my radar.


https://dragonsoulpress.com/

https://www.facebook.com/dragonsoulpress/
 

mrsmig

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Wow. That website is like a desert: they've published nothing, have no staff listed, no upcoming releases scheduled...nothing.

The website is also aimed at writers rather than readers, with a variation on the "we're all family here" come-on:

Here, we strive to publish writers of all experience levels. Have you been given the run-around by almost every publisher? Are you a New York Times best-seller? All are welcome here. The ultimate question you may be asking is why choose us?The answer is simple. We have your best interests at heart. Dragon Soul Press is the publisher to either begin your career or to further the one you currently have. With a full team dedicated to your work, you are provided the resources you don’t have when self-publishing.

I see nothing that indicates the kind of editorial, marketing or promotional experience that one "doesn't have when self-publishing."

They also offer paid services, although every page of those services carries a disclaimer that there's no cost to submit. But then on their submission info page, the second sentence reads, in bold:

After receiving edits back, the author has two weeks to return the submission for formatting.

This seems peculiar. Giving the publisher the benefit of the doubt, I think they're trying to say that that once a book/story has been accepted for publication, that's the turnaround time between edits and formatting, but the way the page is laid out, it sounds like submitting means they're automatically going to start editing.

Their prices for services are pretty low, but judging by the uniformly amateurish quality of their premade covers, you get what you pay for.

I suppose there's a chance that more reassuring info will be forthcoming, but my guess is that this is largely a one-person business, offering no real advantage to self-publishing.

ETA: They've apparently taking submissions for an anthology entitled "All Dark Places." The deadline for the anthology is a bit more than a week away (8.31.18) but there's absolutely no information about that anthology anywhere on the website but on their Event calendar, in teeny-tiny print.

ETA AGAIN: And having said all that, I've discovered there's already a thread about this place here. Asking a mod to merge.
 
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mrsmig

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Oh! My bad. I did do a search, but somehow didn't find that.

I've asked the group admin why they are pushing this press.

I did a bit more poking around about the company's principal. She's put out a handful of anthologies under the publisher name J.E. Feldman FWG. Most of the books are under 200 pages and have almost no reviews. She publishes something new at least once a month, so she's nothing if not prolific.
 

mrsmig

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Okay, well, that explains a LOT, then!

JE Feldman (Jade Feldman) is the admin of FWG (which stands for the Fantasy Writers Group).

Is FWG the group that you referenced in your first post? (You didn't name them or link to their tweets.)
 

RolandWrites

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I wanted to pop over because I've been noticing this press on Facebook and Twitter. I have a lot of author clients I edit for, and this press is asking authors privately to like their facebook page and to submit their books to the press. So there's an update.

Also, they've added a contracts section to their submission page, so here's a link to that: https://dragonsoulpress.com/contracts/

I'm not the best, most well-versed person to talk to about contracts, so someone other than me can break down how good/bad the terms on their three different contracts are.
 

Harlequin

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I asked about contracts, and they said the contract details were coming, so good to see.

However, Jade also said that big 5 publishers did not routinely list all their staff and therefore they didn't have to either.


So, I've only ever signed short story contracts, but those contracts look weird to me for a variety of reasons. They're only summaries, though, I guess. "Manuscripts" contract can't possibly be a technical term, can it?
 
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mrsmig

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Jade forgets that the big 5 publishers are well-established, multi-million dollar companies with nothing to prove. She's a small publisher with everything to prove. Not posting her staff's qualifications is just foolish - unless, of course, they have no qualifications.
 

Harlequin

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Heh. I thought about saying something like that (and also, you CAN look up Tor editors, but w/e) but tbh nobody else on the thread was bothered. They were all keen to submit. Not much to do about it unfortunately.
 

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Yep - invoke Filigree's Rule and step away.
 

RolandWrites

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Right, it's concerning if you can't find out about the qualifications of your publisher and their editing, marketing or cover art people, and it's especially concerning if they aren't willing to talk openly about those things. It makes it feel like what are they hiding by refusing to give qualifications. That's how I would feel as an author who might want to pitch to them. And I wouldn't personally ever sign a contract that doesn't list clear terms as to when my rights revert back to me.
 

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Hi Morgan, and welcome to AW.

The way this publisher does business is not even remotely the way publishing works. Good on you for not falling for it.
 

Morgan Skanderbeg

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Right, it's concerning if you can't find out about the qualifications of your publisher and their editing, marketing or cover art people, and it's especially concerning if they aren't willing to talk openly about those things. It makes it feel like what are they hiding by refusing to give qualifications. That's how I would feel as an author who might want to pitch to them. And I wouldn't personally ever sign a contract that doesn't list clear terms as to when my rights revert back to me.

Hi. Sorry to be late to the party here, but I first had an encounter with Dragon Soul Press a few weeks ago, did a Google search, and this thread came up. Luckily, I am already a member, but had no posts, so this is my first post! I guess I've been a lurker before now!

Anyway, so basically my story is that I was contacted by Jade Feldman, initially as a harmless Facebook friend request, then she added me to a group called Dragon Soul Press anthologies, which I assume is because I am in an anthology group and I said I was looking for some more anthologies to join. After I said I might consider one anthology but I wasn't sure, Jade then offered to go straight ahead and publish my book. I assume she got that from somewhere else. I've lost track of who I've told what to, but I do have a book which has been finished, but I am not yet happy with it, still revising it, editing it, and so forth. I have had publishers who have shown interest in it, but I haven't signed any contracts. I'm not actively pursuing publishers so much as I am kind of feeling them out. Jade didn't offer to publish my book exactly so much as she wanted me to submit my entire manuscript without a contract. I was like no, no, no, and this was a major red flag for me. The website doesn't have any information of any note, no authors, nothing to even indicate that they actually publish novels at all. All Jade would say was "we are a traditional publisher". So what do you offer? So she asked me to email her, so I did, and I asked her to give me some details. What book stores are you affiliated with? What is your distribution network like? How many copies would be pre-printed? What are your sales projections? I sent her a plot outline, and asked if she could sell that, and how much she thought she could sell it for.

No answer at all, which I thought was rude since she asked me to email her. I thought maybe she hadn't got it, so I emailed it a second time a day later. Nothing. I wondered if perhaps it went to spam or junk or something, as I use hotmail, so I told her what my email address was and sent it to her a third time. Nothing. So I sent a message on the forum to say "I emailed you" and sent it a fourth time. Still nothing. So at this point I am getting a bit annoyed, and then she writes on the forum a whinge about people who send her emails that don't follow the submissions process. Well, I wasn't submitting anything. This was asking her to give me details as to why I'd want to consider her publishing house. She didn't respond in the forum either. It was like it was a black hole.

She responded to other things, maybe 50 comments about random stupid things, but still nothing to do with this. I thought okay maybe she wants to wait to make a proper response. Maybe she's busier than she looks. Maybe she wants to get it right.

Then, two weeks after I sent the first email, I check and she has unfriended me. My thought is "how immature". So I decided that it is not a real publisher, because a real publisher wouldn't do that, so I wrote to her, in the group (in a sub-thread that we were the only ones participating in) to say that I was no longer interested in the anthology or in publishing my book.

Curiously, in spite of not seeing me say "I emailed you", she did see me say that I was no longer interested. It was in the same thread.

She wrote back saying that it had only been a day, and that I should give her a break. I'm sorry but 2nd of October was 2 weeks ago, wasn't it? She claimed that we had never been friends. Well, not in real life, but certainly on Facebook! Then she claimed that I had submitted to her.

In email she said that she was rejecting me. LOLOL. Rejecting what? I hadn't submitted anything! She said that I had a bad attitude. She said that my work was good and maybe with some improvement it could be published, but I needed to fix my attitude. So she hasn't seen my work, so that's just a guess, and what attitude? Asking a publisher for more details about themselves? I think that's pretty normal! Other publishers answer. Why doesn't she? Bigger publishers usually have it clearly visible on their website!

I didn't know if they were a vanity press, but I know that they aren't legitimate, and they lie like crazy. I mean, major red flags when they refuse to answer for two weeks a question as to who they are, and when they do answer, they don't answer! She still hasn't told me! She sent me an email saying I had been rejected for a submission I didn't make!

Can we like put up a warning for people not to get sucked into this? According to their Facebook page, they've sucked in a few people already.

I wasn't particularly close to getting sucked in, but if situations were different I might have.

I think we need to warn people.
 

Morgan Skanderbeg

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Hi Morgan, and welcome to AW.

The way this publisher does business is not even remotely the way publishing works. Good on you for not falling for it.

Thank you! I figured that out myself but thought I was being unfair! LOL. I thought oh no I've just been overly harsh and we've had a personality clash. You guys made me feel better! Sorry to post twice but I didn't think I worded it well the first time. I hope that's okay.
 

Morgan Skanderbeg

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Holy crap, and how. Sounds like you dodged the bullet here.

So is there a way to warn people? Like a list we can put them on? There's other people that reportedly have signed contracts with them. While their anthologies seem harmless, I'd be worried if someone were to try to submit a manuscript to them. Do you think they'd steal it for themselves? I didn't know what they were going to do with it.
 

Harlequin

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There's nothing much you can do re the Fantasy Writers group. She's the admin, she owns the group, and she deletes comments and threads which have even a whiff of criticism about her "press".

They're supposedly "acquiring authors" but I have not a clue what is going on with the material she has signed. :Shrug: I don't think she will steal anything as such, but I would imagine anything she publishes, will not do very well.
 
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Morgan Skanderbeg

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There's nothing much you can do re the Fantasy Writers group. She's the admin, she owns the group, and she deletes comments and threads which have even a whiff of criticism about her "press".

They're supposedly "acquiring authors" but I have not a clue what is going on with the material she has signed. :Shrug: I don't think she will steal anything as such, but I would imagine anything she publishes, will not do very well.

Curiously, she didn't delete my messages. She just ignored them. But I wasn't openly criticising them - I was just questioning them. It just seemed so strange.

Anyway, thanks again to this forum, which was the only major Google hit talking about it. I guess she's still small-time so no need yet to compare her to Author House or Austin Macauley.