New Dawn Publishers Ltd

[Old Hack]

I've been asked if New Dawn Publishers Ltd is a good press to submit to.

From their website:

New Dawn Publishers Ltd is a new fiction publishing house, one which focuses on giving student and graduate authors the opportunity they deserve.

Here at New Dawn Publishers, we don't really care whether your work is solicited by a literary agent or not. Instead, we only accept submissions from those who have the qualifications, or those working towards acquiring them. As the only publisher in the UK to implement such a policy, we believe that the investment of time and effort to further one's self and improve the standard of one's work deserves to be rewarded.

What I see is a publisher which gives no information about their experiences or successes in publishing; a website focussed almost entirely on attracting writers to submit, with very little effort put into selling the books they publish, and a competition which is going to publish a stack of anthologies with only one writer ever getting paid for their work--and then, even if they win the entire competition, the prize money is only £200.

I wouldn't even consider them (and yes, I have an MA in creative writing so I am "qualified"). What does everyone else think?

 

[Scribhneoir]

Well, the BEST & BRIGHTEST competition will be open to entries until the deadline of Friday 13th May 2012. After judging all of the entries on a regional basis, anthologies of the regional shortlists will be compiled and published by the 1st of June

Doesn't look like they're putting much effort into this dubious contest, either, taking a whole . . . <checks calendar> . . . 18 days to not only judge all entries, but publish the shortlist, too.

I vote "run away."

 

[Terie]

Ah. The old pretension of confusing academic qualifications with actual talent and skill. It's bad enough in the business/corporate world. Now someone wants to impose it on the arts, too?

One can have one without the other.

The plain fact is that most people can't write a publishable novel or short story. This is true of most students and graduates, too.

What's also true is that plenty of people without academic qualifications CAN write publishable novels and short stories.

(Full disclosure: I have a BA and a post-grad certificate, which means that, like Old Hack, I'm 'qualified'. So this isn't me grousing about personally being excluded.)

 

[frimble3]

Yeah, but I'll bet there's a lot of graduates of writing programs who thought it would give them a leg-up in getting their work published. Now, they're sitting back, disappointed that it wasn't a quick ticket to the world of publication, and they're the market for this outfit, that promises to value their qualifications.
Another outfit that preys on people's dreams? Only this time, they know the potential customers have money, 'cause they could pay for the courses.

 

[aliceshortcake]

That's a spectacularly ugly website. New Dawn owes me £200 for retinal damage.

 

[James D. Macdonald]

After all, Creative Writing degrees have been offered at several institutions across the UK for so long now, but when it comes down to it, the wider publishing industry still seems to percieve these qualifications to be barely worth the paper that the award certificates are printed on.

That's because ... they aren't. The slushpiles of New York (and presumably London) are awash with unreadable novels from folks with creative writing degrees. There is one, and only one, qualification out there: The ability to write an entertaining story. That's a qualification that no academic institution can grant.


Question for Old Hack: Is percieve the British spelling of perceive?

 

[Stacia Kane]

That's because ... they aren't. The slushpiles of New York (and presumably London) are awash with unreadable novels from folks with creative writing degrees. There is one, and only one, qualification out there: The ability to write an entertaining story. That's a qualification that no academic institution can grant.

QFT.

 

[shaldna]

As someone with a degree in Literature and studying for an MA in creative writing - I wouldn't touch them with a bargepole

 

[priceless1]

Why do I develop an eye twitch when I see any publisher talk about giving "authors the chance they deserve"?

 

[Terie]

Question for Old Hack: Is percieve the British spelling of perceive?

I'm not Old Hack, but I can answer: No, it's not.

 

[LillyPu]

Most MFA programs also are associated with putting out a literary journal. Although the course is not a requirement, many students take their turn working with submissions. Reality sets in when the student finds out that most of the stories in the journals are solicited rather than lifted from the slushpile. And whenever a story by an unknown writer is selected from the slushpile, it's usually the cream of the crop. An hour or two (of these classes) is often devoted to the writers' very slim chance of ever getting published, the harsh realities, etc. Having said that, a degree does not make one exempt from having stars in their eyes and being duped, signing with less than desirable presses, or failing to detect a scam.

 

[aliceshortcake]

The Mighty Google tells me that the director of New Dawn Publishers is Mr Sundeep Singh Parhar, who runs the company from his home in Slough, Berkshire. He has a BA in English and Creative Writing from the University of North London.

There's some biographical info about Mr Parhar here: http://www.younoodle.com/people/sundeep_singh_parhar

The profile was posted in 2009, at which time Mr Parhar was

...currently looking to get first novel published to get start-up capital for first company, 'Icycle'.

I was unable to find anything about either 'Icycle' or his first novel, Turbulence.

More info about NDP here:

:
Publishes: Fiction;
Areas include: Adventure; Crime; Drama; Fantasy; Horror; Humour; Literature; Mystery; Romance; Sci-Fi; Short Stories; Suspense; Thrillers;
Markets: Adult; Family; YouthSubmissions policy:
Submissions:Actively seeking new material. This publisher welcomes unsolicited MSS. Both queries and submissions by email are accepted. Fees:
Fees: This publisher charges authors a fee in some circumstances.
Royalties:15>20% monthly + performance-based bonusesYear founded

http://www.firstwriter.com/publishers/details.cgi?RecordNumber=1468

I'm sure we're all dying to find out in which circumstances authors are charged a fee. Perhaps Mr Parhar will pop in to enlighten us.

 

[Richard White]

Why do I develop an eye twitch when I see any publisher talk about giving "authors the chance they deserve"?

I was just getting ready to make the same comment.

Maybe it's the "Publish America Syndrome" that I automatically get the twitches around, but that term usually means, "give people's books a chance to make ME money rather than the authors."

 

[NicoleJLeBoeuf]

Why do I develop an eye twitch when I see any publisher talk about giving "authors the chance they deserve"?

Can't speak for your eyes, but mine develop twitches because the statement is based on a tangle of faulty unstated premises. The speaker either doesn't know much about the publishing industry -- or hopes that their audience doesn't.

 

[Momento Mori]

New Dawn Publishers Limited:
Have you ever taken a course in Creative Writing, or are you enrolled on one right now?

Yes. I have an MA in Creative Writing and graduated top of my class with a Distinction.

New Dawn Publishers Limited:
Have you ever thought of taking it up as a career?

You mean, like, getting paid for my writing? Because I don't see anything on your website to suggest you actually pay up front.

New Dawn Publishers Limited:
Or are you just looking to make some additional income to pay off your student debts, by getting a particularly creative well-received piece of coursework into print?

Theres's something really scummy about playing on people's fears of student debt and it's particularly disgusting that New Dawn are suggesting that by publishing you can pay all of it off.

New Dawn Publishers Limited:
As any aspiring professional author will soon find out, getting on the career ladder is no walk in the park. This isn't helped by the two 'default' submissions policies employed by all other fiction publishers in the UK- either the ultra-exclusionist, risk-averse approach of only accepting manuscripts solicited by a literary agent, or the 'come-on-down' approach of accepting unsolicited manuscripts from anyone who can be bothered to send it. But why should this be the case?

Erm ... because it works? Literary agents work as a filter for publishers so that they know work has been assessed once for quality and saleability.

New Dawn Publishers Limited:
Creative Writing degrees have been offered in institutions across the U.K for so many decades- why does the publishing industry still decry these qualifications to be all but worthless?

The first creative writing degree in the UK was set up in the 1970s at East Anglia University and it's widely acknowledged to have produced some fine writers (including Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro and Zadie Smith). However, the act of completing a MA in Creative Writing does not by itself mean that you've produced a publishable manuscript.

Of the 14 people in my graduating year, 5 people got agents and so far, only 2 have got book deals.

The MA in Creative Writing can be a useful qualification to cite in a query letter, but it doesn't mean your manuscript is any damn good. Added to this is the fact that not all Creative Writing courses in the UK focus on novel writing or indeed require you to complete a full novel. Some require you to produce short stories, poetry and prose extracts in order to pass - all good skills, but the ability to write a good poem doesn't mean you've got a good novel.

New Dawn Publishers Limited:
Here at New Dawn Publishers, we're looking to change the way things work in the world of fiction publishing, trailblazing towards a better, fairer system

The system's already perfectly fair. If you've got a good book, you can get a publishing deal.

New Dawn Publishers Limited:
In our book, if you have the qualifications in, or relating to the field of Creative Writing, or you're currently working towards getting them, that's enough.

No it isn't.

New Dawn Publishers Limited:
Your work doesn't have to be solicited by an agent; in fact, we'd much rather it wasn't, because in our opinion, both publishers and authors lose more royalties that way.

And this load of twaddle right here is proof positive that New Dawn Publishers have no fricking clue what publishing really is.

How does the payment of royalties through an agent cost a publisher more money? The royalty payment is whatever is set out in the contract and the agent deducts their commission before paying it on to the author. The publisher doesn't pay the agent more money.

Also, note that New Dawn only talks about royalties. This is because they're not paying you an advance and as such, have no cash tied up in advance in your book which would incentivise them to make it a success.

New Dawn Publishers Limited:
But because we don't just accept submissions from anyone, we can give each and every submission the time and due consideration it deserves before making the crucial decision whether or not to take it on.

And how do you prove that the people submitting to you have the Creative Writing qualifications you demand? Do you demand to see enrollment letters or graduate certificates?

I suggest to you, with respect, that this is a load of old bollocks.

I've seen publishers like this before. Usually they target Creative Writing course directors who forward on details of their competition to students in case it's of interest. I used to get copied in on these emails for my alma mater course, but got lopped off when I started pointing out to students what a load of crap they were.

MM

 

[shaldna]

They seems to only have two books in print - both very differnt genres. And both with pretty damn awful covers.

 

[Perks]

Ah. The old pretension of confusing academic qualifications with actual talent and skill. It's bad enough in the business/corporate world. Now someone wants to impose it on the arts, too?

One can have one without the other.

I'm doomed.

 

[aliceshortcake]

NDP will accept all types of fiction except poetry. I wonder if Mr Parhar has any plans to publish his own Turbulence, which according to his younoodle.com profile was the first book in a series of five?

It would be nice to know under which circumstances authors are charged a fee. And what exactly does this mean?

Royalties:15>20% monthly + performance-based bonuses

 

[James D. Macdonald]

Here are the steps that I see:

1) Fellow gets a degree in Creative Writing.

2) Discovers that no one wants his novel anyway.

3) Decides publishing is broken; founds new publisher.

We've seen this story (or a variation on it) a thousand times before, and never with a happy ending. I suggest moving on.

 

[Old Hack]

There's a variation on the story which is just as Uncle Jim has outlined above, only it misses off part (1). It's just as sad, and just as likely to end badly.

 

[James D. Macdonald]

Yeah, there are all kinds of variations on Step 1.

Sometimes it's 1) Fellow is successful business executive. Sometimes it's 1) Fellow has a Theory of What Makes the Perfect Compelling Novel. Sometimes it's 1) All of the Fellow's Chums tell him that he's Very Creative.

If step 2, as above, is followed by step 3, as above, the results are generally unhappy.

 

[newdawnpublisher]

Hi everyone. I am Sundeep Parhar, MD of New Dawn Publishers, and after finding out about this thread I decided to come and clear a few things up.

I can assure people that, while our website may at first glance appear to be geared towards attracting authors rather than readers, we do put all the effort we can into getting our authors' books out there in the marketplace. With the competition we're running, every author we publish, at least 100 writers in all, will all be paid for their work- through royalties rather than with advance payments, but no-one offers advance payments when publishing anthologies. And given that major retailers have already expressed interest in stocking the competition's anthologies, those potential royalty payments shouldn't be scoffed at.

Also worth mentioning is that I haven't been a member of firstwriter.com for at least a year, and the publishers' profile cited is now out of date. We no longer charge fees in any circumstances- and to clarify the term 'performance-based bonuses', it refers to our policy of increasing the royalties we pay our authors once a specified number of copies have been sold.

For the competition, it is also worth mentioning that entries are being judged continuously even now. The cover designs of the anthologies themselves has already been carried out, advertising and marketing will begin months beforehand, and all that we will actually need to do in the eighteen days after we stop taking entries (or probably a fortnight, if we take into account how long postal entries will take to get to us) is just the printing and distribution of the anthologies.

Something else from which several people seem to have derived entirely the wrong impression, and perhaps understandably so, was our prior statement that-

...if you have the qualifications in, or relating to the field of Creative Writing, or you're currently working towards getting them, that's enough.

I acknowledge that this was somewhat misleading, and the statement has now been changed to clarify matters. Of course, not every person who takes a creative writing degree will be capable of writing a good novel, and we don't want anyone to get the impression that we will publish anyone who sends their work to us so long as they're a student or a graduate. Every author who submits their work to us will 'get the chance they deserve', but they have to deserve that chance to get it. It's also worth bearing in mind that not every person who has a literary agent will have a publishable book either. Terie, I agree that you don't have to have qualifications to have talent, but talent undoubtedly makes it easier to obtain qualifications; and as for the other part, isn't improving your skills supposed to be what higher education is all about?

Momento Mori- I sincerely apologise if you were angered or frustrated by our website, and you brought a number of points forward which needed to be answered. We didn't intend to give the impression that publishing will write off all your student debts (especially not in the U.K nowadays, after the tuition fee hike), but surely the added income would help towards it? The statement-

'...both publishers and authors lose more royalties that way'

-was poorly worded, and written with the idealistic view that, with the royalties divided between two parties, we would have a moral obligation to pay the author higher royalties to compensate for this. Of course, you'd be hard-pressed to find any for-profit publisher that would think that way, that would give the author's lower effective royalties a second thought; but I'd very much like to count our publishing house as one of the few ones that would.

As you can see, we have only found two novels worthy of putting into print so far. As such, with our short list of titles, we don't need the added incentive of having cash tied up in a novel to do all we can to make it a success. Many people have already drawn attention to the fact that I have already completed a novel myself, and that that novel, Turbulence, is still unpublished. If I wanted to, I could have published it myself, through my own publishing house- but New Dawn Publishers is not a glorified self-publisher, or a vanity publisher. We're not saying that publishing is broken, or that the system doesn't work; we're just saying that another system, our system, has a chance of working as well.

 

[veinglory]

Welcome to the forums and thanks for jumping in -- I would take issue with your notion that all anthologies are paid on a royalties-only model (if I interpret you correctly). Just in the last year I have received advance+royalties, royalties only and flat fee only by anthology editors/publishers (depending on who was running the show). You can normally find examples of all three on market listings like Duotrope.

 

[Momento Mori]

Hi, Sundeep, and welcome to AW.

newdawnpublisher:
With the competition we're running, every author we publish, at least 100 writers in all, will all be paid for their work- through royalties rather than with advance payments, but no-one offers advance payments when publishing anthologies.

Sorry but it isn't true that "no one" pays advances for publishing anthologies. Commercial publishers like Harper Collins, Penguin, Macmillan and so on do pay an advance for the story and royalties on the same. I'm reading a steampunk anthology put out by Walker Books and know the authors got paid for their stories up front.

In any event, there's an active short story market out there that pays authors for stories, will have clear reversion rights so the author can resell and in some cases, count as a professional credit for organisations like the MWA. For short story writers, it's usually better to go down that route that submitting to a new publisher with little or no track record in selling anthologies or other books.

newdawnpublisher:
And given that major retailers have already expressed interest in stocking the competition's anthologies, those potential royalty payments shouldn't be scoffed at.

Cool. Which retailers? How close are you to putting a distribution deal in place? What's your first print run going to look like to achieve that distribution deal? What sort of discount are they asking for? What kind of returns policy? How will that affect the cover price?

newdawnpublisher:
We no longer charge fees in any circumstances- and to clarify the term 'performance-based bonuses', it refers to our policy of increasing the royalties we pay our authors once a specified number of copies have been sold.

That's good to know that you're not charging fees.

Re royalties, increased royalties shouldn't be dependent on sales - particularly if you can't substantially demonstrate that those sales figures have been previously achieved by your company. You're better off going for one, high, flat royalty rate. If you're doing print books (and I think that's personally a bad idea because of the need for capital intensive print runs and the difficulty of getting on shelf distribution), then I'd want at least 50% on the cover price as the starting royalty and even then I'd want to know your track record first.

newdawnpublisher:
It's also worth bearing in mind that not every person who has a literary agent will have a publishable book either. Terie, I agree that you don't have to have qualifications to have talent, but talent undoubtedly makes it easier to obtain qualifications; and as for the other part, isn't improving your skills supposed to be what higher education is all about?

Actually, if you have a reputable agent then you should have a publishable book because that's what reputable agents are interested in - publishable books, which they think they can sell.

I don't deny that an agent may not be able to sell every book by every author they take on - sometimes because a publisher's marketing department might veto it, sometimes because the accountants might not believe it'll sell enough in the market - but good agents want a long term relationship with an author and work with them to produce more good manuscripts in the belief that one will sell.

newdawnpublisher:
Momento Mori- I sincerely apologise if you were angered or frustrated by our website, and you brought a number of points forward which needed to be answered.

I'm neither angry nor frustrated by your website so there's no need to apologise.

I am frustrated with seeing new publishers spring up that spout the same nonsense about the publishing industry and offer some kind of magical route to publication when they don't seem to have an established track record of delivery to back up the pitch.

newdawnpublisher:
We didn't intend to give the impression that publishing will write off all your student debts (especially not in the U.K nowadays, after the tuition fee hike), but surely the added income would help towards it?

Well that all depends on whether authors actually make any money from publishing through your company and if so, how much.

I know a few people who've gone through royalty only publishers such as yours and they've been lucky to make more than 100 quid in royalty payments and that was spread over the course of a year. Bearing in mind the amount of time and effort that goes into writing a book, it's a very poor return and for one friend of mine, what they made was eaten up in the money they spent in promoting their book.

newdawnpublisher:
The statement-
Quote:
'...both publishers and authors lose more royalties that way'
-was poorly worded, and written with the idealistic view that, with the royalties divided between two parties, we would have a moral obligation to pay the author higher royalties to compensate for this. Of course, you'd be hard-pressed to find any for-profit publisher that would think that way, that would give the author's lower effective royalties a second thought; but I'd very much like to count our publishing house as one of the few ones that would.

My issue with this is that it's completely backward for two reasons:

1. No reputable agent is going to want to submit to you precisely because of the fact that you're not paying an advance.

2. Publishers aren't paying the author a lower royalty by dealing with an agent. They're paying the exact same royalty that they'd otherwise be paying to the author. It's the author who's paying the agent out of that royalty as the agent's commission for making the sale.

By trying to distinguish yourself as some kind of "moral obligation" is absolute rubbish and the reason why you're one of the few publishers who think differently is because you clearly have very little experience or understanding of how royalties (or agents) actually work.

newdawnpublisher:
We're not saying that publishing is broken, or that the system doesn't work; we're just saying that another system, our system, has a chance of working as well.

OK, so what's your basis for thinking that? What's your experience to back up your belief that your company can work?

MM

 

[Unimportant]

With the competition we're running, every author we publish, at least 100 writers in all, will all be paid for their work- through royalties rather than with advance payments, but no-one offers advance payments when publishing anthologies.

As veinglory and Memento have said, this is completely wrong. I have sold stories to at least half a dozen different anthologies over the last few years, and every time the publisher has paid me either a flat fee or an advance plus royalties. And these are small presses, not Harper Collins.

So publishers, large and small, do pay authors for their stories in anthologies. Yes, I have seen some small presses who offer royalties only, but I don't submit to them. I reckon a lot of authors feel the same way I do -- which may explain why you're not getting many publishable submissions.