No to TPP
I would caution anyone considering signing with TouchPoint Press to think long and hard before joining this bunch. They did not communicate with me, they did little if any promotion of my book and they were rude and threatening when I voiced concern over their inactivity and shady practices. I am surprised they have managed to continue this long in that they work in the gray area between legal and illegal business practices. They prey upon novice writers that want desperately to be published and use and abuse them because they are afraid to speak up or don't understand what is happening! My recommendation would be to stay away from TouchPoint Press, Sheri Williams Ables or anyone that recommends them to you!
TouchPoint engages in a practice called
Manuscript Hoarding.
Manuscript Hoarding is a legal way for a publishing house to acquire manuscripts first and then decide whether it wants to publish them. The practice is highly unethical but legal, and Sheri Williams at TouchPoint practices it. Here’s what the practice looked like when it happened to me:
I submitted a query to TouchPoint. Within hours, they asked for a full manuscript. Less than two weeks later, Touchpoint offered me a contract for the manuscript and another manuscript in the series (without reading the second manuscript). Sheri Williams personally put pressure on me to sign the contract because she was “ready to start rolling.” I signed, very happy at the time.
I never received a contract for the second book, but the contract for the first book had a clause that specified TouchPoint had right of first refusal on any manuscript that had similar themes, plot, characters, or settings, as did the second book in the series.
Granted, this clause is standard in many publishing contracts and benefits a writer because it lets a writer publish a book series without having to find a new publisher for each book in the series. The clause would not have been a problem had TouchPoint actually published the first manuscript. Instead, TouchPoint kept the first manuscript hostage for ONE AND A HALF YEARS, not publishing it and not allowing me to submit the second book in the series to another publisher because of the clause.
Despite many emails to several TouchPoint employees, I did not hear anything from the company for almost eight months after I sigthe contract. Not one word. Really, I thought they had all died and nobody had found them yet. Eventually, I wrote a blast of emails to everyone at TouchPoint, and someone wrote back to say she had nothing to report. I wrote back to the person. Crickets. Several more months of silence ensued. More emails. More silence. No galleys. No cover. No explanations.
One month before the date on the contract legally mandated that TouchPoint release the book (and after several more blasts of emails), someone wrote that my book was scheduled for released on the following month and that galleys and cover would be forthcoming. A few days passed. I wrote back asking about the galleys and the cover. I got an auto-respond from the person who had sent the email earlier saying that she had stepped down and to contact Sheri Williams the publisher. I did but didn’t hear from Sheri Williams at all. I wrote again. And again. No answer. (BTW, the person who stepped down is still listed on the TouchPoint site as an employee as of this writing.)
When the contract due date came, and TouchPoint Press failed to produce a book, I sent TouchPoint a
reversal of rights request. This legal document reclaims my right to submit to other publishers based on a broken contract. Within hours, Sheri Williams who’d been M.I.A. for a 1.5 years wrote back saying that the company was a “little” behind schedule and that she had the galleys and covers ready to send to me and that they would publish the book in six months if I signed a contract extension.
I said no and insisted on getting back my rights. Quite frankly, I do not believe she had galleys or a cover. If you have galleys and cover, you don’t need six months to publish. Much of requiring a year and a half to produce galleys and a cover has to do with scheduling, not with actually doing the work.
Eventually, Sheri Williams signed the reversal of rights and offered to SELL TO ME the bit of work she claims an editor did on the manuscript at the rate of .01 per word. This practice is also highly unethical and frowned upon in the industry.
I got back my rights and immediately sent the manuscripts to another publisher that had expressed interested in them. I now have a contract with the new publisher for both books. I don’t know what issues the new publisher will present, but I can tell you:
Don’t sign on with TouchPoint or Sheri Williams (a.k.a, Sheri Ables). At best, everyone at TouchPoint is incompetent. At worst, their practices are shady. In all cases, their lack of communication is rude and unprofessional. And
TouchPoint doesn’t publish books it commits to publish.
