Perils and Pitfalls of Publishing - Whom Can The Beginning Author Trust? Part I Publishers
Keep These Warning Signs in Mind If the Book Publisher:
Charges a fee to read your manuscript. You are providing the product for them to sell. Why should you have to pay to see if they are interested in your work?
Offers subsidy contracts (you pay them to have your book published),when they promote themselves as commercial publishers. Are POD (publish-on-demand) publishers, such as authorshouse, IUniverse, and Xlibris, legitimate publishers? Yes as long as the author realizes the costs and the limitations of POD publishing. Publish On Demand books are rarely stocked in bookstores.
Bait and Switch --There are some publishers who hide behind the mask of respectability and call themselves 'traditional' when in fact they are a vanity press. How can you tell? Look at their websites, if the focus is on recruiting writers rather than promoting the books they publish, it's a huge red flag.
Other publishers 'will accept' your manuscript and then come back a few weeks later and say that their list for the next season is full but they would dearly love to publish your book. You just need to share the risk with them by giving them some money.
Rebates --Or the publisher says that any fees you pay them will be completely refunded once your book reaches a certain sales level, usually in the thousands.
A twist on rebates is that the publisher will match your monetary contribution in marketing efforts for your title. Publishers are supposed to market their own titles. The match most likely will not be in advertising dollars, review copies sent, or book tour expenses but the efforts of the in house staff. Efforts that probably won't be focused specifically on your title.
Has any kind of financial or referral fee arrangement with editing services. Or the publisher pushes authors to engage specific editing services, or gives the author's name to the editing service.
Asks the author to provide a list of people the book can be marketed to. This indicates they are not willing to spend the time or money necessary to promote the book to bookstores.
Some publishers offer contracts that are unfair. They obtain rights that should remain with the author of the work, such as motion picture rights, or serialization rights with magazines. If the publisher can't effectively sell the rights, the author should retain them.
Should you consider a new publishing company?
New publishing companies spring up all the time. There is nothing wrong about going with a new press and there can be advantages. The author gets more attention because there are fewer authors. The titles get more focus and marketing because the company is eager to be successful. The downside is that new presses sometimes are challenged to get their titles in bookstores. And as with any new business entity there is a higher failure rate with a new press than with an established publisher. New presses in their eagerness to get going can overextend their resources and contract more titles than they can manage. If the company fails, your royalties may not ever get paid, and your title may be tied up in the courts for a number of years. The rights to publish are considered an asset of the publishing company. Unless your contract states in the case of insolvency the rights to your title are returned to you, a court could decide they belong to the creditors of the bankrupt company.
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About The Authors
Brian Hill and Dee Power have written several nonfiction books including 58 Ways to Find Money for Your Business, "Business Plan Basics", "Inside Secrets to Venture Capital" and "Attracting Capital From Angels," John Wiley & Sons. Reach them through The Capital Connection
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