A Few More Lies For the Ignorant (Part One)
So, having already spoken on the Harlequin mess, wasn’t I surprised to find this article over at Self-Publishing Review with a whole lot of nonsense for the price of zero (the post is a guest post, so I don’t know how well it reflects what the owners of the site wish to portray, since I am not a regular reader). I’m not going to do much to touch the author’s discussion of science publishing. Not only do we not know who the author is (it just says “guest post” and unless I missed something there is no author named), but he contradicts himself (or herself) in the post by pointing to links where people have done exactly what he/she has said isn’t happening (after all, Michio Kaku, one of the leading scientists in the world right now, has publicly denounced self-published science authors for producing nonsense). Where the author really falls off his or her rocker, is in regards to the backlash from Harlequin’s decision to create a vanity press. S/he goes through the four main complaints against Harlequin and says a lot of things that would sound like nonsense to anyone with a brain (or at least a brain that is flipped to the “on” position). First point: They are cashing in on their slush pile. The questions implicit in this is that the slush pile is of inherently less value than the accepted pile. There are plenty of reasons to believe this isn’t the case. Most novels have been in dozens of slush piles before they’ve been accepted. Does being in a slush pile mean a novel is inherently bad? Then nothing but Sarah Palin’s book would exist – hardly a ringing endorsement of editorial quality control over cynical marketing exploitation. First off, there are loads of reasons why book queries get rejected (too many for me to list them here, but you can look that up on your own). Some big reasons are: the book wasn’t right for the publisher (try someone else), the query was crap (get better at it), or the book was crap (write another one and try again). These aren’t universal, but they are common reasons, and you can’t assume that a publisher is wrong. Maybe your book really does suck, or maybe it just isn’t a good fit. Second, the fundamental problem with this point is that the slush pile isn’t the rejected pile. It’s the “to be read” pile. It is made up of manuscripts that haven’t yet been picked up by the editor and viewed. Being in the slush pile means you are just one of many trying to get published by a particular publisher. That’s it. Third, this is exactly what Harlequin is doing: cashing in on their slush pile. Instead of publishing that book legitimately, they want to recommend to authors they reject from their slush piles to head on over to their vanity press and pay Harlequin for the privilege of publication. They aren’t recommending the authors go to Lulu, which doesn’t require you to pay anything up front for a basic package. They are recommending authors that aren’t “good enough” for Harlequin’s traditional line spend thousands to get published by their vanity press line, with the fake hope that they might get snatched up by regular-Harlequin in the future if it turns out alright. If you don’t see something wrong with this, then maybe there’s something wrong with you. Second point: They’re exploiting naïve authors. Um, pardon me, but book publishers are expert at exploiting naïve authors. That’s why royalties tilt so harshly to publishers, why rights are exploited, why contracts are mind-numbing. Do you really think most publishers sit down with an author and works out a custom deal while patiently explaining the ins and outs, creating author-friendly options to ensure goodwill, and conceding contractual advantages willingly? How naïve do they think we are? Actually, royalties tilt heavily towards the publisher because the publisher puts a shitload of money into publishing an author’s book. See here for the breakdown for hardcover books. Royalty rates aren’t ideal, but books also are no longer the dominant mode of consumption these days, and publishers are forced by consumers to produce a lot of books in order to satiate the wandering tastes of consumers. But trying to say that authors get shafted by book publishers is hardly true of all publishers. If anything, booksellers are the ones getting shafted, since they often have to offer massive discounts just to sell the books at all, cutting into the large chunk they generally would keep at the end of the day. On the other side of things: this is why most authors recommend you get an agent. Agents are in the business to make you (the author) more money, because the more money you make, the more money they make. This is called mutual interest. Now, getting to the part about taking advantage of naive authors: publishers are hardly taking advantage. They don’t lie about anything (well, some of them have, but this is hardly normal of the business). They tell you straight up that you will be paid for your book (they don’t promise a particular rate at all) and that your book will be in bookstores. They hand you a contract that states exactly what you’re getting and some of them even recommend getting an agent. Vanity presses and a lot of self-publishing houses do the exact opposite. They paint a pretty picture of their print-model business so that unsuspecting authors will flock in and fork out their hard-earned dollars to print a book that a) will not be distributed in bookstores (though many of them say it will); and b) will likely not sell many copies or make you famous (another thing that many of them say is a good possibility). Lulu is one of the few honest self-publishing firms; they have gone on record to say that they want to sell few copies of millions of