PSA: Who Pays Whom
Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 08:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rolanniNobody here lives under a rock, but in case you've been really, really busy having, oh, A Life, I'll just mention here that Harlequin Publishing (aka The Evil Empire) has hit on a scheme to make money from its slush pile, to wit:
It will start a vanity press arm, Harlequin Horizons by name, and! (here's the genuis) it will steer hopeful authors whose manuscripts Harlequin-not-Horizons are rejecting to the vanity press arm. Which will be happy to publish your book for you, as soon as your check to them for six grand clears the bank.
This is -- how to put it nicely? -- vile. Right up there with taking lollipops from three-year-olds. It preys upon hopes and dreams while deluding people -- and That's Just Wrong.
Harlequin has been Sternly Chastised by the Romance Writers of America, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Novelists, Inc, and Mystery Writers of America. At last report, Harlequin was Hurt and Dismayed by this reaction and has promised to rename the imprint -- which I see it has done -- DellArte Press. See? All better! Now, no one knows it's Harlequin behind the mirror.
Just so we're all on the same page, here's a glossary:
Vanity Publishing: You pay (a lot) for someone to publish your book for you. In Harlequin -- excuse me -- in DellArte Press' case, they also take a percentage of each sale -- sorta like reverse royalties. Never do this, no matter how much you want to see your name on a book cover.
Self-Publishing: You lay out and print your own book, either from a online service like Lulu, or the old-fashioned way of sending a printer the files and having them print and bind it for you. Or, perhaps you serialize on the web. You make all artistic and budgetary decisions. For some books, this is a perfectly valid choice and can be profitable for the author and beneficial to readers.
Small Press: Just what it says: a small publisher. Advances range from $0 to something more than that but still (probably) less than what a Big Press will pay. You take less risk than with self-publishing, enjoy a wider distribution, and close personal attention from your editor. NOTE: A legitimate small press does not ask the author for money to publish their book. They may not offer an advance upfront, but they will pay royalties. To the author. And they will bear production expenses.
Traditional Publishing: A third party publisher acquires your novel. They send you a check. When your book has earned out its advance (i.e. "advance against royalties"), you will begin to receive royalty checks from the publisher. This is the usual, normal way of things. See "traditional," above.
The phrase paying [one's] dues: is an analogy; it does not denote an Actual, Physical payment of money. The dues referred to are the time you spend honing your craft, getting rejected, and honing some more.
Warning signs: If your publisher hasn't asked you for money to publish, but they ask you for, oh, money to pay the artist, or the copy editor -- run away; it's a scam.
EDITED TO ADD: ...with thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
houseboatonstyx for mentioning this in comments... Your copyright belongs to you. If a publisher (or agent, or...anybody, actually) tries to gain control of your copyright (which is, alas, a common practice in academic publishing) run away. This is not how we do it over here in Commercial Fiction. Common practice: An author signs a contract with a publisher, granting the publisher the right to publish a particular work for X time. When that time expires, the rights return to you. There is no, not ever, any "signing over" of copyright.
If you find yourself in doubt about an offer to publish, reference Yog's Law.
Small print: The above refers to the publishing of fiction, which is the industry I understand. Academic or other esoteric publishing practices are not relevant to the above discussion.
That's all I got.
G'night.
It will start a vanity press arm, Harlequin Horizons by name, and! (here's the genuis) it will steer hopeful authors whose manuscripts Harlequin-not-Horizons are rejecting to the vanity press arm. Which will be happy to publish your book for you, as soon as your check to them for six grand clears the bank.
This is -- how to put it nicely? -- vile. Right up there with taking lollipops from three-year-olds. It preys upon hopes and dreams while deluding people -- and That's Just Wrong.
Harlequin has been Sternly Chastised by the Romance Writers of America, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Novelists, Inc, and Mystery Writers of America. At last report, Harlequin was Hurt and Dismayed by this reaction and has promised to rename the imprint -- which I see it has done -- DellArte Press. See? All better! Now, no one knows it's Harlequin behind the mirror.
Just so we're all on the same page, here's a glossary:
Vanity Publishing: You pay (a lot) for someone to publish your book for you. In Harlequin -- excuse me -- in DellArte Press' case, they also take a percentage of each sale -- sorta like reverse royalties. Never do this, no matter how much you want to see your name on a book cover.
Self-Publishing: You lay out and print your own book, either from a online service like Lulu, or the old-fashioned way of sending a printer the files and having them print and bind it for you. Or, perhaps you serialize on the web. You make all artistic and budgetary decisions. For some books, this is a perfectly valid choice and can be profitable for the author and beneficial to readers.
Small Press: Just what it says: a small publisher. Advances range from $0 to something more than that but still (probably) less than what a Big Press will pay. You take less risk than with self-publishing, enjoy a wider distribution, and close personal attention from your editor. NOTE: A legitimate small press does not ask the author for money to publish their book. They may not offer an advance upfront, but they will pay royalties. To the author. And they will bear production expenses.
Traditional Publishing: A third party publisher acquires your novel. They send you a check. When your book has earned out its advance (i.e. "advance against royalties"), you will begin to receive royalty checks from the publisher. This is the usual, normal way of things. See "traditional," above.
The phrase paying [one's] dues: is an analogy; it does not denote an Actual, Physical payment of money. The dues referred to are the time you spend honing your craft, getting rejected, and honing some more.
Warning signs: If your publisher hasn't asked you for money to publish, but they ask you for, oh, money to pay the artist, or the copy editor -- run away; it's a scam.
EDITED TO ADD: ...with thanks to
houseboatonstyx for mentioning this in comments... Your copyright belongs to you. If a publisher (or agent, or...anybody, actually) tries to gain control of your copyright (which is, alas, a common practice in academic publishing) run away. This is not how we do it over here in Commercial Fiction. Common practice: An author signs a contract with a publisher, granting the publisher the right to publish a particular work for X time. When that time expires, the rights return to you. There is no, not ever, any "signing over" of copyright.If you find yourself in doubt about an offer to publish, reference Yog's Law.
Small print: The above refers to the publishing of fiction, which is the industry I understand. Academic or other esoteric publishing practices are not relevant to the above discussion.
That's all I got.
G'night.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-11-25 02:47 am (UTC)Several years ago a man I knew through the community theatre group I was in published a novel. I was happy for him, and I did get a copy of the book. I was dismayed though, to see all of the typos that should have been caught with basic proofreading. It was at this point that I discovered he had used a vanity press, and apparently one of the things they didn't do was proofreading before a book was put out for sale. He worked his butt off to sell his book, doing signings everywhere he could, interviews, everything he could on his own, and I don't know if he ever made back whatever it was he paid the vanity press. From my pov, it seemed like that press didn't do anything to promote him. I felt bad for him and still do, because he had a pretty good story that could've been a really good story with a little editing, and if somebody had done some proofreading, there wouldn't have been a typo on the book jacket itself, or hopefully anywhere else.
To this day, every time hear "vanity press", I think about all that hard work he did, and pray he finally earned his money back, and maybe a little bit more. I don't think he ever published again. :(
no subject
Date: 2009-11-25 03:03 am (UTC)Some really surprising typos can slip through in conventional publishing. More than once I have stared in disbelief at an International Bestseller and screamed at the heavens:
"Didn't anyone proofread this damn book???"
no subject
Date: 2009-11-25 03:10 am (UTC)How do you sphell that?
Date: 2009-11-25 03:45 am (UTC)The problem with spell check is that it will tell you if a word is spelled wrong.
But what people fail to understand is that it doesn't care if you've used the wrong word.
Now people need spell check. They just have to remember to re-read everything to be sure they said what they thought they said.
Re: How do you sphell that?
Date: 2009-11-25 07:20 am (UTC)I get a fair number of students using weather instead of whether, and even a few using where instead of were.
And this is in tertiary education.
Re: How do you sphell that?
Date: 2009-11-25 01:46 pm (UTC)Mary
no subject
Date: 2009-11-25 01:15 pm (UTC)But yes, a number of them are obvious spellcheck demons. Real words, just not the *right* ones.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-25 11:07 am (UTC)I remember one of Anne McCaffrey's books ("Damia's Children", I think) where it had so many errors that I was very tempted to mark the whole thing up in red ink and send it to her. I actually emailed her first, and her comments about the publisher were scathing. Apparently, in spite of her sending them the corrected proofs on floppy disk (in those days publishers didn't take email!) they had printed out her corrections from the final proof and then got almost every one wrong in their typesetting, including inserting text instead of correcting it, adding more errors to her corrected text, deleting the erroneous text and then not inserting the corrected text, altering text which was supposed to be unchanged, etc. The result was unreadable in many places.
And that was with a high-profile full-time author and a professional publisher. At least with electronic submission these days one can hope that the text doesn't have to be re-typed, but I'm certain that some of the errors are still introduced after the author has seen the final proofs in many cases. I still see books with repeated lines or paragraphs or missing ones.
(And then there's the thing I really hate as a reader -- font size changes. In the days of lead typesetting it was necessary to avoid re-setting the entire page (or several pages), but these days it shouldn't be necessary. They may think that people won't notice a half-point change for a paragraph, but I not only notice but it takes me ages to spot what is wrong because it's subtle; it jars me out of reading mode so I then have to find the problem before I can continue.)
no subject
Date: 2009-11-25 01:12 pm (UTC)Vanity press
Date: 2009-11-25 05:20 am (UTC)Re: Vanity press
Date: 2009-11-25 11:07 am (UTC)Says on his webiste (http://www.matthewreilly.com/authorbio.html) that he self-published (pls chk ref above) Contest, thereby gambling with his own mon$y on his own terms -- and hit it big.
It happens. Publishing is so arcane and so many weird things happen that it's no wonder, really, that people who aren't in the business are sometimes Horribly Confused.
Re: Vanity press
Date: 2009-11-25 11:18 am (UTC)Still a good story, though, of how publishing houses can get it wrong (in terms of the marketability of a book) and self belief, perseverance, perspiration and sheer dumb luck can lead to Wonderful Things.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-25 03:18 am (UTC)A legit self-publishing service, however elaborate, at most will ask for a NON-EXCLUSIVE right to print whatever copies are ordered. A ratbastard vanity press may ask for constraints on your conrol of the copyright to this book and to your future books!
no subject
Date: 2009-11-25 11:15 am (UTC)Re Anne Mccaffrey
Date: 2009-11-25 02:10 pm (UTC)One letter makes just a *bit* of difference in the meaning, but wouldn't be caught by spell-check.
To add relevance to the Lee-Miller world, I started reading the Liaden Universe(TM) because of the forward by Anne Mccaffrey. Imagine, the book A.M. takes with her when she's in Hospital!
Sue H
Re: Re Anne Mccaffrey
Date: 2009-11-25 06:42 pm (UTC)Nathan
Copyright question
Date: 2009-11-25 09:28 pm (UTC)Google settlement? Doesn't Google attempt to keep to books in the public domain??
Sorry if this is off-topic.
I'm glad you said something about it here - I've been following the story (and blogged about it myself) and it's amazing how confused and confusing it got.
Rock on RWA, MWA and SFWA
Lauretta@ConstellationBooks
Re: Copyright question
Date: 2009-11-26 04:34 pm (UTC)Since Google has a mandate to Do No Evil, it's trying to redefine what's "evil".
Re: Copyright question
Date: 2009-11-28 01:49 am (UTC)Lauretta
Spreading the word
Date: 2009-11-25 10:49 pm (UTC)http://www.teleread.org/2009/11/25/dont-self-publish-in-vain/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+teleread%2FKHnj+%28TeleRead%3A+Bring+the+E-Books+Home%29
Yipes! That's a long URL.