Teresa,
You should get paid for your posts on POD and publishing scams. They're excellent. And much more thorough than some of the "tips" columns I see on other writer sites.

Posted July 1, 2003 9:29 PM by John Farrell

This info is from R. R. Bowker.

The average prices (2002) for various formats:

Adult hardcover: $27.52
Juvenile hardcover: $15.78
Adult trade paperback: $15.77
Adult mass market paperback: $7.30

Posted July 2, 2003 12:21 AM by James D. Macdonald

Less the discounts for buying at Amazon, Costco, etc. of course.

Hmm. I'd been seeing more and more of this around and I'd been trying to figure out what it was. All I'd been smelling was something fishing, but thanks for pointing out the hook.

Posted July 2, 2003 1:10 AM by Kevin Andrew Murphy

I wonder if your several comments on different scams (different but--alas--the same) could be published in the SFWA Bulletin?

As well as various other Author society magazines. Author's Guild Bulletin, SCBWI's Bulletin etc.

Jane

Posted July 2, 2003 2:03 AM by Jane Yolen

Let's look at the prices charged by Wildside Press, known honest. They publish a catalog, have sales reps, pay royalties, take returns, and in all ways act like any other small press. They also use PoD technology for their printing. This is based on all Wildside paperbacks listed at Amazon as being published in 2003:

Wildside:

Mean $17.01
Median $15.95
Mode $19.95
Range $7
Minimum $12.99
Maximum $19.99

Posted July 2, 2003 2:33 AM by James D. Macdonald

The specialised non-fiction exception is pretty wide, and has always been around.

Mostly, though, that's a form of self-publishing, which is a bit more honest a game. There's pitfalls in it, and people tend to wear the publisher's hat and forget to pay themselves as the writer.

Anyway, you've mentioned that down-blog, in previous articles on this. What most of us are likely to see is local history. Some writers think it's worth getting their memoirs in print, and I suppose future historians will be glad of that.

But better to deal with an honest printer, or some sort of publisher. Is there a term for the honest operation, something like "contract publisher", who would do the work?

Posted July 2, 2003 2:41 AM by Dave Bell

A nice example of specialized nonfiction would be Sailboat Self Steering You can Build by Willimam Wensel.

A twenty two page booklet on building the HV 101
Horizontal Self Steering Vane for Sailboats.

I don't imagine that there are enough people who want to build a horizontal self-steering vane for their sailboats to make it worthwhile for a commercial house to bring out an edition and for B&N to stock it, but those people who do want to build such a rig will go to great lengths to seek out the book, and pay nearly any price to have it.

Posted July 2, 2003 7:28 AM by James D. Macdonald

Thanks, John (and everyone else). If I have anything valuable to say on these subjects, it's in part because I happen to perceive scams structurally, and because I've done so many different jobs in publishing that I have a pretty good sense of how things relate.

The list of what I've done is best rendered as a specimen of that characteristically American art form, the extended brag:

I've been a typesetter, researcher, manuscript typist, copywriter, copyeditor, editor, line editor, proofreader, slugger, and once in a while a designer and illustrator. I came in at the end of hot lead and linotype, and was trained on some of the earliest computerized typesetting systems. I've read proof on long galleys and on screen, and still have a stash of lick-and-stick query flags. I brought the first Mac to Tor, produced its first DTP mechanicals and galleys, and oversaw its first digitally retouched covers. I've worked on magazines, newspapers, books, comic books, and websites, and edited science fiction, fantasy, mysteries, literary criticism reference series, comics, general nonfiction, naughty novels, straight news, editorials, features, church bulletins, political polemics, worldcon publications, Bob Webber's metallurgical engineering papers, and a bunch of other stuff I'll remember later. I've worked in editorial, crossed over the line to work in production, then crossed back over to editorial again. I92ve read Ace's and Baen92s slush (though not much), temped at Avon and Warner, and worked in a department that was sacked en masse the week before Christmas. I92ve proofread Latin, Spanish, Catalan, Anglo-Saxon, Elizabethan English, several dialects of Middle English, Early Modern English, Modern English, and equations. I once rewrote an entire book in one day. I've lost track of how many nonexistent dialects and languages I've kept track of. I92ve line-edited Terry Carr, proofread u&lc, held Harlan Ellison to a deadline, forced a packager to maintain quality control, and thrown fear into the heart of a Haddon Craftsman sales rep.

(Take that, Mike Fink!)

(Now Robert Legault looks up from his whittling, spits thoughtfully, and says "Hell's bells, that ain't nothin' 'tall. Why, I once--")

Posted July 2, 2003 7:39 AM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

On the other hand, how many will seek out The Steadfast by M. A. Schweitzer, a 390 page paperback mystery original by a previously unpublished author, a book with a cover price of $51.98?

Posted July 2, 2003 7:44 AM by James D. Macdonald

Compare Wildside's numbers, above, with another PoD press chosen for illustrative reasons (this is a real place, though I forebear to mention its name).

Mean $29.54
Median $29.90
Mode $29.98
Range $50.02
Minimum $19.98
Maximum $70.00

Compare both with R.R. Bowker's average prices.

Both this publisher and Wildside produce trade paperbacks.

Average price of an adult trade paperback per Bowker: $15.77
Average price of one of Wildside's PoD trade-size paperbacks: $17.01
Average price of one of this publisher's PoD trade-size paperbacks: $29.54

Not surprisingly, Wildside's main page is covered with ads for books they have for sale. Not surprisingly, this publisher's main page is covered with notices that becoming a Respected Published Author is now within your grasp.

Who's your market, baby? Who's selling what to whom?

Further variants:

Bottom-feeding fee-charging agents are starting to send their clients eventually to the PoD over-priced-book publishers. These latter publish the slush-heap -- an agent is hardly required. The question in my mind is whether there's a kickback involved, or if the self-styled agents are using the publications there to boost their resumes: so-and-so many Published Authors on my client list! See, their books are available on Amazon and by special order everywhere! Hoo hah! Pay me my $200/month representation fee! Your book shows great promise. I can all-but-guarantee it will be published by a royalty-paying publisher! Oh yass!

Posted July 2, 2003 8:41 AM by James D. Macdonald

This is just so depressing. So many people writing so many bad books. And so many scammers feeding the frenzy to make a quick buck. (I don't have anything remotely like Teresa's experience, but for a while I was getting an unsolicited book a day to review and that was quite distressing enough.)

Posted July 2, 2003 9:06 AM by Danny Yee

The depressing thing for me is that one of these print-the-slush-heap places likely has, out of every hundred books, perhaps two that would have been publishable. Alas! Those books will never be properly edited, nor will anyone but the author's mom and her bridge club ever read them. Alas! A loss to us all.

I'm told that J. K. Rowling had a number of rejections before Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone sold. I'm told that one among the editors who rejected it, on being asked about the decision to pass on the book, replied that the version he saw was "unreadable crap."

What apparently happened was that somewhere along the line, several rejections in, Rowling sat down and learned how to write.

Imagine if rather than re-writing she'd gone to one of the PoD disguised vanity presses though! Her book would have been published exactly the way she wrote it! (The vanity PoD houses advertise lack of editing as a feature, not a bug.) She'd have been a published author! Hooray! She'd have sold her 75 copies (by dint of hustling everyone she knew). She'd have been happy. Really. The thrill of holding a printed copy of your own book -- I can't describe it. It's wonderful.

Sigh.

Posted July 2, 2003 9:34 AM by James D. Macdonald

Holding Harlan Ellison to his deadline sounds like a story I'd like to hear in more detail, Teresa. Maybe at Readercon? (if my wife doesn't deliver that weekend....)

Posted July 2, 2003 9:52 AM by John Farrell

Ah yes, the "specialized non-fiction" exception. As one who hopes to get a tenure-track job someday, I'll keep my mouth shut on this particular topic. (Anybody want to buy a translated 12,000-line Old French epic? It's just like a Jackie Chan movie. Honest.)

Posted July 2, 2003 10:01 AM by Anne

Anne: I'm curious, against my better judgement. What's the epic?

Posted July 2, 2003 10:06 AM by Cassandra

The story I deeply want to hear is why - and above all how - you "once rewrote an entire book in one day."

Posted July 2, 2003 11:32 AM by Sylvia Li

While I, too, would love to hear the "rewote in one day" story, I have a different publishing/making light related query.

By following the one of the "particles" links (loving this new feature, btw), I ended up at "the worst website I've seen this year." On it, this Publish America shill asserts that--

"There are 56,000 publishers in the U.S.
*9There are 1.5 million different books in print
*9Last year, 135,000 new titles were published, 540 each day
*9Bookstores stock less than 1% of all new titles
*980% of all book sales are controlled by only 5 publishing powerhouses
*9The top 20 publishers account for 93% of all book sales "

Does anyone have the hard numbers on this? I mean, 56,000 U.S. publishers sounds like, to put it mildly, wildly inflated.

Posted July 2, 2003 11:42 AM by Adrienne

Cassandra: "La Chevalerie d'Ogier de Danemarche." Guts! Glory! Shenanigans!

Posted July 2, 2003 11:49 AM by Anne

Holding Harlan to a deadline? There's a job waiting for you with the State Department . . . ever considered going back to school, say Foreign Service at Georgetown?

Posted July 2, 2003 2:18 PM by Claude Muncey

Anne: Cool! Don't suppose you'd let me see it? (I have my "defrocked medievalist" hat on, not my "commercially savvy editor" model.)

Kevin, when I was mixing it up in that argument in PC Magazine, one of the other participants was M. A. Schweitzer, author of The Steadfast. He was deeply puzzled that his publisher had set the cover price of his mystery novel at $51.98. I was puzzled too. If a book isn't a major reference work, nor full of color plates, nor out of print, nor wildly specialized, there is no reason on earth for it to have a $52 cover price. Not this year, at any rate.

Here's the story problem version: How many copies of his own book does the author have to buy at $52 a pop before it would have been cheaper to go to Vantage in the first place?

Answer: a lot fewer copies than you'd have gotten from Vantage.

Jane, I'd be perfectly happy to have my posts on this subject reprinted elsewhere. I'd want to say yes on a case-by-case basis, and tidy up the text a bit, but the point of the exercise is to put this information where wanna-be authors will find it.

Dave Bell, it's called a printer. There's an article of mine on the Writer Beware website on how to do just that. If you want to go the POD route, I haven't seen Booklocker's contract or their production quality, but I like their approach, and I love their explanatory text.

Danny, there are some people who passionately want to be deceived, like the guy I heard of recently who's got a novel out from PublishAmerica, and poems in three International Library of Poetry anthologies. He's buying a dream. That's his lookout.

But some of these writers are honest. They aren't good enough to be published yet, but they might get there if they keep at it. For them, scam publishers aren't just a distraction and a ripoff. They're a heartbreak. Running afoul of them makes it that much harder to keep writing.

John, Sylvia, I'll try to get to those stories another day. The Harlan story is relatively short and not all that colorful.

Adrienne, what I know about Mr. Marcus is that almost all the Amazon reviews of his novel Crispy are five-star raves, and an awful lot of them are by PublishAmerica authors.

I have serious trouble believing there are 56,000 publishers in the United States. That'd give you an average of 1,120 per state. You might get away with that in New York and California, but they'd kind of stand out in Wyoming and Montana, and in Rhode Island the publishers would outnumber the burger stands.

I went and looked in our office copy of Publishers Directory. It's dated 1999 and was published by Gale Research, but there's a limit to how far wrong even Gale can go. According to the PD, in 1999 there were 18,985 publishers in Canada and the United States combined. That includes the America Tolkien Society, which publishes a quarterly journal plus buttons, t-shirts, posters, etc. Also: some people in West Virginia who self-published a tailgater's cookbook, a firm that publishes psychological testing materials, a bookshop that reprints antique maps of its historic local area, a guy in California who publishes real estate licensing test prep materials, a fruit & vegetable growers' association that publishes occasional newsletters, a professional organization that sends its members an annual directory of the pet industry in Canada, about a zillion local museums and historical societies, and the Urdu Society of Canada. Are you getting the idea?

There's been a tendency for unsaleable authors--mostly middle-aged men--to decide that their repeated rejections are a sign that the publishing industry is broken, and to start their own online publishing company. They start with just their own titles, and try to entice other unpublished authors into letting them publish their books. Some of these guys morph into scammers as they figure out how things really work. There are a lot of these guys, but in order to hit the target figure there'd have to be two of them for every "publisher" listed in that Gale Research directory, and that's just not plausible.

If I knew how he arrived at that "56,000 publishers" figure, I might be able to figure out how he arrived at his figures for the total number of titles published, etc.; but I don't, so I can't.

I wouldn't be terribly amazed to discover that 80% of all book sales are controlled by five publishing powerhouses (that'd be Bertelsmann, von Holtzbrinck, and WarTime, plus two more). For the top twenty publishers to account for 93% of all sales just means that publishers nos. 6-20 have an additional 13% of the total market. Maybe it's true; maybe it isn't. But it wouldn't surprise me.

So, I'd say he's got a mix of and bad and possibly good data there. The question is, what conclusions does he draw from it?

Posted July 2, 2003 2:34 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

"I wouldn't be terribly amazed to discover that 80% of all book sales are controlled by five publishing powerhouses (that'd be Bertelsmann, von Holtzbrinck, and WarTime, plus two more)."

Actually, we're not in the top five North American trade publishing groups. As I recall, that would currently be:

* Bertelsmann (Random House, Vintage, Ballantine, Bantam, Doubleday, Dell, etc)

* Viacom (Simon & Schuster, Pocket, etc)

* Pearson (Viking, Dutton, Putnam, Berkley, Penguin, misc. flightless aquatic birds)

* AOL Time Warner (Warner Books, Little Brown, Time-Life, etc)

* HarperCollins (HarperCollins, Morrow, Avon, etc)

In North America, Holtzbrinck's book publishing comprises St. Martin's Press, Tor/Forge, Henry Holt, and Farrar Straus Giroux. I vaguely recall we're something like #9, all told. I'm fairly sure Harlequin is also bigger than us, when you include all their various paperback lines--Silhouette, Gold Eagle, Thrashing Man-Flesh, etc.

Posted July 2, 2003 3:00 PM by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Those stats are credited to Publish America in this newsletter: http://www.simegen.com/pipermail/this-n-that-l/2003-April/000001.html

(If you check around their authors' message boards you'll find they're trotted out whenever a PA author asks why his books aren't being shelved at some given bookstore. There are all these publishers, see, and all these books, and bookstore shelves are finite, so, just by accident your book isn't being shelved there. Besides, the big guys are squeezing out the little guys! We're all in this together!)

(No one comes to the obvious conclusion: Well, if 80% of book sales come from 5 publishing powerhouses, it would farking behoove me to make sure my book came out from one of those places.)

Posted July 2, 2003 3:36 PM by James D. Macdonald

SIGH. What's really sad, Teresa, is that the people who need this information, who really need to know that these are nothing but scams, are certain that it's being disseminated by embittered has-been and never-were writers who don't want any competition. About half of these darlings will continue to pay PublishAmerica for the "privilege" of publishing that "Absolutely Fabulous/Farscape" crossover trilogy at ridiculous prices, and the rest will only bite when they see a particularly good ad in "Writer's Digest". The likelihood of the latter is pretty good, though, when you look at the number of "writers" who continue to believe that buying ten-year subscriptions to "WD" will somehow allow them to make a living from writing science fiction short stories.

Of course, one would think that venues like "Writer's Digest" might be interested in offering warnings to their subscribers. It's not like that's going to happen, though, and not just because most writing magazines depend upon the advertising from vanity presses. The odds of "The Writer" or "Writer's Digest" running an article on publishing scams or what to do when a publisher won't pay for a previously published article are right up there with the Dallas Cowboys winning the World Series or SFWA requiring regular publication as a precondition for continued membership. After all, you don't want to scare away the people who plan to quit their jobs and write full-time the moment they get their story published in "Pulphouse", right?

(And before anyone says anything, I know "Pulphouse" shut down years ago. When I heard the news, I suddenly understood how Hunter S. Thompson felt when Nixon resigned.)

Posted July 2, 2003 3:56 PM by Paul Riddell

There's been a tendency for unsaleable authors--mostly middle-aged men--to decide that their repeated rejections are a sign that the publishing industry is broken, and to start their own online publishing company. They start with just their own titles, and try to entice other unpublished authors into letting them publish their books. Some of these guys morph into scammers as they figure out how things really work

In a way, I can't help admiring their confidence and courage, but, of course, those who morph into scammers are a Bad Thing. The others may be too, but I still can't help admiring that confidence and courage.

MKK

Posted July 2, 2003 4:20 PM by Mary Kay

About a year ago my grandad coughed up something in the range of $20,000 to Vantage Press for 500 copies of his book. He carries copies around in the trunk of his car, to foist on unsuspecting people who politely ask, "Oh, you wrote a book? What's it about?"

I had had the privilege of reading his MS before he started submitting it, and I knew perfectly well that any publisher willing to publish "Doc's Boy" was no publisher he wanted to be dealing with, but Gramps didn't listen. Now he's angry that Vantage isn't doing the marketing they said they were going to do.

All of this is sad, but what really torques me off is when he starts implying that I can get something published too, someday when I'm a big girl.

When I do I'm going to rub his nose in it.

Posted July 2, 2003 4:40 PM by Holly Messinger

Teresa, when I asked about what I labelled a "contract publisher" I had in mind somebody who could bridge the gap between the author and the printer. Am I seeing "printer" as something more limited than you do?

What I have in mind is, perhaps, somebody with your experience, who can make the connections. Whether it's possible to sell real editing to an author, I'm not sure. But there are things which can be sold, such as cover design.

Thinking about it, you'd probably end up with an unviable blend of agent and publisher that could all too easily fall into the fringes of vanity publishing.

Posted July 2, 2003 4:44 PM by Dave Bell

All this reminds me of a YA book I read waaaay back in elementary school called The Great Mom Swap or some such title. Essentially these two girls thought their moms would be perfect for each other so they convinced their moms to let them swap houses over summer break. One of the girls was a writer (of hilariously bad romance stories) and wanted to get published and actually had a run-in with a vanity publisher in the story. (She gets saved from being published by her "new mom" who tells the publisher off for trying to get money from a minor.) It made me wonder if the author had a run-in herself at one point. In any case, I too had always cherished dreams of being a writer and I was glad that life informed me of these scams before I actually fell for one.

Random thought: Why haven't people online noticed that if you go to a real publisher's website, you see generally see lots of books on the front page, and if you go to a vanity publisher, you see quotes from hapless authors, lots of "publish your book now" and nary a book in sight? At least nary a book on most of the publishers I've run into. 1stBooks and WePublish certainly didn't have any. PublishAmerica had loads, so I guess they want to prove the exception to the rule.

Totally amused by this letter from Dean Koontz to a PublishAmerica author.
http://www.publishamerica.com/upinlights.htm#ryder

Posted July 2, 2003 6:20 PM by PiscusFiche

So, that's two people for the "Chevalier" epic.

I don't know where I picked up the idea that summer is for reading novels with pink covers and little content.
I wish I could get rid of it: though it doesn't stop me from laying outside on the green, contentedly reading 'serious' books, I always feel vaguely tratiorious.

Posted July 2, 2003 6:30 PM by Cassandra

Three for "La Chevalerie d'Ogier de Danemarche". Especially if it has evil giants.

Posted July 2, 2003 7:15 PM by clew

Three for "La Chevalerie d'Ogier de Danemarche". Especially if it has evil giants.

Any shopping, shagging, and quaffing Cosmos? With a pink cover, of course.

I'm having this vision of "Sex and the City meets Guts! Glory! Shenanigans!" Possibly a new line from Silhouette.

Posted July 2, 2003 7:58 PM by Ter

A relatively ancient variation on this scam is the "Who's Who in Whatever Field" industry. Or various poetry collections. The variation is that the scam artist publishes a book with a lot of subjects, many of whom can be counted on to buy a copy or three at some inflated cost.

Ondemandmanuals.com is an example of, as far as I can tell, a legitimate POD publisher. The URL below is for a hard copy of a manual for the Mac shareware program GraphicConverter. The author pays nothing, and can buy copies at a relatively low cost. The author sets the retail sales price, and apparently splits the margin with the publisher. From the name, they appear to be targeting technical manuals, but it's not a bad model for low-volume publishing.

http://www2.ondemandmanuals.com/4dcgi/odmdosearch?title=&author=&subject=&aisle=Elbsand+Publishers&keyword=&user=

Posted July 2, 2003 9:38 PM by Jonathan

Four for Ogier de Danemarche, with a nod to Three Hearts and Three Lions.

Posted July 2, 2003 11:02 PM by Vicki

So, is this particular nameless (but I know who it is) publisher a good bet if I really only want one copy of my book? Seriously, I was thinking of letting them pay me a dollar for the privelege of printing up in a nice book all the recipes that I now have scattered on index cards, backs of envelopes, and scraps of paper, strewn all over my kitchen. I mean, if I'm going to go to the trouble of typing them up for myself, why not scam a scammer into printing and binding a free copy for me? Or did I miss something in the list of 'strings attached'?

Posted July 2, 2003 11:29 PM by FranW

S'funny, my strong association with Ogier the Dane is

'Well could Ogier work his war-boat, well could Ogier weild a brand/Much he knew of foaming waters, not so much of farming land."

Which just won't fit with the work described, but I'd like to read it anyway.

Posted July 3, 2003 12:03 AM by Graydon

Anne: Another one for Ogier.

Posted July 3, 2003 12:20 AM by Lois Fundis

If Graydon is five for Ogier, I'm six.

Posted July 3, 2003 12:29 AM by Elise

Make that seven -- Lois slipped in while I was posting.

Posted July 3, 2003 12:30 AM by Elise

Apropos of nothing: Why is it that "estimable" and "inestimable" mean essentially the same thing"? Every time I see the word "estimable", I want to make it an antonym of "inestimable."

Sigh.

Posted July 3, 2003 12:38 AM by Kenneth G. Cavness

Add another to the growing list of Chevalerie d'Ogier fanciers. I spent a summer as a very young lass beating my way through an Elderly Anglish saga, with concordance and some sort of dictionary, primarily because I wanted to know what happened next. I never quite got to What Happened Next, and looking back I suspect that my expectations of narrative were not entirely congruent with those of the poet.

In any case, regarding why prospective authors don't notice when they're being screwed over by scamming PODs, there's none so ungrateful as a mark whose eyes you've just opened. Writers who've no hope in hell of going professional still want the typeset pages bound between cardboard and held together with cheap glue.

Look, when I go out for an afternoon and knock out a few pencil sketches, I can, over the next weekend, if I want, mat and frame them and hang them on my wall and they look rather nice. Not high art, but quite nice.

A hobbyist writer doesn't have that option, that finish. What he has when he's done is a printed manuscript, at best. It's not a book, there's no resemblance to a book. Not a book like you can buy in a store, with a fancy cover and all.

That's where the POD people come in. You can tell that writer till you're blue in the face that they're being ripped off, and all they'll see is that you're pissing on their book.

Posted July 3, 2003 12:50 AM by pericat

Oh my! Hooray! I should've known that this crowd would be interested!

No shopping, only one instance of shagging (but it's vital to the plot) and not much quaffing. But plenty of Eeeeevil Saracens and a two-headed, four-armed giant. Also a Divine Intervention and a very smart horse.

But unfortunately I haven't finished translating it yet. The only English version I have is a 10pg single-spaced plot summary that doesn't really convey the flavour of the thing. Which I'm happy to share, except I'm not sure how to get a Word-for-Mac file efficiently to all y'all's computers. (Of course, when I _do_ get it closer to done, I'm going to see about joining a writer's group, so they can point out my infelicities.)

Teresa, I think it's "medievalist in aeternum," from what I've seen. As for your hats, I've been planning it as a facing-page translation for use in the classroom anyway; my diss director told me there's one-a them wossnames for it, specialized markets or something? :-P

Oops. And now I hafta go teach....

Posted July 3, 2003 10:27 AM by Anne

Kenneth: because 'inestimable' is formed from the verb 'estimate', but 'estimable' is from 'esteem'. Note the absense of *'esteemable', at least from my dictionary.

A very large unpredictable number can be inestimable, but not estimable. No doubt someone will backform estimable in that sense and ruin everything. /pedantic whining

Posted July 3, 2003 10:32 AM by Xopher

Money flows to the author, true.

How much money, they never say.

Was it Mark Twain who said, you can make a fortune as a writer in America, but you can't make a living.

Posted July 3, 2003 11:18 AM by Jeff Crook

The "fortune but not a living" observation was by James Michener.

I suppose, on the model of flammability, we need "noninestimable" just to complete the set.

Posted July 3, 2003 11:54 AM by John M. Ford

Saracens and a multi-armed giant?! Cool!

Posted July 3, 2003 12:00 PM by Vicki

And don't forget the divine intervention.

If you don't have a divine intervention, you can make do by having your characters watch as an elaborately symbolic masque is enacted. Or you can put in a big fight with a big monster. Or an intricate court case. Or a really bloody scene where someone slaughters their in-laws.

I'm sure I'm forgetting a few.

You get extra points if you work in more than one of them. You lose a point every time one character turns to another, says the medieval equivalent of "As you know, Bob," and rattles off a numbered categorical list.

If it doesn't have any really cool scenes, you're probably reading La Chanson de Roland, Western literature's first full-length piece of liebestod slash fic.

If it becomes apparent that the major characters are going to die violently together before the last page is turned, and this realization perks them right up, the story was originally written in Old Norse or Anglo-Saxon.

If something completely inscrutable happens, and one or more major characters conclude as a result that they're going to die before the last page is turned, the original story was Irish.

If the fight scenes average one or more spear-brasting per stanza, the story is French.

If you find yourself in a medieval epic, never agree to a one-on-one fight, on horseback, against an unidentified person who is wearing a closed helmet. If they're not your own true love, your true king, your long-lost twin brother, or a son you didn't know you had, they're some BNK fighting in disguise. No matter which one it is, you're guaranteed to wish you hadn't fought them.

Posted July 3, 2003 4:14 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

BNK?

Posted July 3, 2003 5:30 PM by Jeremy Leader

Immoderate laughter! (Dunno what BNK means. Big-Name King?) You know, Teresa, you should put on your editor-hat and publish Marie de France's _Lais_. I know exactly who should do it, too.

I forgot to mention the Lovely Saracen Maiden, who's engaged to the Courtly Saracen Kannigget. And her treacherous brother.

Dang, all this is making me want to get back to work! Good thing I only have 3 more days of summer school.

Posted July 3, 2003 5:41 PM by Anne

BNK = Big Name Knight. Galahad, Lancelot, Gawain, one of those guys.

Posted July 3, 2003 6:32 PM by James D. Macdonald

James: Just so. One of Camelot's MVPs.

Interesting idea, Anne. People would be bound to misinterpret the title, but that might be a commercial plus.

Who do you have in mind?

Posted July 3, 2003 8:38 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

The comments on that Publish America thread are so sad:

I look at it this way. If they took the chance on an unknown like me, then I have to live with the list price and pray I can sell enough copies to make some money. I am sure it would not hurt to ask them to lower the price, but it is how they stay in business, publishing new authors, that have no money to publish themselves. At least they are there huh. Without them, how many of us would have the money to print our own books? Not many I bet.

Posted July 3, 2003 10:17 PM by Rivka Wald

Um, I was trying to offset that middle paragraph as a quote. It's not meant to be my words - just the first and last paragraphs are.

Posted July 3, 2003 10:18 PM by Rivka Wald

(working backward)

Jeff Crook: Have you counted how many people in this conversation are making a living writing fiction?

Anne: Medievalist in aeternum, check. It was a spiritual turning point in my life when I realized that there was neither pretension nor self-delusion involved in my taste for reading Middle English texts. I just like them.

Word for Macs is not a problem.

You should ask Jim Macdonald to send you the text of Syr Agricoli. I'd post it myself, if he sent me the text and gave me permission.

Fran, I regret to say it's more than one publisher, but I know which one offers a one-buck advance. It sounds like a good idea. I might try that myself.

Oh, that's funny. It's just occurred to me that this makes a very durable backup medium.

You do want to make sure you're familiar with WordPerfect. Here's their pr*d*ct**n c*cl* (I hate having to call it that): You send them your e-text file, formatted according to their specs. They pour it into a template, run a spellchecker over it, and send the file back to you so you can read proof and make your own corrections.

You have to get it right, though. Some of their authors have received their finished copies, only to discover that their printed-and-bound text has been transformed into a single continuous paragraph, or, in another case, into a single continuous word. I had no idea that WordPerfect was so powerful, but apparently it can do things like that with a single misplaced command.

(This is giving me a case of concretized metaphor. When we're reading blues -- those are page images taken directly from the offset plates, a very late stage in production -- one common rule of thumb for what you do and don't correct says you should only fix errors that are bad enough to make a dog laugh, or blatant enough to be visible from ten paces. I may never get to see a dog laugh, but PA has finally provided me with an example of a text error visible at ten paces.)

The obvious inference is that they forward the proofed text file to the printer without looking at it. This has all sorts of interesting possibilities we need not go into here.

I've been thinking about this for several hours now, and I can only spot a couple of potential problems. One is that you don't own the rights on those recipes. It'll probably be enough to give the book an unattractive title so that no one will buy it.

Of course, if you really were worried about it, I could suggest a truly dumb fix: Take a list of the commonest ingredients, and systematically change them to different and improbable nouns in your text. When you get your book back, paste a list of what's really what on the inside front cover: plaster of paris = flour, baseballs = onions, grunions = green onions, etc.

The other problem is that the publisher you have in mind has an "all rights for seven years" contract. If my correspondent with the interesting take on rights reversions is correct, you might want to use a pseudonym on the book to start with, to avoid having to use one later.

PiscusFish, authors tend to know (or at least meet) people who've had run-ins with vanity publishers. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if that one had first- or second-hand experience.

I've seen that page. Dolly Parton and Pat Boone sound like they might actually have read the books. The Mississippi author site lists all known Mississippi authors. Most of the rest of those breathlessly reported successes are essentially some Hollywood person's staff saying "Yes, do please send me a copy of your book, at absolutely no cost or obligation to me." (Alternate reading: "We acknowledge the receipt of your query letter. Send the book.") Charlton Heston's and Dean Koontz's letters are small masterpieces of polite denial.

You'd have to be as naive as a PA author to think those were something to crow about.

Dave Bell, try Booklocker. I really do like their approach. Oh, and the Botox thing? It's real. No kidding.

Holly, you hang in there. You're going to make it. So are L.J. and Fran, if they do the same.

Mary Kay, if you dealt with these guys, you wouldn't admire their confidence and courage. They're more like Dilbert's pointy-haired boss, forging on ahead because they don't care about anyone else's opinions, and they don't know enough to figure out that what they're trying isn't going to work.

Of course, if they cared about what other people think, and knew more about how the world works, they'd be better writers. They might even be good enough to sell.

Paul, WD has put a lot of work into not noticing some of the things its regular advertisers do. I don't know why anyone reposes their faith in it.

Posted July 3, 2003 11:34 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Rivka: for future reference, use {blockquote} and {/blockquote}, and run your text in around the tags. I'm not sure you can get smaller text, but you can indent it. If you want to distinguish it further, consider italicizing it.

Now let me go see if I can fix that first one there...

Posted July 3, 2003 11:37 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Jeff Crook: Have you counted how many people in this conversation are making a living writing fiction?

No. Is there anyone here making a fortune? I'd like to meet them.

Two years ago, I made the equivalent of 40 hrs a week at minimum wage from my writing. Last year was considerably less. This year will be somewhere in between, barring any sudden wild success.

Not that I would bar sudden wild success.

Posted July 4, 2003 12:51 AM by Jeff Crook

Jeff: John M. Ford, Jim Macdonald, and Jane Yolen; and if I'm not missing someone, I'll be surprised. (Whoever you are: identify yourself so I can apologize.) And that's just the chance gathering of this topic thread; there are other self-supporting authors who turn up here.

Perhaps I'm mistaken. If so, I apologize. But I'm habitually suspicious of publishers, agents, and other mavens (not you) who go on about how hard it is to publish first novels, or how hard it is to make a living in publishing. It's not because I'm defensive of my half-cracked industry. It's because so many of the outfits that say it do so as a preamble to explaining to young authors that they deal they're offering is the best they're likely to get.

If you can write books people want to read, you can make a living. The corollary is that a publisher that'll take anyone who submits a manuscript isn't primarily making their money off sales to the general reading public.

Posted July 4, 2003 1:22 AM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Teresa: Neil Gaiman, who else?

Posted July 4, 2003 8:24 AM by Anne

But I'm habitually suspicious of publishers, agents, and other mavens (not you) who go on about how hard it is to publish first novels

Well, I am neither publisher nor agent nor maven. I'm just a writer working hard at being self-sufficient in the honest to God world of publishing. Some day (soon, I hope) I will be, before my boss catches me writing at work.

I am, however, a firm believer in the lucky break. But my philosophy is that you do the work you need to do so that when your lucky break comes, you can jump all over it. Meanwhile, you try to nudge fate into gear.

Sorry if I gave you the impression I am from 1stBooks. I really need to work on my opening.

Posted July 4, 2003 11:16 AM by Jeff Crook

This Print-On-Demand discussion is important. The book publishing business is, for the first time since the introduction of paperbacks, undergoing a revolution. Amazon + POD already tips the balance, and ebooks are small but inevitably significant.

I am barely one of the "professional writers" in this comment thread. Having just filed, under threat by the California taxers, of 25% lateness penalty, my 2001 tax returns, I know my own figures. For 2001, my writing gross income was barely $17,000. That was $5,500 royalties for a science fiction novel I co-authored (I could have taken smaller advance if I insisted on my name on the cover), and business writing for hire (business plans, legal documents, and the like).

The cost of making that $17,000 (internet, cons, travel, postage, etc.) was $19,000. So I lost $2,000 as a professional writer in 2001. Fortunately, there is salary income in my 2 Professor household, so that loss reduced my Adjusted Income, and hence increased the amount of refund claimed.

I confess this, because I know that I am very close of a MEDIAN professional freelance writer in North America, according to National Writers Union figures. I was 7 years an elected member of the Los Angeles area NWU, and its Steering Committee.

When the median writer who actually has a book publication in a given year MUST have another income stream to pay the bills, the system is fatally sick.

My friends and I have experimented with POD, both as Authors and as Publishers. The verdict is not yet in. Our expenditures are reasonable research expenses for our broader business plan, which also involves our web presence (many tens of millions of hits per year from our little group).

My father, Samuel H. Post, was editor, then editor-in-chief, then publisher of science fiction and other genre authors including Poul Anderson, Philip K. Dick, H.P. Lovecraft, and MANY more. For a more complete list, go to my domain (magicdragon.com), click on "Science Fiction", click on "Authors", Click on Authors starting with "P", and scroll down to Post. So I learned about the book business growing up, with my mother also in an executive office as assistant to the head of a publisher. I went to cocktail parties, when the baby sitter was unavailable, at Norman Mailer's house, and I met many writers of global fame. But the rules then don't fit the realities now.

It is hard to get accurate numbers on the NA book industry, which even when combined with magazines, is a minor part of the paper and wood pulp segment, which is dominated by larger industries, such as toilet paper.

Print-On-Demand will affect your life more than toilet paper on demand.

But the course we take as an inefficient "mature industry" undergoes technological transformation is chaotic, inherently unpredictable. We could have 10,000 years of Dark Ages, unless we who professionally foretell the future do hereby create a POD Foundation for the entire galaxy... Oh, wait, that's another story...;)

Posted July 4, 2003 12:56 PM by Jonathan Vos Post

unless we who professionally foretell the future do hereby create a POD Foundation for the entire galaxy

I'm not so sure she was knocking the POD business model (or whatever you want to call it) so much as the newest morphs of the vanity press. POD technology is important. That's how we (at the Memphis Writers Co-op) are producing our Best of Memphis anthology. However, we are using a POD printer to produce our book, not a POD publisher, because it is the most cost-efficient model for an organization whose budget consists entirely of my small personal donations, plus the reading fees for the anthology. One of our members recently used the same printer to produce a book on HIPAA law, and it is currently the number one HIPAA book in the country. So we know we'll get the production quality we need. The rest of it is up to us.

If I may beat this drum a little longer...

We are still accepting submissions for the anthology. The Co-op URL is http://tog.20m.com. The major restriction is that the author must currently or formerly live in the Memphis area. It's a contest, with a reading fee (oops, there goes Yog's Law). Our panel of judges tells you that we are serious about this, so it is not a vanity publication. In fact, if all the great writers from our area were to submit, we'd have an anthology easily able to compete with the best on the market.

So if you know anyone who qualifies, please let them know about the anthology. If this anthology does well, we'll be able to pay our winners better in future anthologies.

Gosh, and didn't I just say I'm not a publisher?

Posted July 4, 2003 1:44 PM by Jeff Crook

I'm not making my living as a fiction writer, but as a journalist, which, despite what some say, is still writing. I freelance for mags like Cooking Light and earn my regular cabbage as an editor/staff writer at an alternative weekly (think Village Voice, but smaller). I'm still working on getting that first fiction byline. Making stuff up is something I've avoided for the last decade or so as a copywriter and it can be difficult to break the habit.

Posted July 4, 2003 1:49 PM by Adrienne Martini

The only way I can think of for the word to get out to the general public about vanity presses would be for Stephen King to write a novel about them, preferably followed by a movie. It's actually semi-plausible as a novel (humor, pathos, evil, retribution), but unlikely to happen, and only semi-successful as propaganda even if it does.

Posted July 5, 2003 2:28 AM by Nancy Lebovitz

"I've been a typesetter, researcher, manuscript typist, copywriter, copyeditor, editor, line editor, proofreader, slugger, and once in a while a designer and illustrator...."

Yeah, but what have you done lately?
(since you rang)

Posted July 5, 2003 7:55 AM by Robert L

Backing up a bit:

"I look at it this way. If they took the chance on an unknown like me, then I have to live with the list price and pray I can sell enough copies to make some money."

I can't bring myself to trawl through much of PA's material, so perhaps someone with steelier eyeballs knows: do they actually tell their marks that the company is "taking a chance" on them, with the possibility of financial loss hovering like a grackle with a green eyeshade?

Perhaps this is only the writer's misapprehension. But if not, then PA is making a deliberately false statement of the financial situation, which is not the same thing as one of its many fraudulent implications.

Though it is possible (given many of the issues already covered) that the marks are immune to even the straightforward statement that they are being lied to. Heck, I read David Maurer at an impressionable age. For those who haven't gotten to him yet, the Scamorama FAQ ("My 419 was signed by Dr. Owongo Gizmo, not Dr. Owongo Doodad. Could it be real?") is also highly instructive.

Posted July 5, 2003 5:39 PM by John M. Ford

So what does sell from these vanity/near vanity presses?

You need books which a) aren't going to be in bookstores anyway, b) where the finished quality of the prose isn't the main selling point, c) which sell on word-of-mouth, d) to a niche market too small for a commercial house to look at. Like specialized non-fiction, price isn't the first consideration.

So what did I find? Cross-dressing/transexual/transgender fiction. Particularly genre fiction. There's a whole constellation (if you go to Amazon and follow the "People who bought this book also bought..." links). Decent Amazon sales numbers (in the five and six digit range). Reviews which sound like they were written by someone other than the author. And there're coming out from PublishAmerica, Xlibris, Booklocker, iUniverse, 1st Books and that constellation.

Not necessarily erotica -- regular books with protagonists who are "people like me." Westerns, thrillers, mysteries, romances.

So that's another data point.

Posted July 6, 2003 11:04 AM by James D. Macdonald

Jane Yolen, are you the person who wrote a treasury of folktales from all conceivable cultures? If so, thanks for doing it. That was my favorite book of stories when I was little. I especially remember the Tlingit ones, and the Turkish ones about Hodja (hm, maybe that was a different book).

Posted July 7, 2003 4:16 AM by Xhenxhefil

I forgot to mention the Lovely Saracen Maiden, who's engaged to the Courtly Saracen Kannigget. And her treacherous brother.

Poly fiction; marketable.

Posted July 8, 2003 1:41 AM by clew

Speaking of vanity publishing, we have one of the vainer ones haunting rec.arts.sf.fans at this very moment. He's flamming the group -- simultaneously flaming and spamming -- figuring that if he abuses the regulars enough, we'll all break down and buy his (over 50) books. He posts under a bunch of names, coming up with new ones as needed, most recently chiding me in the guise of a hitherto-unheard-from lurker who is so disappointed that I could doubt the word of this modern-day Gibbon (scribble, scribble, scribble) that he/she/it is going to filter me forevermore. Many of the posts are word-for-word identical.

Sounds like one of the ones who has to promote the book himself, and who has chosen to do it by spamming (and flamming, when that doesn't work). Hell of a way to make a living.

Parties who can't avoid watching car crashes may see for themselves. Either just open any post at random -- odds are good it'll be in that thread -- or look up someone whose name rhymes with obert tanek, and has the same initials as Rectal Sphincter. Sorry for the circuitousness, but I imagine he has the mutant ability to google for his name, and I expect you'd rather not be taken over by sock puppets today.

Posted July 8, 2003 7:49 AM by Kip W

An AbFab/Farscape crossover still doesn't sound like a bad idea, and this time it isn't from too little coffee.

Another set of eyeballs for an Ogier translation. Medieval and rennaissance chivalric epics are a hobby — I'm trying to figure out how to fuse them with modern fantasy.

---L.

Posted July 8, 2003 1:29 PM by LNH

The author pretending to be someone else trick is hardly new, though the rise of the vanity PoD publishers with a presence on Amazon has given it a new urgency.

See for example http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=3a5c1397.5139891%40news.swbell.net&output=gplain

And read the book yourself here: http://books.iuniverse.com/viewbooks.asp?isbn=0595162932&page=1

Posted July 8, 2003 6:34 PM by James D. Macdonald

Gods below.

If the author has a driver's license, I find myself hoping that the text is grounds for his state of residence to revoke it.

Posted July 8, 2003 6:39 PM by Graydon

Oh, heck, Graydon, it's only half-vast.

(Undoubtedly not the first time that comment has been made.)

When, in the future, the histories of Jeff Bezos's karaoke Bar get written (and thanks to the new technology, they will) the sociological material will probably have far more interest than the business-model analyses.

Posted July 8, 2003 6:49 PM by John M. Ford

Doing a Google Groups search for author:queuerayzy@hotmail.com is enlightening. Make sure you "repeat the search with the omitted results included."

This is neither the first nor the only example.

See also http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=81ncl0%247m3%241%40nnrp1.deja.com&oe=utf-8&output=gplain

and

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4vh0gn%24rm2%40newsbf02.news.aol.com&oe=utf-8&output=gplain among the more notorious.

"Thanks to the Power of the Internet and the Miracle of Print-on-Demand publishing, everyone can read raw slush!"

Posted July 8, 2003 9:46 PM by James D. Macdonald

Oh, I believe in the practice; there's a reason English includes shill as a specific noun.

It's kind of embarrassing to see it being done so badly, though.

And, well, I worry that my writing sucks rocks. Stuff like the half-vast example produces a very complex emotion compounded of fear that mine is too that bad, disbelief that anyone could possibly not notice, and a sort of wonder that editors don't get operant conditioned to detest reading, that the authors and promoters of these things somehow escape effective mockery, and that there is clearly some reward involved utterly independent of being able to feel that one has just perhaps effectively communicated a story, or something like one.

Posted July 9, 2003 12:07 AM by Graydon

Shills, yes, but you don't often see three-card-monte dealers simultaneously play both the card thrower and a mark in the audience betting on which card is the Queen.

===

There is genuine pleasure that the authors get. There's one of 'em, on one of the vanity publishers' message boards, who talks about the day her author's copy arrived, about hugging it to her and spinning around in her kitchen, about taking it to bed with her that night.

The author really does get that experience. Later is worse, when reality sets in ... and the author blames himself for not trying hard enough. And thinks that the only reason the book isn't selling is because no one has heard of it. Maybe if someone posts about it on Usenet ... but it can't be the author posting, because on some level the authors realize that the problem with vanity published books is that readers know the only person who liked the book is the author.

So they create a sockpuppet. What can it hurt? Maybe there really is someone who would recommend the book if only he read it.

Alas, alas.

Posted July 9, 2003 12:55 AM by James D. Macdonald

I made the mistake of skimming PA's author message boards. All that hopefulness and anxiety--it's heartbreaking. One of the authors mentioned the high cover prices. "Oh, it's because our quality is higher," said another author. That's when I wished I could post Jim's comparison of prices.

Sigh. Now I'm all depressed.

Posted July 9, 2003 9:02 AM by Beth

Telltales:

1. "I happened to be doing thus-and-such thing, and came across a copy of this book."

2. Tends to tell, rather than show, what's good about the book, and gives the author a lot of diffuse, blurb-style praise. This is as opposed to genuine readers. When they've just had a great time reading something, their heads are full of the storyline and characters and ideas, and they talk about them very specifically.

3. "Can anybody tell me more about this writer?!" is a dead giveaway.

4. If there's an online discussion of some work of fiction, and one of the participants is incredibly tenacious, engaging with every remark and question and responding to every post, that participant is the author. If two participants are doing that, they're both the author(s).

Posted July 9, 2003 10:26 AM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Other tell-tales: The post provides detailed ordering information for the book; the poster appeared only recently and has no interests other than telling everyone about this Great Book he's discovered.

Posted July 9, 2003 10:41 AM by James D. Macdonald

If the author has a driver's license, I find myself hoping that the text is grounds for his state of residence to revoke it.

...smelled the roses in the seat beside her... then plowed into the semi that had stopped for the school bus, thus ruining both her and the author's day, as the novel ended on the first page.

Posted July 9, 2003 1:21 PM by Jeff Crook

I meant to add the observation that I thought I was a shameless self-promoter. But I see now that there are depths that I have not even begun to fathom.

Posted July 9, 2003 1:25 PM by Jeff Crook

wrt authors feeling they should have tried harder to sell (per Jim's comment recently) -- that sounds almost like a codicil to Yog's Law; i.e., money for (or management of) publicity doesn't flow from the author. There was a court case >20 years ago in which an author (William Starr, IIRC) sued for breach of contract, arguing that the publisher had blatantly failed its obligation to diligently publicize the book; a west coast judge was exceedingly unimpressed by the publisher's actions, but had to close the case on the grounds that the contract was based in New York, leaving the author to give up rather than buying a cross-country ticket or hours from a New York firm.

Posted July 9, 2003 3:08 PM by CHip

Hi! My name is Mortimer Glatzbier. The other day I was cleaning out the cat box when I saw a book that my friend Bob must have left lying around the last time he visited. It was The Apocalypse Door by James D. Macdonald. I'd never heard of either the book or the author, and it didn't look like the kind of book I like, but I picked it up. Before I finished the first sentence I was hooked! This book is the best book I've ever read. I asked my friend Bob who this James D. Macdonald who wrote The Apocalypse Door is, but he didn't know. Can anyone tell me who he is?! I must know if he wrote anything else, because I'm going to buy it! This is the best book I've ever read, and James D. Macdonald has to be the best author writing in English today! I can't believe that he isn't on the top of the New York Times Best Seller Chart! I'm going to have a sex change operation just so I can bear his love child!

I'm going to go over to Amazon.com right now and write a five-star review of this book. Everyone should go over there and write a five star review! Then I'm going to nominate it for a Hugo, a Nebula, an Edgar, a Howie, and a Rita. Then I'm going to read it again! The Apocalypse Door (by James D. Macdonald, a person I don't even know) is that perfect book that everyone will love!!!! You can get it at Amazon.com, at Barnes&Noble, or special order it at your local bookstore! It's got an ISBN of 0312869886 (you'll need that to special order it). Don't forget to review it at Amazon, because you'll be totally amazed by this wonderful book by an author I'd never heard of before today!!!!!

Posted July 10, 2003 1:37 AM by James D. Macdonald

James, that is a work of art.

Would you permit me to make one small alteration? That should be "It's got an ISBN number of 0312869886."

Posted July 10, 2003 9:10 AM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

By the by, I love the "recent comments" feature, else I'd never have seen these last two comments. (OTOH, it seems there might be some disemvoweling called for over on the old "saints" thread.)

Perhaps I'll see you all at Readercon on Sunday?

Posted July 10, 2003 10:08 AM by Kate Nepveu

Miss T: By all means, make the change. (That's why you're an editor, right?)

BTW, at Readercon I'll be reading from the sequel to The Apocalypse Door (Buy one! better still, buy a dozen! And write a review! Five stars, remember?)

Posted July 10, 2003 10:22 AM by James D. Macdonald

Alas, I won't be at Readercon on Friday, so I'll miss the reading. (And of course I'll write a review of it when it comes out--I pride myself on having got several people to read the first.)

Posted July 10, 2003 10:31 AM by Kate Nepveu

My experience so far is that money flows away from the author in specialized non-fiction as fast as it can go. I just got the bill for a bunch of material I want to quote in my book on Tolkien and war -- between the fact that neither my publisher nor my department will pay the permission fees, and the rather high price my publisher plans to charge for my book, I will be very lucky to break even. Well, it's tenure I'm aiming for, not riches, but riches would be very nice indeed.

Posted July 10, 2003 10:42 AM by Janet Croft

I see what you mean about the identical praise. I saw that "Mortimer Glatzbier" letter before, but the last time I saw it, the writer was "Debra Doyle".

Posted July 10, 2003 3:21 PM by Glenn Hauman

Wow. This comments section is both informative AND entertaining. Thanks for the info - I'm a moderately successful cartoonist, but just finished my first manuscript (and hopefully novel somewhere down the line). I've seen plenty of info on POD services, but this takes the cake. Once again, to the whole crowd, thanks.

Posted July 15, 2003 3:06 PM by J. Grant

Experience mocks me. The major drawback of even the best service PODs is that you can't price your book to compete with the trades. PODs start at $15.95 for any decent length novel. Compare that to $8.95 or $10.95 from Tor or Penguin for a trade paperback. And you're an unknown quantity to boot--even if you're a decent writer.

And then...what do I find? This.

$24? Used?

As C3PO said, we seem to be made to suffer.

Posted July 16, 2003 11:52 AM by John Farrell

But John, it's a good book. I've seen cases similar to yours where the book was priced at less than four dollars. I can readily imagine some future universe in which the first edition of Dr. Janeway's Plague is a pricey collectible.

It's true that you can't get the low per-unit cover prices of conventional publishing. No way around that, this year at any rate.

J. Grant, you're welcome, and good luck.

Posted July 19, 2003 8:01 AM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Teresa,
:)

BTW, are you still thinking of doing something with pineapples? (Soak 'em in Stoli!).

Posted July 24, 2003 12:10 PM by John Farrell

I appreciate all of the comments and great info about PODs. I have a question that I am almost afraid to ask but I have no idea where else to ask it if not here.

How can you be sure that your POD publisher is paying you accurately. I am awaiting my second quarter check and I cannot help but be concerned that it won't be right. I say this because a friend of mine discovered by accident that he had been shorted on his fourth quarter check for 2002.

Is there a way I can audit the sales to compare to the report?

Posted August 6, 2003 9:23 PM by April Fields

Alas, if your publisher pays on "net," that'll be difficult at best. Payments on net are an invitation to fraud. See, for example, all the Hollywood stories about payments on "net," where the studio proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that no movie ever made has shown a net profit.

If your contract allows it, you can hire an accountant to audit the publisher. Alas, many PoD presses have non-standard contracts which may not allow that recourse. Usually, if the audit shows an error above a certain threshold the publisher has to a) pay the royalties, and b) pay for the audit.

You usually don't wind up auditing your publisher until after you've decided that you don't want to get published by them ever again.

Standard, legitimate publishers pay royalties on cover price. That's pretty easy to figure out, and there are ways to find out how many copies sold that don't rely 100% on the publisher's say-so.

Posted August 6, 2003 10:52 PM by James D. Macdonald

Addendum: You can call Ingram's at (615) 213-6803 (have your ISBN handy) to find out how many copies of your book they shipped.

That won't be iron-clad, since it only tracks books that moved through Ingram, but it's a start.

Posted August 6, 2003 11:03 PM by James D. Macdonald

Addendum #2: April, that Amazon Sales Rank of 66,194 is very impressive.

Here's more on 1st Books, from a comparison shopping guide to the various vanity PoDs: http://www.booksandtales.com/pod/1stbooks.htm

You'll notice that the reviewer says "They pay royalties according to an "Author Payment Schedule" that must be signed separately (hopefully) and is not explained in their contract. This can cause some serious trouble somewhere down the road" and "Their royalty payment system is too convoluted for my liking. You have no way of knowing how much you are getting." So what you're concerned about is a known problem.

Posted August 7, 2003 12:44 AM by James D. Macdonald

Thanks for the reply James.

My book went live last October and I knew from day one that I would be the one to promote it. But it is a NF and has a target market so I was pretty sure I could do the job. My efforts and strategies have paid off. At this point, I don't even know how many websites are selling my book. I find new ones every day. This is one of the reasons I am anxious to see my second quarter check from 1st Books.

So, you are saying that an Amazon rank of 66,000 is good? Good grief, in recent months it has been as low as 7,200. For several days it hovered in the 30,000 range and before that it was in the 27,000 range for a week. The articles I write seem to effect the numbers, but I am new to this game and I really have no idea what the Amazon ranking means.

I had to laugh at the discussion about author reviews. I have five reviews in Amazon and I didn't solicit any of them. It's embarrassing to me because when I read them it sounds like I might have written them (except for maybe one). What I don't understand is why one person wrote two, back to back. It makes no sense. I don't recognize the name so she didn't buy it from me directly. It's not that I don't appreciate the good feed back, but if I was going to write one I could come up with something different. Here's a laugh, I didn't realize I could write one. How do you get around the name recognition cookie?

Since we are on the topic, let me say that I knew, going in, that 1st Books was a self-published venture. A lot of starry-eyed wanna-bees buy into the hype. But I've been involved in publishing in a former incarnation and I just wanted to get my book out there quickly and I wanted to have editorial control as well as the photography. But, more importantly I had no idea how long it would take to do it and I didn't want a deadline. It took me seven months to complete the manuscript and the only deadline I had was the one I imposed on myself.

What I didn't do was buy all the promotion packages because I knew the direction I was going with the book and I know how to write press releases. I have to say that I've learned a lot in the past year. It's been an interesting journey. I could share some things - to do and not. What I need now is to learn more about the actual process of how the book is wholesaled. My knowledge about Ingram and the part they play in POD distribution has gaping holes in it.

I thought that my book was purchased from 1st Books because it is not warehoused. So where does Ingram come in? Does this mean that all the places that purchase to resell buy through Ingram and Ingram purchases from 1st Books?

Posted August 7, 2003 7:30 AM by April Fields

On the Ingram's thing: http://special.lightningsource.com/link/ingram.asp

You know how the various PoDs say in their sales copy that their books are distributed through Ingram's and Baker & Taylor and so on? Bookstores don't order through fifty-thousand different publishers, they order through a couple of distributors. Saying that a book is listed with Ingram or Baker & Taylor is the same as saying "Available for sale."

Your book falls in the category of "specialized non-fiction" that does particularly well when self-published (as opposed to self-pubished novels). The Amazon numbers are a bit inflated when compared to other books, since on-line is about the only way it'll sell, as opposed to mostly selling in bookstores with the overage coming through Amazon. But still, 66K is respectable, and 7,200 is outstanding.

Amazon reviews have tightened up a lot, since they started only accepting reviews from accounts that have at least bought something from Amazon. If you have two credit cards, and two e-mail addresses (hello, Hotmail!) you can have two review-capable accounts going. And so on. Like I said, things were formerly more wild-and-wooly. Nowadays it's a bit more limited, though not immune to cheating. As to why someone posted the same review twice -- that reviewer pressed the button, saw that the review didn't go up (they don't get published instantly) and tried again. Nothing sinister there.

As to what to do now, have you considered taking a a printout of your page from Amazon showing that nice 66K sales rank, and writing a letter to St. Martin's (the nice people who publish the Atkins Diet) or John Wiley & Sons, or some other nice, respectable able-to-get-books-into-stores publisher that handles non-fiction? I'm sure that arrangements can be made to get out of your 1stBooks contract.

(Yeah, yeah, I know, St. Martin's doesn't take unsolicited manuscripts. When you write your letter, and they write back saying "Sure, send us your book," all of a sudden it is solicited.)

Posted August 7, 2003 11:41 AM by James D. Macdonald

have you considered taking a a printout of your page from Amazon showing that nice 66K sales rank, and writing a letter to St. Martin's

A friend of mine currently has the number one HIPAA book in the country - self published through his own company. When it hit number one, he got a phone call from the big New York publisher who turned it down. He is now negotiating with them for other books.

Going to St. Martins or someone else is a good idea.

Posted August 7, 2003 12:21 PM by Jeff Crook

I've just added 101 Low Carb Dessert Recipes to Junglescan. (That's one way to get a record of sales history using the Amazon dipstick.) http://1.junglescan.com/scan/details.php?asin=1403360421

(My most recent book is here so you can see how this works.)

Posted August 7, 2003 1:36 PM by James D. Macdonald

The unsolicited reviews saying "Holy cow, these all taste really good!" are persuasive. Even the twin reviews from one reviewer look good; it means she was so thoroughly sold on the book that she wrote a second review from scratch when she thought the first one hadn't gone through.

You have a finished book on a hot subject. It sells better when you publish articles mentioning it, which I'd take to mean that when people know it exists, they want a copy. Definitely, send it around and see what happens. If you really loathe the cover, put a plain paper wrapper around the book with the title and your name printed on it.

And by the way, taking seven months to write a book doesn't put you at the slow end of the bell curve.

Onward to the question of your royalties. Jim's right about distributors. Your publisher won't be handling all those little orders and shipping arrangements. The great majority of these publishers just shovel their titles into Ingram, Baker & Taylor, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble Online. Maybe they hit a few more distributors and online booksellers, but that's about it. They don't field a real sales force.

The question is, how many outfits ship copies of your books, and who are they? If your royalty reports broke out your sales by account, and you knew for sure that the reported royalties for a particular quarter were honest, you could take the percentage of them that were sold by Ingram during that period, and see whether your latest quarter's sales made through Ingram represent roughly the same percentage of the whole. If Baker & Taylor also let you check your sales numbers, that would make your estimate more accurate.

But that's unlikely, so you're probably left with methods that are even rougher and more approximate. For instance: you also sell copies of your book, yes? Has the way you sell them changed from one quarter to another? If not, the sales made through your publisher should be behaving in a more or less similar fashion.

Another thing to look for is unexplained fluctuations. If your sales have been gradually increasing, you'd want to look closely at a quarter where they showed an inexplicable drop, especially if they return to their previous level the quarter after that.

I have no idea what to do if your royalties are calculated from net profit rather than cover price. Nobody but the company can tell what their net profit is.

Posted August 7, 2003 2:11 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Since this thread is still active, I thought I would throw this in here:

CafePress is now getting into publishing, in what looks like, to me, a POD model. http://www.cafepress.com/cp/info/sell/books.aspx

However, they've been pushing back the available date since I've been looking at that page (and right now it still says Aug. 4), so I'm not sure how well things are going. The prices look pretty reasonable to me, though.

I've only bought one thing through CafePress (a "Still Not King" mug), so I can't vouch for their service extensively, but this seems like it's worth keeping an eye on.

Posted August 7, 2003 4:47 PM by Kate Nepveu

you'd want to look closely at a quarter where they showed an inexplicable drop

I tend to follow the Amazon rankings as a measure of how my books are selling overall. So it was with some surprise that I had an explosion of returns of my second book last quarter, while it remains the best ranked of the three on Amazon.

Posted August 7, 2003 5:22 PM by Jeff Crook

Hooboy, I have had a long, hard day and reading all these responses is both enormously gratifying and putting me over the edge into a completely overwhelmed brain dead heap. I might have to digest all this tomorrow with my first cup of coffee.

I will say this, I cannot tell you how excited I am to find intelligent, positive people who have REAL information. I've been flying blind since October, doing all the things I knew to do, lucking out in some cases with nothing more than ignorance as my guiding force. For example, I had no idea that POD's were treated by brick and mortar book