The way that you get published doesn’t determine if your book is genuine or not.
I get this question regularly: should I seek an agent, or go straight to a press? Other authors wonder if becoming an author-publisher makes sense. I don’t know how it helps anybody to answer the question by saying “It depends.”
“Oh no,” some authors try to say, “you didn’t have a bona-fide book. You paid to have it published.”
Better not tell Professor Strunk’s estate about that belief. Yes, the author of The Elements of Style, the original writer, released his book that was “printed at the author’s expense.”
And yet here we are, a century later and claiming that the zero-investment model is the only one that’s not a cheat. Except it’s just not as simple as “I paid nothing to have that book published.” Right? Because if it was that simple, then the $800 indexing fee that an author of a nonfiction book pays for, usually themselves — well, that $800 is a little hybrid. The litmus test is not the scott-free nature of publishing.
Now, a traditional press will usually still make you pay for an index, regardless of your subject or the term of your relationship with them. What you learn after awhile is that libraries like to buy nonfiction books with an index. You also learn that the college presses tell authors to pay for an index, almost reflexively. I must say, the toughest contract you’re likely to see is the first offering from a college press. Some start by taking your copyright, if you sign without getting good advice and redlining.
Pro distribution does make a difference in how many books get sold. We all want readers, don’t we? If our costs are nothing, but the book vanishes in the maw of Amazon or the remainder racks of a bookstore, then what the traditional author gets is the good feeling of being traditional. It all depends on the caliber of the book. And in a market now where self-published titles can earn ancillary rights contracts, the line is disappearing altogether. It doesn’t make much difference if you’ve got 20 books or two. Things are changing for the companies that publish in overseas translations, audio rights, or dare we hope, film and TV. Self-pub to traditional is a rising strategy.
How things work now
Here’s how the process works today, based on my reporting from published authors of all kinds. They pay for a development edit or even a line edit, before the agent even sees the book. Or they invest in the same, before going to the publisher, if they go straight to a press and are trying to get a first book published. (This, apparently, is not paying to have your book published.) Maybe there are some books that don’t need any pro editing prior to submission. When you get deep enough into nonfiction, the publisher is just delighted anybody is writing well about the subject at hand. Photography, history: the author only invests in the research and the indexing.
What has been galling, to me, is the rush that I see to say “those hybrids cheat people” — when stories abound where traditional publishers cheat an author. Or go bust owing royalties. Or there’s a distributor like SPD that goes belly up, and then nobody gets paid: not publishers, not authors. Thousands of them, in the SPD saga of this year. But because they follow an accepted and hide-bound model, they are somehow supposed to be a better publisher. Or at least different, until you start adding up profits and sales. Yes, get an attorney to read your contract. Go ahead and sign if you feel better about your book’s prospects and can find proof the press can keep a book in midlist, selling.
The difference, as I see it, is that authors can invest nothing in traditional books. The nonfiction authors sometimes sell 400 books and can hardly cover their costs of indexing. In fiction, of course, they’re in profit once sales begin, depending on the terms of the contract, so long as they don’t mind the risk of having their books locked up in a press with no system to sell them. There are other kinds of presses. Stories are legion, though, of good-enough publishing in traditionals, where experienced authors keep looking for a press that knows how to get a book discovered and keep it selling.
I respect every author who ever won a contract for a book, and admire the ones who made any money on them. The ranks of authors who got nothing out of a book deal with a traditional house, except for 24 books for their own use — well, that’s a huge list. Every one of them figured the deal would be better going in, didn’t they?
I love to hear from any author about their experience with distributors. It’s plain that the distributor is a player in the publishing game working on both the hybrid and traditional sides. Let’s try to erase “cheat” from the hybrid experience — or just add that word to the lexicon of traditional, until there are no cheating publishers at all.
