Every wary writer will have heard of vanity publishing. It occupies the shadier side of the publishing business, and involves less-than-scrupulous publishers charging writers for publication. In vanity publication, the quality of the work is never considered, just the willingness and ability of the writers concerned to hand over large chunks of their cash. The books are often shoddily produced and rarely make any decent level of sales: the good writing is published alongside the bad, and while the vanity publishers make money out of the deal, the writers almost never do.
Jonathon Clifford came up with the term of "vanity publishing" a few decades ago, and has worked ever since to expose the truth about vanity publishing. He's written numerous articles about vanity publishing for the mainstream press, and is widely acknowledged as the primary expert on this nasty subject.
My thanks to him for this post.
As an aspiring author it isn’t writing your book that is the problem, it is when (without guidance) you come to search for a publisher that you risk being ensnared by those determined to take your money while giving you little or nothing in return.
So who am I to offer you guidance?
For eighteen years I have carried out a one-man campaign to clean up the world of vanity publishing. During that time I have been sent copies of hundreds of their promotional letters, editorial reports, quotations and contracts. Through this material it has been proved to the satisfaction of the courts that many vanity publishers are guilty of “gross misrepresentation of their services”. As a result many authors have—with my advice—successfully sued the vanity publisher with whom they had become embroiled.
In 1996 I was invited to our House of Lords for lunch to speak about the need to change the law to control vanity publishing. Fifty-eight Members of Parliament answered my call for support, but it wasn’t until 2008 that the law had been sufficiently altered to allow those bodies who wished to take action against dishonest vanity publishers. In 2000 I organised an Awareness Campaign backed by a website and free advice pack (which may be freely downloaded from my website) giving advice on Finding a Mainstream Publisher, Internet Publishing, the Market for Short Stories, Self-Publishing, Copy Editing, Proof Reading and Vanity Publishing
I have also made programmes for both regional and national BBC and Commercial TV, have taken part in a host of national and regional radio programmes and there have been articles about my work in magazines and newspapers both in the UK and around the world.
How (very easily) can you be taken in?
You find an advertisement in a newspaper or magazine which asks for manuscripts to be submitted. You send off yours and it is ‘accepted’.
But you do not appreciate that almost anyone who submits anything gets it accepted and, in the euphoria of that ‘acceptance’, your brain goes out of the window! You do not see the £ sign followed by the noughts. You fail to remember (if you ever knew) that the only publishers who ever advertise for authors are vanity publishers who are there to make money out of the unsuspecting author, not from the sale of copies of the books they publish - for once they have received your final payment they have all the money they are going to make out of you and promotion and marketing would cost some of it.
Along with the ‘acceptance’ of your manuscript you must also wary of two other phrases: ‘Print-on-Demand’ and ‘Self-Publisher’.
The honest print-on-demand outlet is extremely useful, but it is a phrase that can be misleading. If the publisher does not implement an effective promotion and marketing strategy for your book there is little or no demand for it, other than from your own efforts. He can then quite legally print only the very few copies ordered by your friends and family—whatever you may have paid!
Self-publishing cannot by definition be done for you by a third party and there have already been cases in the UK where vanity publishers masquerading as ‘Self-Publishers’ have been taken to task by the Advertising Standards Authority.
However the required payment is described, it is you who are going to pay for your book—not (as you are led to believe) a part of, or a share of, or a subsidy towards, but all of the cost plus a handsome profit and once it has been ‘published’ it will no doubt simply disappear into the woodwork.
Publishing your book should be an enjoyable and stimulating experience, not the fiendish nightmare created by so many vanity publishers. So before you answer an advertisement, go to my website and request a copy of my Advice Pack which is available to all—at no cost.
© Johnathon Clifford May 2009
Showing posts with label subsidy publishing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label subsidy publishing. Show all posts
Saturday, 6 June 2009
Monday, 4 May 2009
Vanity Presses: Might They Steal Your Work?
I've been alerted to an anonymous complaint concerning a UK vanity press.
It concerns a writer who withdrew his submission as soon as he realised that he was dealing with a vanity press rather than a mainstream publisher. He asked for his material to be returned: but he's alleging that now publication is no longer an option the vanity press is ignoring all his attempts to contact it and has not returned any of the materials he supplied, despite repeated requests for it to do so.
Now, in this writer's situation I wouldn't be too worried: I'm sure he won't have been foolish enough to send in his only copy of the material, so he should still have a copy at home, safe and sound, to submit to somewhere more reputable; and this vanity press isn't going to publish his book unless he pays for it to do so, as it just doesn't have the sales channels available to make money by actually selling copies of it like good publishers do.
However, if you have had similar (or more sinister) problems with a vanity publisher I'd really like to hear from you, either in the comments to this thread or by email. You can reach me on "hprw at tesco dot net", and I'll keep all correspondence confidential.
It concerns a writer who withdrew his submission as soon as he realised that he was dealing with a vanity press rather than a mainstream publisher. He asked for his material to be returned: but he's alleging that now publication is no longer an option the vanity press is ignoring all his attempts to contact it and has not returned any of the materials he supplied, despite repeated requests for it to do so.
Now, in this writer's situation I wouldn't be too worried: I'm sure he won't have been foolish enough to send in his only copy of the material, so he should still have a copy at home, safe and sound, to submit to somewhere more reputable; and this vanity press isn't going to publish his book unless he pays for it to do so, as it just doesn't have the sales channels available to make money by actually selling copies of it like good publishers do.
However, if you have had similar (or more sinister) problems with a vanity publisher I'd really like to hear from you, either in the comments to this thread or by email. You can reach me on "hprw at tesco dot net", and I'll keep all correspondence confidential.
Thursday, 16 April 2009
Self-Publishing vs Vanity Publishing
Self-publishing and vanity publishing can be very difficult to tell apart.
There are marked similarities between them: both often involve little or no editorial selection or input; both usually produce books which are difficult to market or sell effectively; and very few books from either sector make a decent number of sales. But there are differences too.
Self-publishing involves a writer publishing their own book, and controlling everything from the content to the sales. So the imprint on the copyright page has to be theirs, and not that of the publishing service they’re using. The copyright statement refers directly to them, or indirectly by referring to the copyright holder (who happens to be them), and not to the publisher or printer. If a book is published with someone else’s imprint on the title page, it can’t logically be self-published, right? Further, the self-published writer maintains control of the editing, production, PR and sales processes all the way along: while they might pay other people to do some of the work for them—like editing or design—they project-manage the whole thing. This means that at any stage in the process the self-publisher knows exactly what’s happening with their book, how many copies are printed or sold, and how much profit or loss has been incurred as a result.
As I’ve written before, a vanity publisher is defined as a publisher which makes the majority of its money from its writers rather than its readers, whether by up-front charges or through selling books back to them once the book is published (which is how PublishAmerica does business). It’s a question of focus here, and websites are a good source of information: if the publisher focuses on finding new readers to sell to, chances are it’s a mainstream house; if its focus is on impressing writers and getting them to submit then chances are it’s a vanity press. Writers who use a vanity publisher have little or no control of the publishing process, they usually don’t have easy access to sales or royalty figures, the imprint on the copyright page is rarely theirs (although I have seen this happen) and often the copyright statement doesn’t refer to them either. Then you can argue that there’s a question of intent on behalf of the vanity publisher; and a question of the author’s knowledge and understanding of the process—but those two points are much more difficult to quantify and establish, and sound either spiteful or insulting, depending on whether you’re the publisher or writer concerned, so I’m not too fond of them.
This is a difficult distinction to make. It’s made even more difficult by most of the vanity presses insisting they’re self-publishing service providers, subsidy or cooperative publishers, or are working to a new business model or other similar nonsense; and by writers not understanding that there are so many differences between mainstream, vanity and self-publication. Many organisations don’t distinguish between vanity and self-publishing: I remember hearing that the Arts Council, for example, lumps them in together. But I know of several dedicated self-publishers who do very well for themselves; and I know of many writers who have been stung by vanity publishers and have been deeply hurt as a result.
There are marked similarities between them: both often involve little or no editorial selection or input; both usually produce books which are difficult to market or sell effectively; and very few books from either sector make a decent number of sales. But there are differences too.
Self-publishing involves a writer publishing their own book, and controlling everything from the content to the sales. So the imprint on the copyright page has to be theirs, and not that of the publishing service they’re using. The copyright statement refers directly to them, or indirectly by referring to the copyright holder (who happens to be them), and not to the publisher or printer. If a book is published with someone else’s imprint on the title page, it can’t logically be self-published, right? Further, the self-published writer maintains control of the editing, production, PR and sales processes all the way along: while they might pay other people to do some of the work for them—like editing or design—they project-manage the whole thing. This means that at any stage in the process the self-publisher knows exactly what’s happening with their book, how many copies are printed or sold, and how much profit or loss has been incurred as a result.
As I’ve written before, a vanity publisher is defined as a publisher which makes the majority of its money from its writers rather than its readers, whether by up-front charges or through selling books back to them once the book is published (which is how PublishAmerica does business). It’s a question of focus here, and websites are a good source of information: if the publisher focuses on finding new readers to sell to, chances are it’s a mainstream house; if its focus is on impressing writers and getting them to submit then chances are it’s a vanity press. Writers who use a vanity publisher have little or no control of the publishing process, they usually don’t have easy access to sales or royalty figures, the imprint on the copyright page is rarely theirs (although I have seen this happen) and often the copyright statement doesn’t refer to them either. Then you can argue that there’s a question of intent on behalf of the vanity publisher; and a question of the author’s knowledge and understanding of the process—but those two points are much more difficult to quantify and establish, and sound either spiteful or insulting, depending on whether you’re the publisher or writer concerned, so I’m not too fond of them.
This is a difficult distinction to make. It’s made even more difficult by most of the vanity presses insisting they’re self-publishing service providers, subsidy or cooperative publishers, or are working to a new business model or other similar nonsense; and by writers not understanding that there are so many differences between mainstream, vanity and self-publication. Many organisations don’t distinguish between vanity and self-publishing: I remember hearing that the Arts Council, for example, lumps them in together. But I know of several dedicated self-publishers who do very well for themselves; and I know of many writers who have been stung by vanity publishers and have been deeply hurt as a result.
Saturday, 28 March 2009
Tainted By Association
A little while ago I read a post on the Authonomy message board in which information was requested about a particular London-based publisher. Was it a legitimate publishing house? I did a little digging and realised I’d already checked out the same publisher for someone on the Absolute Write message board last summer.
On reading the publisher’s website I got the distinct impression that they were a pay-to-play publisher, although prices weren’t mentioned. Most of the site focussed on advising writers how to submit, and how to prepare their work for submission: but surely a publisher should focus on promoting the books they’ve already published? I emailed the publisher to find out more and their reply confirmed to me that they were, in fact, a vanity press. I posted this information at Absolute Write and thought no more of it until a few weeks later, when I received by email a threat of legal action against me. The person who made the threat worked for the publisher concerned, and was upset that I’d put his name up at Absolute Write.
I was happy to edit his name out of my original post: my objection wasn’t directed at him, but at the publishing company he worked for, which was charging writers to publish them; and I do prefer a quiet life. However, I did find it intriguing (and still do, hence this post) that while he asked me to edit his name out of my post, he didn’t make any objection at all to my identifying the company he worked for as a vanity press.
Now, why do you think that might have been?
On reading the publisher’s website I got the distinct impression that they were a pay-to-play publisher, although prices weren’t mentioned. Most of the site focussed on advising writers how to submit, and how to prepare their work for submission: but surely a publisher should focus on promoting the books they’ve already published? I emailed the publisher to find out more and their reply confirmed to me that they were, in fact, a vanity press. I posted this information at Absolute Write and thought no more of it until a few weeks later, when I received by email a threat of legal action against me. The person who made the threat worked for the publisher concerned, and was upset that I’d put his name up at Absolute Write.
I was happy to edit his name out of my original post: my objection wasn’t directed at him, but at the publishing company he worked for, which was charging writers to publish them; and I do prefer a quiet life. However, I did find it intriguing (and still do, hence this post) that while he asked me to edit his name out of my post, he didn’t make any objection at all to my identifying the company he worked for as a vanity press.
Now, why do you think that might have been?
Tuesday, 17 March 2009
Sales Statistics
There's a very useful analysis of self-publishing via the POD route on the Writer Beware website. While this extract discusses sales statistics, the complete article is far more extensive and essential reading for everyone who is considering self-publishing their work.
Sales Statistics
Despite some highly publicized successes, the average book from a POD service sells fewer than 200 copies--mostly to the authors and to "pocket" markets surrounding them--friends, family, local retailers who can be persuaded to place an order. According to the chief executive of POD service iUniverse, quoted in the New York Times in 2004, 40% of iUniverse's books are sold directly to authors.
POD services' own statistics support these low sales figures. AuthorHouse's online Fact Sheet, updated in September 2008, reported 36,823 authors and 45,993 titles. According to the New York Times, AuthorHouse reports selling more than 2.5 million books in 2008, which sounds like a lot, but averages out to around 54 sales per title.
iUniverse's most recent Facts and Figures sheet reports that the company published 22,265 titles through 2005, with sales of 3.7 million: an average of 166 sales per title. Obviously some titles can boast better sales (Amy Fisher's If I Knew Then sold over 32,000 copies)--but not many. According to a 2004 article in Publishers Weekly, only 83 of more than 18,000 iUniverse titles published during that year sold at least 500 copies. And in a 2008 article in The New York Times, iUniverse's VP, Susan Driscoll, admitted that most iUniverse authors sell fewer than 200 books.
As of 2004, stats for Xlibris were similar. According to a Wall Street Journal article, 85% of its books had sold fewer than 200 copies, and only around 3%--or 352 in all--had sold more than 500 copies. Things looked up in 2007: according to Xlibris's own internal reports, recently obtained by Writer Beware, 4% of its titles had sold more than 1,000 copies. However, the averages still aren't good. As of mid-2007, Xlibris had 23,000 authors and had published 23,500 titles, with total sales of over 3 million--around 127 sales per title.
Once independent companies, AuthorHouse, iUniverse, and Xlibris are now all owned by the same company, Author Solutions. In a New York Times article published in early 2009, Kevin Weiss, Author Solutions' CEO, put the average sales of titles from any of the company's brands at around 150.
Lulu.com, one of the most popular and cost-effective of the POD services and still independent despite the apparent trend toward consolidation among POD services, is explicit about its long tail business model. In a 2006 article in the Times UK, its founder identified the company's goal: "...to have a million authors selling 100 copies each, rather than 100 authors selling a million copies each." A Lulu bestseller is a book that sells 500 copies. There haven't been many of them.
Many thanks to Victoria Strauss for giving me permission to use this piece.
Sales Statistics
Despite some highly publicized successes, the average book from a POD service sells fewer than 200 copies--mostly to the authors and to "pocket" markets surrounding them--friends, family, local retailers who can be persuaded to place an order. According to the chief executive of POD service iUniverse, quoted in the New York Times in 2004, 40% of iUniverse's books are sold directly to authors.
POD services' own statistics support these low sales figures. AuthorHouse's online Fact Sheet, updated in September 2008, reported 36,823 authors and 45,993 titles. According to the New York Times, AuthorHouse reports selling more than 2.5 million books in 2008, which sounds like a lot, but averages out to around 54 sales per title.
iUniverse's most recent Facts and Figures sheet reports that the company published 22,265 titles through 2005, with sales of 3.7 million: an average of 166 sales per title. Obviously some titles can boast better sales (Amy Fisher's If I Knew Then sold over 32,000 copies)--but not many. According to a 2004 article in Publishers Weekly, only 83 of more than 18,000 iUniverse titles published during that year sold at least 500 copies. And in a 2008 article in The New York Times, iUniverse's VP, Susan Driscoll, admitted that most iUniverse authors sell fewer than 200 books.
As of 2004, stats for Xlibris were similar. According to a Wall Street Journal article, 85% of its books had sold fewer than 200 copies, and only around 3%--or 352 in all--had sold more than 500 copies. Things looked up in 2007: according to Xlibris's own internal reports, recently obtained by Writer Beware, 4% of its titles had sold more than 1,000 copies. However, the averages still aren't good. As of mid-2007, Xlibris had 23,000 authors and had published 23,500 titles, with total sales of over 3 million--around 127 sales per title.
Once independent companies, AuthorHouse, iUniverse, and Xlibris are now all owned by the same company, Author Solutions. In a New York Times article published in early 2009, Kevin Weiss, Author Solutions' CEO, put the average sales of titles from any of the company's brands at around 150.
Lulu.com, one of the most popular and cost-effective of the POD services and still independent despite the apparent trend toward consolidation among POD services, is explicit about its long tail business model. In a 2006 article in the Times UK, its founder identified the company's goal: "...to have a million authors selling 100 copies each, rather than 100 authors selling a million copies each." A Lulu bestseller is a book that sells 500 copies. There haven't been many of them.
Many thanks to Victoria Strauss for giving me permission to use this piece.
Saturday, 14 March 2009
The Big Question About Self Publishing Successes
If self-publishing is such a brilliant thing for a writer to do, why is it that most of the writers who are said to have achieved true success through self-publishing have only done so after their books have been republished by a mainstream publisher?
Tuesday, 24 February 2009
The Bookseller Blog: How Self-Publishing Really Works
I have another piece up on The Bookseller blog today called "How Self-Publishing Really Works" (catchy title, don't you think?), in which I discuss the differences between self-publishing and vanity publishing. I'll be posting something similar here in a week or two but I'd really like it if you'd comment over at The Bookseller in the meantime.
Thursday, 19 February 2009
Reverse-End Vanity Publishing
There are vanity publishers out there which insist that they are not vanity publishers because they don't charge their writers anything for publication. PublishAmerica, a notorious reverse vanity publisher, even pays its authors a token advance of one dollar in an attempt to signify its good intent.
As is so often the case, all is not necessarily what it appears.
A vanity publisher is one which makes the majority of its money from its authors, rather than from selling its books on to new readers. Ordinary vanity publishers do this by charging their writers fees upfront for publication, and often making further charges of extras that they consider optional, like editing, design, press release writing and distribution and so on—all of which are done as standard and for free by reputable mainstream publishers.
So how can a publisher which charges no upfront fees be considered a vanity press? Especially when, like PublishAmerica, it pays its authors an advance? Simple.
Instead of charging of those upfront fees, our reverse-end vanity publisher gets its authors to pay after the event, usually by persuading them to buy copies of their own books for resale, often at inflated prices. PublishAmerica does very well out of this business model: at the last count it claimed it had signed up over 35,000 happy writers. No wonder PublishAmerica’s CEO Willem Meiners can afford to fly a helicopter.
As is so often the case, all is not necessarily what it appears.
A vanity publisher is one which makes the majority of its money from its authors, rather than from selling its books on to new readers. Ordinary vanity publishers do this by charging their writers fees upfront for publication, and often making further charges of extras that they consider optional, like editing, design, press release writing and distribution and so on—all of which are done as standard and for free by reputable mainstream publishers.
So how can a publisher which charges no upfront fees be considered a vanity press? Especially when, like PublishAmerica, it pays its authors an advance? Simple.
Instead of charging of those upfront fees, our reverse-end vanity publisher gets its authors to pay after the event, usually by persuading them to buy copies of their own books for resale, often at inflated prices. PublishAmerica does very well out of this business model: at the last count it claimed it had signed up over 35,000 happy writers. No wonder PublishAmerica’s CEO Willem Meiners can afford to fly a helicopter.
Tuesday, 17 February 2009
YouWriteOn and The Bookseller Blog
Last week, I was invited to write a response to a piece on The Bookseller Blog about YouWriteOn's publishing scheme. My contribution has just gone up, and you can read it here.
Many thanks to all of you who provided information and helped with the research: naturally, I'm not going to out any of you here but you know who you are and your help is much appreciated.
I have two more pieces due to appear there over the next couple of weeks: they which discuss vanity publishing, self-publishing, and the growing involvement of mainstream publishers in such schemes. I'll provide links when they appear.
Many thanks to all of you who provided information and helped with the research: naturally, I'm not going to out any of you here but you know who you are and your help is much appreciated.
I have two more pieces due to appear there over the next couple of weeks: they which discuss vanity publishing, self-publishing, and the growing involvement of mainstream publishers in such schemes. I'll provide links when they appear.
Thursday, 5 February 2009
YouWriteOn and Arts Council England: What's The Connection?
There’s a lot of confusion over who runs YouWriteOn, and how it’s related to Arts Council England. People seem to think that YouWriteOn is run by Arts Council England, organised by Arts Council England, or part of Arts Council England in some other nebulous way, but this is not the case: YouWriteOn’s only apparent connection with Arts Council England is through the substantial funding it has received from that organisation.
Arts Council England’s funding has forged a link between Arts Council England and YouWriteOn which many people perceive as a stamp of legitimacy. When the YouWriteOn publishing scheme was first launched, there were writers who saw it as a chance to get published by Arts Council England; others felt reassured that the scheme had to be above-board because of Arts Council England’s apparent involvement. However, when Arts Council England was asked for clarification of its involvement in the publishing scheme it replied:
You’ll find Arts Council England’s letter reproduced in full in comment number 5 to this blog post. Soon after that letter appeared on the blog, a disclaimer was posted on YouWriteOn’s home-page which stated that its vanity publishing arm was separate from the Arts Council England-funded area of the site: that disclaimer has since been edited, but at the time of writing it reads,
Despite YouWriteOn apparently being taken to task by Arts Council England and instructed to distinguish between the Arts Council England-funded and vanity-funded areas of the site, the Arts Council England logo still appears at the top of every one of YouWriteOn’s web pages—including the pages which offer the vanity publishing packages.
Some writers have now contacted Arts Council England (and here's a handy list of its chief executives, just in case you were considering doing the same) to ask why it funds a vanity publisher, but have received what they consider to be less-than-satisfactory replies: while I’ll not reproduce them here, I suspect that anyone with a complaint would do better to contact the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the Government department to which Arts Council England reports: one of the ministers there is the rather effective Barbara Follett, who also happens to be married to a writer called Ken something-or-other.
It’s widely felt that it’s inappropriate for Arts Council England to be associated with a vanity publisher in this way: vanity publishing doesn’t support writers, it exploits them, and Arts Council England has apparently stated independently that it does not and will not condone such schemes. While I’ve been unable to find written evidence of this stance, it seems likely considering Arts Council England’s remit to support and encourage the arts. My opinion is that YouWriteOn should either accept funding from Arts Council England or continue its vanity publishing operation, but that it shouldn’t run the two projects side by side: there are too many conflicts of interest between them. But YouWriteOn is unlikely to give up its Arts Council England funding just because I think that it should, because there's too much at stake: it's received nearly £85,000 from Arts Council England in the last three and a half years (the following links will download PDFs when you click on them):
June 2005: £29,896
February 2007: £24,000
2007-8: £10,000
February 2008: £10,000
October 2008: £11,000
Total Arts Council funding received by YouWriteOn since June 2005: £84,896
I’m particularly interested by the £11,000 paid last October: the grants information form states that this amount was paid to Edward Smith of YouWriteOn.com to fund “A major new writing competition in partnership with Random House. This will give new writers the opportunity to have their books published by a major publisher”. I’m intrigued to know more about this competition: this funding was approved four months ago, and yet no announcement of any competition has yet been made. I wonder what Random House will have to say about that?
This Arts Council England funding, plus the £11,000 or so which YouWriteOn has received as a result of its vanity publishing operation, works out to a rather nice turnover of around £27,400 each year—impressive for a start-up business which seems to be run by just one man. It’s worth noting that there are a few layers of potential income that I’ve not included here:
Arts Council England’s funding has forged a link between Arts Council England and YouWriteOn which many people perceive as a stamp of legitimacy. When the YouWriteOn publishing scheme was first launched, there were writers who saw it as a chance to get published by Arts Council England; others felt reassured that the scheme had to be above-board because of Arts Council England’s apparent involvement. However, when Arts Council England was asked for clarification of its involvement in the publishing scheme it replied:
YouWriteOn.com receives funding from Arts Council England to run its website forum and professional critique service for writers.
Arts Council England has not funded, and has not endorsed, the separate Print-on-Demand self-publishing service offered through the site.
As with any self-publishing service, Arts Council England would encourage writers to read the terms and conditions carefully and make an informed judgement about the service on offer. If in doubt, you should contact the Society of Authors http://www.societyofauthors.org/ who have information sheets and guidance about self-publishing and vanity publishing.
We have asked the site moderator to make this absolutely clear, so that there is no confusion about the involvement of Arts Council England.
You’ll find Arts Council England’s letter reproduced in full in comment number 5 to this blog post. Soon after that letter appeared on the blog, a disclaimer was posted on YouWriteOn’s home-page which stated that its vanity publishing arm was separate from the Arts Council England-funded area of the site: that disclaimer has since been edited, but at the time of writing it reads,
The Arts Council fund critiques for new writers from leading publishers each month on YouWriteOn.com.YouWriteOn also offers its own book publishing initiative, funded solely by us.
Despite YouWriteOn apparently being taken to task by Arts Council England and instructed to distinguish between the Arts Council England-funded and vanity-funded areas of the site, the Arts Council England logo still appears at the top of every one of YouWriteOn’s web pages—including the pages which offer the vanity publishing packages.
Some writers have now contacted Arts Council England (and here's a handy list of its chief executives, just in case you were considering doing the same) to ask why it funds a vanity publisher, but have received what they consider to be less-than-satisfactory replies: while I’ll not reproduce them here, I suspect that anyone with a complaint would do better to contact the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the Government department to which Arts Council England reports: one of the ministers there is the rather effective Barbara Follett, who also happens to be married to a writer called Ken something-or-other.
It’s widely felt that it’s inappropriate for Arts Council England to be associated with a vanity publisher in this way: vanity publishing doesn’t support writers, it exploits them, and Arts Council England has apparently stated independently that it does not and will not condone such schemes. While I’ve been unable to find written evidence of this stance, it seems likely considering Arts Council England’s remit to support and encourage the arts. My opinion is that YouWriteOn should either accept funding from Arts Council England or continue its vanity publishing operation, but that it shouldn’t run the two projects side by side: there are too many conflicts of interest between them. But YouWriteOn is unlikely to give up its Arts Council England funding just because I think that it should, because there's too much at stake: it's received nearly £85,000 from Arts Council England in the last three and a half years (the following links will download PDFs when you click on them):
June 2005: £29,896
February 2007: £24,000
2007-8: £10,000
February 2008: £10,000
October 2008: £11,000
Total Arts Council funding received by YouWriteOn since June 2005: £84,896
I’m particularly interested by the £11,000 paid last October: the grants information form states that this amount was paid to Edward Smith of YouWriteOn.com to fund “A major new writing competition in partnership with Random House. This will give new writers the opportunity to have their books published by a major publisher”. I’m intrigued to know more about this competition: this funding was approved four months ago, and yet no announcement of any competition has yet been made. I wonder what Random House will have to say about that?
This Arts Council England funding, plus the £11,000 or so which YouWriteOn has received as a result of its vanity publishing operation, works out to a rather nice turnover of around £27,400 each year—impressive for a start-up business which seems to be run by just one man. It’s worth noting that there are a few layers of potential income that I’ve not included here:
- Its original vanity-publishing package, which it runs in association with Legend Press, costs £399, £699, £899 or £1,499, depending on which package you choose.
- YouWriteOn runs a paid-for critiquing service: prices start at £75 for a short story of up to 3,000 words, and then increase with your page count: a report on a 400-page novel would set you back £550. Writers are asked to state which three advisors they'd prefer to comment on their work: while the people who provide these reports do seem reputable and experienced (although I haven't checked out any of the names), I could find no guarantee that anyone would get the advisor(s) they requested.
- It’s not yet clear how many books YouWriteOn/Legend has vanity-published at £39.99 each and it seems that not all books have yet been published, so the initial income from this will almost certainly reach a figure higher than the £10,906.35 I quoted yesterday.
- YouWriteOn will continue to earn money from every one of the sales of those vanity-published books as their writers work to sell them.
Meanwhile, I’ve found this quote about YouWriteOn and the man who runs it, Edward Smith, buried in the depths of this PDF from Arts Council England:
Edward Smith, YouWriteOn’s director, provided the design spec for the site, and manages it from day to day, with some support from web company ZARR. In terms of user experience, the site is clunky, full of broken links and difficult to navigate, with forums that mysteriously open at particular hours only. Nonetheless, YouWriteOn.com has 6,000 members, and receives millions of page views a month. There is clearly a hunger for these services. (Edward used to work in a Citizens Advice Bureau and sees his work as being about information and empowerment.)(Bolding mine: I added the link to YouWriteOn's "web company", too: perhaps it knows what's happened to the forum.)
Just yesterday, Tom Chalmers of Legend Press told The Bookseller that the project has "largely been a success". Meanwhile, there are many writers who Smith promised to publish in time for Christmas who, despite making numerous attempts to contact Smith, have still heard nothing from him, several weeks later. Many don’t know whether or not their books will even be published; and while several have now cancelled their contracts, few have received any confirmation of their cancellations, leaving them worried about the future of their books.
I wonder just how empowered they feel right now.
Monday, 2 February 2009
YouWriteOn’s Free Publishing Offer: An Update
Last autumn, YouWriteOn’s “free publishing deal” attracted a lot of attention from writers and industry watchdogs. It was discussed on several writers’ message boards; Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware blogged about it; and so did I.
The deeply sceptical felt that it was at best an ill-thought-out scheme or at worst, a cynical vanity publishing plan to separate naive writers from their money; the optimistic saw it as an innovative publishing scheme designed to break the mould of corporation-controlled publishing (in case you haven’t read my original posts, I fell in with the sceptics).
Publication was initially scheduled for the first week of December but as we moved into the second week of the month, only a tiny handful of writers had been notified that their books were available. Books trickled onto Amazon and Barnes & Noble—but only those written by authors who had paid what Ted was misleadingly referring to as the “distribution fee” (the £39.99 he had charged writers to assign an ISBN to their books): not a single book appeared from the writers who had chosen the free option.
YouWriteOn members began to post questions on the YouWriteOn message board, asking when their books would appear: but Ted Smith, who seems to run YouWriteOn single-handed, largely failed to respond directly to their questions: instead, he pointed out that publication by Christmas had always been an aim, but not a promise. When the level of complaints and in-fighting threatened to overrun the message board, Smith began deleting posts (including a few of mine); then he began deleting whole threads; and then, on December 19, he closed down the entire message board, supposedly for its brief annual Christmas break. The board remains closed to this day. It’s apparently undergoing upgrades. They had better be good.
What is YouWriteOn doing with this break from message board moderating? You’d think that it would be taking care of the legal obligations that come with running a reputable publishing company, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Last week a representative of the British Library confirmed to me that despite all publishers having a legal obligation to provide it with copies of all their books under the Legal Deposit scheme, YouWriteOn has not provided a single copy of any of its latest titles. And YouWriteOn can’t say that it was unaware of this obligation: it was discussed on the YouWriteOn board before the board was taken down, and in Absolute Write’s thread about YouWriteOn which Ted Smith has contributed to; and if that were not enough, the Legal Deposit team alerted YouWriteOn to its legal obligation last summer when it had to make an official request for one of YouWriteOn’s previous publications, when YouWriteOn failed to provide a copy within the legal deadline.
Meanwhile, what of YouWriteOn’s authors? As I write this, 192 books are listed under the YouWriteOn imprint on Amazon, and 273 on Barnes and Noble—although I’ve also noticed several YouWriteOn books listed without any imprint details, so the actual number will be higher.
Not one of those books that I’ve checked (and I've looked at over half of them) has any form of synopsis to tell the browsing reader what the book is about: and most of the jacket designs use the same standard template in purple, cream and black which is, I’m afraid, downright ugly; or an image of a blue planet, which renders the superimposed title illegible. So much for the ten foot rule.
I’ve spotted many errors in Amazon’s listings: one author’s first name was correctly given as Tamsin on her book jacket, but was listed as Jasmine in the Amazon details, which would have made searching for her by name impossible; there were several cases where the Amazon details referred to one book but a completely different book appeared in the cover image provided by YouWriteOn. Many more showed spelling errors in names and/or titles on the provided image of the book jackets, in the details provided to Amazon, or on both; and there were some particularly odd inversions of the authors names. Two authors have discovered that their titles, names and ISBNs are confused to such an extent they’re not sure which is their book, and which belongs to the other. Am I nitpicking? Hardly. Out of one hundred YouWriteOn books that I chose at random from Amazon UK two weeks ago, sixty seven had errors in the details provided to Amazon by YouWriteOn. Of those sixty seven books with errors, only one now shows corrected copy. The remaining errors are still in place.
One writer paid to have her cover professionally designed and, while the designers did a good job, all thirty of the copies which she ordered for her launch party arrived with a green stripe running across the cover, as did copies that her friends ordered at different times: which implies that this was not a printer malfunction, but an issue with the PDF held by Lightning Source—which was, of course, supplied by YouWriteOn.
At least she has a book, though: several writers have still heard nothing about their books’ status from YouWriteOn despite repeated requests for information. Writers who didn’t cough up for the “distribution fee” have been told that their books will be available to order from the YouWriteOn website on some unspecified date in the future and as the contract states that they won’t earn any royalties on copies they buy themselves, they have no real way to make money from the sales of their own books. Some writers have cancelled, but have received no confirmation that their cancellations have been received; and meanwhile, YouWriteOn has blithely announced on its own website that following the huge success of its publishing scheme it’s planning to open its doors to a new round of submissions in the spring.
I have to ask: a success for whom? Not for the writers who still have no idea when, or if, their books will published; nor for the writers whose books are incorrectly listed on Amazon. And while I’m genuinely pleased that some YouWriteOn writers are happy with their books, I wonder how well their books will do bearing in mind that YouWriteOn has provided these books with no editorial input or distribution whatsoever.
One thing that has been provided, though, is a nice big chunk of money to YouWriteOn: the authors of every single one of those 273 YouWriteOn books now showing on Barnes & Noble paid £39.99 to YouWriteOn to get them there: a total of £10,906.35, plus the income provided by the authors whose YouWriteOn books are listed as “imprint unknown”. That’s a very nice return for making a couple of slapdash downloads every day in the four months or so since this scheme launched: and it doesn’t take into account any of the money which YouWriteOn has earned on the back of the sales of these books. Is this vanity publishing? It certainly looks like it to me.
(Please note: I'd have liked to have linked to various posts at YouWriteOn's message board to provide my many sources for this piece, but as it's been taken down that's not possible; and while it might have been useful to link to some of the many errors I've seen on Amazon I didn't want the authors concerned to feel that I was poking fun at them: so I've decided not to highlight any individual books here.)
The deeply sceptical felt that it was at best an ill-thought-out scheme or at worst, a cynical vanity publishing plan to separate naive writers from their money; the optimistic saw it as an innovative publishing scheme designed to break the mould of corporation-controlled publishing (in case you haven’t read my original posts, I fell in with the sceptics).
Publication was initially scheduled for the first week of December but as we moved into the second week of the month, only a tiny handful of writers had been notified that their books were available. Books trickled onto Amazon and Barnes & Noble—but only those written by authors who had paid what Ted was misleadingly referring to as the “distribution fee” (the £39.99 he had charged writers to assign an ISBN to their books): not a single book appeared from the writers who had chosen the free option.
YouWriteOn members began to post questions on the YouWriteOn message board, asking when their books would appear: but Ted Smith, who seems to run YouWriteOn single-handed, largely failed to respond directly to their questions: instead, he pointed out that publication by Christmas had always been an aim, but not a promise. When the level of complaints and in-fighting threatened to overrun the message board, Smith began deleting posts (including a few of mine); then he began deleting whole threads; and then, on December 19, he closed down the entire message board, supposedly for its brief annual Christmas break. The board remains closed to this day. It’s apparently undergoing upgrades. They had better be good.
What is YouWriteOn doing with this break from message board moderating? You’d think that it would be taking care of the legal obligations that come with running a reputable publishing company, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Last week a representative of the British Library confirmed to me that despite all publishers having a legal obligation to provide it with copies of all their books under the Legal Deposit scheme, YouWriteOn has not provided a single copy of any of its latest titles. And YouWriteOn can’t say that it was unaware of this obligation: it was discussed on the YouWriteOn board before the board was taken down, and in Absolute Write’s thread about YouWriteOn which Ted Smith has contributed to; and if that were not enough, the Legal Deposit team alerted YouWriteOn to its legal obligation last summer when it had to make an official request for one of YouWriteOn’s previous publications, when YouWriteOn failed to provide a copy within the legal deadline.
Meanwhile, what of YouWriteOn’s authors? As I write this, 192 books are listed under the YouWriteOn imprint on Amazon, and 273 on Barnes and Noble—although I’ve also noticed several YouWriteOn books listed without any imprint details, so the actual number will be higher.
Not one of those books that I’ve checked (and I've looked at over half of them) has any form of synopsis to tell the browsing reader what the book is about: and most of the jacket designs use the same standard template in purple, cream and black which is, I’m afraid, downright ugly; or an image of a blue planet, which renders the superimposed title illegible. So much for the ten foot rule.
I’ve spotted many errors in Amazon’s listings: one author’s first name was correctly given as Tamsin on her book jacket, but was listed as Jasmine in the Amazon details, which would have made searching for her by name impossible; there were several cases where the Amazon details referred to one book but a completely different book appeared in the cover image provided by YouWriteOn. Many more showed spelling errors in names and/or titles on the provided image of the book jackets, in the details provided to Amazon, or on both; and there were some particularly odd inversions of the authors names. Two authors have discovered that their titles, names and ISBNs are confused to such an extent they’re not sure which is their book, and which belongs to the other. Am I nitpicking? Hardly. Out of one hundred YouWriteOn books that I chose at random from Amazon UK two weeks ago, sixty seven had errors in the details provided to Amazon by YouWriteOn. Of those sixty seven books with errors, only one now shows corrected copy. The remaining errors are still in place.
One writer paid to have her cover professionally designed and, while the designers did a good job, all thirty of the copies which she ordered for her launch party arrived with a green stripe running across the cover, as did copies that her friends ordered at different times: which implies that this was not a printer malfunction, but an issue with the PDF held by Lightning Source—which was, of course, supplied by YouWriteOn.
At least she has a book, though: several writers have still heard nothing about their books’ status from YouWriteOn despite repeated requests for information. Writers who didn’t cough up for the “distribution fee” have been told that their books will be available to order from the YouWriteOn website on some unspecified date in the future and as the contract states that they won’t earn any royalties on copies they buy themselves, they have no real way to make money from the sales of their own books. Some writers have cancelled, but have received no confirmation that their cancellations have been received; and meanwhile, YouWriteOn has blithely announced on its own website that following the huge success of its publishing scheme it’s planning to open its doors to a new round of submissions in the spring.
I have to ask: a success for whom? Not for the writers who still have no idea when, or if, their books will published; nor for the writers whose books are incorrectly listed on Amazon. And while I’m genuinely pleased that some YouWriteOn writers are happy with their books, I wonder how well their books will do bearing in mind that YouWriteOn has provided these books with no editorial input or distribution whatsoever.
One thing that has been provided, though, is a nice big chunk of money to YouWriteOn: the authors of every single one of those 273 YouWriteOn books now showing on Barnes & Noble paid £39.99 to YouWriteOn to get them there: a total of £10,906.35, plus the income provided by the authors whose YouWriteOn books are listed as “imprint unknown”. That’s a very nice return for making a couple of slapdash downloads every day in the four months or so since this scheme launched: and it doesn’t take into account any of the money which YouWriteOn has earned on the back of the sales of these books. Is this vanity publishing? It certainly looks like it to me.
(Please note: I'd have liked to have linked to various posts at YouWriteOn's message board to provide my many sources for this piece, but as it's been taken down that's not possible; and while it might have been useful to link to some of the many errors I've seen on Amazon I didn't want the authors concerned to feel that I was poking fun at them: so I've decided not to highlight any individual books here.)
Friday, 30 January 2009
Vanity Publishing vs Self-Publishing
It is difficult to separate vanity publishing from self-publishing. Where do you draw the line between the two?
Vanity publishers often insist that what they offer is serviced self-publishing. For a fee (often a high one) they offer services like editing, typesetting and design: the problem is that there are some very useful self-publishing service providers out there which also charge for those services but which don’t count as vanity publishers.
The imprint under which you’re published provides a useful (but not infallible) guide. If you pay anything towards your own publication, either up-front by way of fees for editing, an ISBN or printing, or at the back end of the equation by buying copies of your own books for resale, then if the book has the name of your own publishing company on the imprint page it’s likely that you self-published it, while if it has the name of the service-provider as the imprint you are definitely vanity-published.
And, while there’s nothing inherently wrong with paying for expert help, remember that real, commercial publishers provide everything at no cost to the writer: it's part of the package when they agree to publish a book. If you do hand money over to anyone, make sure that the people you’re paying really are experts in their field, are going to add real value to your book: and aren’t just charging you a high price for help you don’t really need.
Vanity publishers often insist that what they offer is serviced self-publishing. For a fee (often a high one) they offer services like editing, typesetting and design: the problem is that there are some very useful self-publishing service providers out there which also charge for those services but which don’t count as vanity publishers.
The imprint under which you’re published provides a useful (but not infallible) guide. If you pay anything towards your own publication, either up-front by way of fees for editing, an ISBN or printing, or at the back end of the equation by buying copies of your own books for resale, then if the book has the name of your own publishing company on the imprint page it’s likely that you self-published it, while if it has the name of the service-provider as the imprint you are definitely vanity-published.
And, while there’s nothing inherently wrong with paying for expert help, remember that real, commercial publishers provide everything at no cost to the writer: it's part of the package when they agree to publish a book. If you do hand money over to anyone, make sure that the people you’re paying really are experts in their field, are going to add real value to your book: and aren’t just charging you a high price for help you don’t really need.
Thursday, 20 November 2008
Special Christmas Offer!
Dear Author,
As Christmas approaches, we want to say thank you to our authors for all the wonderful support you’ve given us over this last year. So here's our latest special offer for you all.
For a limited time only, all our authors will be given AN INCREDIBLE FORTY-FIVE PERCENT DISCOUNT on all orders.
There’ll be FREE SHIPPING for all orders of twenty copies or more.
And if you order fifty copies or more, you'll get AN EXTRA FIVE PERCENT DISCOUNT across your whole order!
This one-off holiday offer has to expire at close of business on Friday. Don’t get left without books for Christmas: place your orders now, so that we can ensure your books are delivered in good time for the holiday season.
Thank you!
Your Author Support Team
You don't see Random House sending letters like this to the writers they publish. That's because Random House is a commercial, mainstream publisher which sells its books to readers, and not to the people who wrote them.
Special author promotions like this are a sure sign that you're dealing with a vanity publisher, and not with a mainstream publisher.
If you get a letter like this from your publisher, take a moment to consider that few self-published or vanity-published books ever sell as many as 100 copies before you take advantage of their offer. Because if you don't, you're likely to end up with some very expensive boxes stacked up in your hallway for the next couple of years.
Friday, 3 October 2008
How Vanity Publishers Hook You
It is daunting for an inexperienced writer to approach a commercial publisher direct. It’s difficult to find out who to submit to, and what those editors want to see. And once all that’s done, those editors aren’t often keen to chat. While commercial presses value their writers they don’t cosy up to them: they prefer business relationships with their writers, not instant friendships.
Vanity publishers, on the other hand, go out of their way to seem friendly and approachable to all the writers they can find. They indulge in cheerful chatter and use all sorts of techniques to encourage new writers to feel that they share a friendship, rather than a business relationship: they make their writers feel safe, special and valued right from that very first contact.
Vanity presses insist that the big publishers consider themselves too important to consider work from new, apparently insignificant writers. They foster the belief that commercial presses treat their writers badly, and that vanity publishing is the only way to proceed if a writer wants to be treated with any sort of respect. It’s difficult to face rejection, and the criticism that that implies. It’s not surprising that many writers don’t feel up to exposing themselves to it over and over again, and that when they find a press which seems to understand what they’re going through, and it is willing to take a chance on their writing, they decide that it must be a good one.
When they are eventually slapped with a demand for money they justify it in all sorts of ways. This publisher must be a good guy, they reason: it understands how difficult it is to get published, it’s prepared to give a chance to an unknown, and no one else will even consider them—which is what the publisher has told them, one way or another, right from that very first contact. The vanity publisher has made them feel safe, among friends, and appreciated, whereas the commercial publisher simply rejected their work.
Commercial presses aim to seduce their readers, not their writers, because that’s who they sell to, and that’s where they make their money: vanity presses focus their attentions on the writer, because that’s where their particular pot of gold lies.
Vanity publishers, on the other hand, go out of their way to seem friendly and approachable to all the writers they can find. They indulge in cheerful chatter and use all sorts of techniques to encourage new writers to feel that they share a friendship, rather than a business relationship: they make their writers feel safe, special and valued right from that very first contact.
Vanity presses insist that the big publishers consider themselves too important to consider work from new, apparently insignificant writers. They foster the belief that commercial presses treat their writers badly, and that vanity publishing is the only way to proceed if a writer wants to be treated with any sort of respect. It’s difficult to face rejection, and the criticism that that implies. It’s not surprising that many writers don’t feel up to exposing themselves to it over and over again, and that when they find a press which seems to understand what they’re going through, and it is willing to take a chance on their writing, they decide that it must be a good one.
When they are eventually slapped with a demand for money they justify it in all sorts of ways. This publisher must be a good guy, they reason: it understands how difficult it is to get published, it’s prepared to give a chance to an unknown, and no one else will even consider them—which is what the publisher has told them, one way or another, right from that very first contact. The vanity publisher has made them feel safe, among friends, and appreciated, whereas the commercial publisher simply rejected their work.
Commercial presses aim to seduce their readers, not their writers, because that’s who they sell to, and that’s where they make their money: vanity presses focus their attentions on the writer, because that’s where their particular pot of gold lies.
Monday, 22 September 2008
Remaindered Books
While sales of some long-published books are sometimes resurrected by a chance remark or a turn in world events, and a few continue to sell well for years, most books enjoy their highest sales during the few weeks immediately after publication.
Once that first flush of sales has passed, what happens to a book?
It becomes part of the publishers backlist: it will probably have turned a profit for the publisher already and so any further sales will provide a welcome income. If it continues to sell consistently, even in smaller numbers, chances are that it's publisher will keep it in print.
There is a cost to the publisher associated with the book: it isn't free to warehouse the remaining copies, and as numbers dwindle they become harder to locate and store, and more difficult to maintain in a clean, new condition. When the income generated by a title is exceeded by the cost of continuing to sell it, the book is declared out of print and all remaining stocks are disposed of.
Where possible, those remaining stocks are sold as "remaindered books" to the chains which specialise in this trade, like "The Works", in the UK: but if the titles don't have much popular appeal, then the last step for them is the pulping machine.
Once that first flush of sales has passed, what happens to a book?
It becomes part of the publishers backlist: it will probably have turned a profit for the publisher already and so any further sales will provide a welcome income. If it continues to sell consistently, even in smaller numbers, chances are that it's publisher will keep it in print.
There is a cost to the publisher associated with the book: it isn't free to warehouse the remaining copies, and as numbers dwindle they become harder to locate and store, and more difficult to maintain in a clean, new condition. When the income generated by a title is exceeded by the cost of continuing to sell it, the book is declared out of print and all remaining stocks are disposed of.
Where possible, those remaining stocks are sold as "remaindered books" to the chains which specialise in this trade, like "The Works", in the UK: but if the titles don't have much popular appeal, then the last step for them is the pulping machine.
Friday, 18 July 2008
Subsidy And Cooperative Publishing
It’s easy to understand how naïve writers are sometimes parted from their cash. Times are hard. This we know. So, when a publisher claims that print sales are not what they were, and that most publishers are struggling just to stay afloat, it’s easy to stretch that into believing that publishers could bring out just a few more titles each year if only they could share a little of the upfront investment—in return for which they’d be happy to share the resulting profits.
After all, why should the publisher shoulder all the risk? Shouldn’t the writer invest a little something too? By subsidising the cost of publishing their own book, or by taking part in the cooperative publication of their book, a writer will end up with their book in their hands which wouldn't otherwise have been published.
They will also be several hundreds of pounds poorer, because both these schemes are disguises for vanity presses, and don’t represent any sort of publishing credit. Their books are highly unlikely to be stocked by any real bookshop (online bookshops are another thing entirely). And they’ll be lucky if they sell even a hundred copies in the end.
Writers invest their time in the books that they write, and should not invest their money too. They take their share of the risk when they write their work. It’s a publisher’s job to pay for publication and if none are prepared to buy a particular book, then it’s because the book just isn’t good enough to sell.
After all, why should the publisher shoulder all the risk? Shouldn’t the writer invest a little something too? By subsidising the cost of publishing their own book, or by taking part in the cooperative publication of their book, a writer will end up with their book in their hands which wouldn't otherwise have been published.
They will also be several hundreds of pounds poorer, because both these schemes are disguises for vanity presses, and don’t represent any sort of publishing credit. Their books are highly unlikely to be stocked by any real bookshop (online bookshops are another thing entirely). And they’ll be lucky if they sell even a hundred copies in the end.
Writers invest their time in the books that they write, and should not invest their money too. They take their share of the risk when they write their work. It’s a publisher’s job to pay for publication and if none are prepared to buy a particular book, then it’s because the book just isn’t good enough to sell.
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