Sunday, February 19, 2012

POD Publishing Gone Horribly Wrong

What can I say about my publisher, XXX Books, who have just closed their doors?  Not much of any good.  The warning signs were there but I chose to ignore them.  What were they?
(Note: This incident happen six years ago, but still applies today)

*  XXX Books had a non-negotiable contract from the start.  My agent could not get them to budge on one item.
*  They paid no advance.
*  They paid 12% on NET royalties.
*  They barraged the author with self-promotion emails, tactics and rules.
*  They required a friends/family/relatives list for the initial sales push, identicle to Publish America's spam campaign.
*  They lied about having two dozen book stores as partners. 
*  They had zero distribution--they sold from their website exclusively for three years before they made the step to Amazon.  Then the books became unavailable via 'out-of-stock' notices to Amazon.
*  Retail book prices were as high or higher than the worst vanity printer on the internet--Publish America.  They even surpassed hardback prices.
*  Postage costs of the books from Canada made sales prohibitive, and sometimes were higher in cost than the books themselves.  It was only until the end of the company where the postage cost was reduced to a flat five dollars per title.
*  My royalty payments rolled over each quarter.  I was never paid a dime for both books for over a year, and have not been paid to this day.
*  They claimed to use offset technology, with first print runs of 1,500.  They lied.  They were POD all along.
*  Review copies were never sent out.  This was after 60 copies were requested from major review sources (in my case).
*  There was no fundamental or content editing whatsoever.  The editing that was provided was done by amateurs, who left literally hundreds of mistakes in the text.  The editors were paid by credit/byline only.
*  The book formats were atrocious--wraparound text, breaks, sentence omissions, paragraph and chapter misalignment, wrong font size, ragged right hand margins, etc.
*  Author self-purchase emails and notices were sent regularly.  The author's discounts were the lowest ever seen in the industry--20% at first, and then later 30%.  Until the blowout closing sale of 50% off.
*  No ARCs or galleys.  Straight PDF dump to the printer.
*  Sub-standard clip art.  Your front cover was NOT negotiable.  Your suggestions were all but ignored after your first complaint.
*  Late or no delivery of books.  The U.S. postal service was blamed for missing books or late books.
*  No promotion, marketing, conferences, festivals, show attendance--no effort to sell to the outside markets was evident.
*  Authors were continually berated for failing to self-promote.
*  Email threats.
*  Lies about car crashes, family and personal illnesses.
*  Claims that bookstores were the least favorable place to sell books.  The internet was stressed as the premiere sales source.
*  Zero trade reviews--Booklist, Kirkus, Publisher's Marketplace, NYT.

IN MY ESTIMATION, XXX PUBLISHING OF CANADA SURPASSED THE UNSCRUPULOUS TACTICS OF THE WORST PUBLISHER ON RECORD IN THE INDUSTRY--PUBLISH AMERICA. OVER 30 AUTHORS AND 70 TITLES WERE DUMPED.  MANY SERIES WERE CUT IN HALF, LEAVING UNPUBLISHED SEQUELS, AND AUTHORS SCRAMBLING TO FIND OTHER PUBLISHERS/PRINTERS.

Folks if you think this case is exclusive, I beg you to evaluate every contract you get, and do the required amount of research about any small press publisher that uses the POD model. There are more than a few bad eggs out there. Today anyone can hang up a publishing shingle. It's better to not be published at all than to be published poorly. Remember: Money Always Flows To The Author. 

Planet Janitor: The Moon is not Enough (Engage Science Fiction) (Digital Short) by Chris Stevenson (Kindle Edition - Feb 7, 2012)Kindle eBook

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4 comments:

  1. "It's better to not be published at all than to be published poorly"

    This, 10,000 times

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks, Wayne. It can't be repeated enough.

    ReplyDelete
  3. What a horrible experience. I believe that these days though, even the mid-sized publishers leave a lot of the marketing to the authors themselves.

    http://www.ManOfLaBook.com

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm afraid you're right. More and more of the push has been expected of the author in the past five years. You'll see evidence of this when their mission statement or contract stipulates an emphasis on "author participation." That's a dead give-away that this outfit is sorely lacking in funds, or simply relies on the author to get the books sold. It's a "free sales force" mentality becoming more and more prevalent.

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