Indie Authorship Becomes More Attractive
Posted by Zoe Winters on June 28th, 2010And so it begins. One of the arguments for indie music and film and against indie authorship is that very often big Hollywood studios and big record companies seem to like to cheat artists out of money. It’s like a fun hobby. Most people are fairly aware by now of how abusive many record companies are to their artists, often getting them into contracts that are so unattractive one wonders how an agent or lawyer could ever in good conscience allow them to sign.
But this hasn’t been that true for publishing. In publishing there are the “good publishers and agents” and the “bad publishers and agents”. The bad ones are scam artists and acting outside of the accepted way of things. They may be agents who try to charge “reading fees” and then send authors to “editors” to help clean up their work for additional money.
Or they may be vanity presses that claim to have “accepted” the author, but they just need the author to defray some of the costs of publication. In publishing there is a long tradition of scam artists, and so there have been many groups available to help writers avoid getting scammed.
One of the favorite sayings to avoid scam situations is “money always flows to the author”. There are still writers who think they are supposed to pay something for someone else to publish their work. But one of the very first things they learn is that no, “money always flows to the author”. I have a personal pet peeve about that saying since I think it makes NO sense from a business perspective. (i.e. writing is a business and a writer has to spend money on “something” usually to succeed even if it’s just a professional website design.) But for the newbie writer, it’s a good rule of thumb to help them avoid scam presses and agents. The problem only comes in when it’s applied like a mantra.
Most authors seem to believe that large publishing companies are fluffy bunnies who have their best interests at heart. But even though an agent “should” have the author’s best interest at heart, usually they ultimately side with the publisher, since they want to work with that publisher again. The agent’s need to continue to be acknowledged by the publisher is a conflict of interest with the author’s need to get the best contract.
Despite the various small issues with big publishers, nothing has been so blatantly anti-author until now. Publisher’s Weekly announced the Author’s Guild’s ire over contract changes made by Wiley, a major publisher.
Wiley, after taking control of Bloomberg book publishing, sent a letter to its authors announcing a change in the way royalties would be paid, which they would have to sign. The Author’s Guild warned authors not to sign the letter because while the letter seems upbeat and excited as if the author is getting something good, they aren’t. They are losing up to 50% of what they were making because the publisher suddenly wants to pay royalties on publisher net, rather than on suggested retail price.
From the Publisher’s Weekly article:
By using the phrase “we are pleased to inform you that we will be paying royalties on the net amount received” Wiley gives the impression that the change is beneficial to authors, the Guild said.
There were also a couple of other unattractive terms which would in effect give the publisher control of the work forever, and never let the rights revert back to the author.
On the small press front, I have an author friend who has been in long emails with her editor trying to get her publishing situation improved. Her covers are horrible, worse than some of the worst self-published covers, the pricing is insane and way too high to encourage buying, and the ebook formatting is bad.
The stupid decisions made by her publisher harm her ability to make sales and maintain a readership. So it’s no better on the small press front. Many small presses are no better than self-publishing aside from the fact that the author doesn’t maintain control of marketing, distribution, design, packaging, or any other factor.
Another issue to keep in mind is that most authors, even NY pubbed authors, don’t make that much money. Really. They don’t. In popular thought, all authors with NY publishers have lavish publisher-financed book tours, get tons of promo, and make lots of money. Even though I’ve been writing for a long time before I self-published, I believed up until a few years ago, that every NY pubbed author was “making a living”. I had NO idea that many midlist authors only get $5,000 – $10,000 per book advance. At those rates you have to be churning out three books a year to make a teacher’s salary.
For any author not making it high onto the midlist, it’s like a little author sweatshop.
So, if you didn’t know before why many authors are “choosing” to self-publish and not doing it as a desperate last resort, now you know. Publishers can be just as crappy and unfair as other media moguls, and the money just isn’t great enough for most to justify that crap. The public perception of a self-publishing author just not being “good enough” to get a “real publisher” should go by the wayside as more and more stories like this make it out into the open.
Zoe Winters is an indie author of quirky paranormal romance and a passionate advocate of the indie author movement. Visit her at: http://www.zoewinters.org to try free samples of her fiction.
Tags: indie authors, indie books, publishers behaving badly, publishing realities, why indie?
Great post, Zoe. I think one of the reasons that self-publishing is gaining ground of late is that publishers are getting greedy and desperate in regard to e-publishing. This alerts authors to how little publishers actually contribute to the process these days. (In case that sounds like author paranoia, let me quote a publisher who told me: “If authors knew how unfair the deals we’re offering really are, they’d be up in arms.”)
I would recommend to any new author to start by self-publishing (including digital), build up a presence, and then let publishers convince you they have some value to add. Some of them do – usually the newer and smaller ones. The big conglomerates have had things their own way too long. Now make them work for it.
Hey, Dave, thanks for commenting! LOL @ “If authors knew how unfair the deals we’re offering really are, they’d be up in arms.” No, they’d be self-publishing!
I definitely agree with your perspective. The problem is that most of the big NY pubs just won’t give most debut authors much that they can’t achieve for themselves faster and with less risk for more profit.
A NY pub possibly giving you an ugly cover, possibly giving your book a stupid title, possibly giving you limited distribution, and not marketing you… expecting you to do that yourself. AND they take forever to get a book to market, AND they want such a large percentage of the profits.
hahahahahaha um, no.
Go, indie!
Excellent post! Part of me wants to tweet this link with the captain, “See! Publishing companies ARE evil!” because you get that whole publishing company paranoia around self publishers, sometimes. Not everyone may be evil – but I certainly think the paranoia is justified! I’ve been learning a lot more about self publishing over the past few months and I’m really starting to like the looks of it, especially with the rise of ebooks that is going to come in the next few years, and the poor contracts authors are getting for their digital rights.
I’m around a lot of people who think they can live off their writing if they’d just get published… I try to bite my lip because I don’t feel that way at all, I know it isn’t true. And the way the game is played today – even less so for an unknown! Self publishing seems safer and more worth it in the end.
Suzanne, when I found out there were NY published authors who still had a day job, I thought, “screw that!”