Scams in publishing

Publishing Scams and How they Work

Information from http://theworldsgreatestbook.com/self-publishing-scams/ website Updated: April 15, 2015

Rarely do I re­pub­lish a blog post, but I just got an­other email from a writer who didn’t do his home­work.

Many self-pub­lish­ers start their book pro­jects with un­re­al­is­tic ex­pec­ta­tions and mis­un­der­stand­ings about how pub­lish­ing works. A huge in­dus­try has arisen to prey on writ­ers who are un­sure of the path. This ar­ti­cle ex­plains the ba­sics of how pub­lish­ing scams work and how writ­ers can avoid them.

Pub­lish­ers must learn the risks in­her­ent to their busi­ness. If you fan­ta­size you’ll earn your in­vest­ment back as soon as you get on Oprah’s show, it’s not the sup­ply chain’s job to pres­sure-test your as­sump­tions.

“If I’m a painter and you want pur­ple zebra stripes on your pink house, some­one’s going to take your money; it might as well be me.”

Though that kind of busi­ness prac­tice isn’t strictly un­eth­i­cal, it over­looks the fact that the most im­por­tant thing pub­lish­ing ser­vice providers can sell is guid­ance. Too many au­thor ser­vice com­pa­nies take ad­van­tage of the fact that it re­ally is your re­spon­si­bil­ity to know what you’re get­ting into.

To un­der­stand where the bait-and-switch usu­ally hap­pens in pub­lish­ing scams, it’s es­sen­tial to un­der­stand how the book­seller’s eco­nomic pie gets sliced.

Pub­lish­ing: Ed­i­to­r­ial and Pro­duc­tion Costs

Pro­duc­tion costs are an es­sen­tial as­pect of bring­ing a well-made book to mar­ket. Every writer pays for qual­ity in the short run or for short­cuts in the long run. Every pub­lisher must pay for ink and paper, and (I hope) for edit­ing and de­sign. Ed­i­tors and de­sign­ers are part of the es­sen­tial sup­ply chain that re­sults in ready-to-re­tail books. The pro­fes­sion­als who make their liv­ing pro­vid­ing print­ing, cover de­sign, edit­ing, type­set­ting, and bind­ing can quite rea­son­ably be ex­pected to earn a profit.

If these costs aren’t clearly stated, don’t pre­tend your “pub­lisher” has some mag­i­cal abil­ity to “make them go away.” Any­one claim­ing to be your pub­lisher—even a le­git­i­mate op­er­a­tor—ex­pects to pay these bills. Know­ing where that money comes from is im­por­tant.

Pub­lish­ing: Dis­tri­b­u­tion and Sales Costs

Ad­di­tional costs in­clude ship­ping, dis­tri­b­u­tion, and seller com­mis­sions (which usu­ally run half of cover price). These costs occur after your book is made avail­able to the pub­lic and an order is placed.

Do you know what it costs to sell one copy of your book? Do the math. Sub­tract your ed­i­to­r­ial and pro­duc­tion costs from what you have left after the seller’s com­mis­sion is paid. If you don’t know what it costs to print, ship, and sell a book, you are not in con­trol of your pub­lish­ing busi­ness.

The Pub­lisher’s Cut

If you re­ceived an ad­vance pay­ment against roy­al­ties on your book, you most likely have a tra­di­tional pub­lisher back­ing you. Pub­lish­ers are in­vestors who buy and sell in­tel­lec­tual prop­erty for profit. Your pub­lisher thinks your book will sell and has paid for edit­ing, de­sign, mar­ket­ing, print­ing, and dis­tri­b­u­tion on top of your ad­vance. Con­sider what an enor­mous risk that is if you’re an un­known au­thor. Your pub­lisher is gam­bling on mak­ing enough profit on book sales to cover your pro­duc­tion costs and your ad­vance—be­fore they see a dime. It’s no won­der pub­lish­ing con­tracts are so dif­fi­cult to come by. Pub­lish­ers cer­tainly care that your book is good, but they mostly care whether your book will sell.

Many a tra­di­tion­ally pub­lished au­thor has won­dered why noth­ing came in after the ini­tial ad­vance. “I thought I was going to make $2 per book. I know you’ve sold books; where’s my money?” Very often, the book has sold but it hasn’t sold enough copies to cover the pub­lisher’s in­vest­ment.Your pub­lisher is in busi­ness, too. After in­vest­ing in you, they ex­pect to re­cover their out­lay be­fore they skip mer­rily down the profit shar­ing road with you.

Other Risks

If you’re sell­ing books in tra­di­tional book­stores, re­turned books can bury you. If you dis­trib­ute 3000 books and sell 1000, you can still lose money when you have to pay for 2000 un­sold books to be re­turned or de­stroyed (tragic but cheaper than ship­ping them back and fig­ur­ing out what to do with them). Read more about re­turns here.

How Pub­lish­ing Scams Work

Van­ity pub­lish­ing scams usu­ally tar­get first-time pub­lish­ers. Most have a rough draft man­u­script ready and have begun to ask ques­tions about how to pub­lish. They need edit­ing, type­set­ting, de­sign, and dis­tri­b­u­tion. A web search soon brings them to xU­ni­verse­House who of­fers one-stop shop­ping for all the needed ser­vices and a dis­tri­b­u­tion pack­age. They offer a plat­inum plan, a gold plan, a sil­ver plan, and a tin plan with ser­vices that fit any bud­get. You get to keep your copy­right so the deal is “risk free.” When Pen­guin calls of­fer­ing a big con­tract, you won’t be locked in to your deal with xU­ni­verse­House.

Most au­thors have heard all the bad doo doo about self-pub­lish­ing. They want a “real” pub­lisher and xU­ni­verse­House of­fers to as­sume that role. xU­ni­verse­House in­flates the re­tail price and skims the cream back off every sale as a “pub­lisher’s” roy­alty. Here’s where the red bull­shit in­di­ca­tor light on your dash­board should be flash­ing. XU­ni­verse­House hasn’t in­vested a dime in your book. Why should it earn a roy­alty from it? If any­thing, xU­ni­verse­House has put you at a dis­ad­van­tage by in­creas­ing your re­tail price (and by putting their kiss-of-death logo on your book’s spine). This is why “self-pub­lish­ing com­pa­nies” are oxy­moronic: you’re ei­ther self-pub­lish­ing or some­one is pub­lish­ing you. Pay­ing some­one to be your pub­lisher is like hir­ing some­one to take a va­ca­tion for you so you can stay home and work.

Here we find a use­ful de­f­i­n­i­tion for the term, “pub­lisher.” A pub­lisher is an en­tity that in­vests in and as­sumes the risks for pro­duc­ing and dis­trib­ut­ing a piece of media.

Es­cap­ing the Trap

So maybe you “pub­lished” with xU­ni­verse­House be­fore you read this ar­ti­cle or had some­one point out the typos in your book. Maybe you got an in­formed cri­tique of the cover art and found out it’s for­mu­laic or cliché. Prob­a­bly, the work done by xU­ni­verse­House isn’t hor­ri­ble; it just never got past “pretty good.” Maybe your book’s just too ex­pen­sive?

No big deal. The con­tract says you can get out at any time. But the small print says the cover art and the type­set­ting and other dig­i­tal as­sets be­long to xU­ni­verse­House. As the pub­lisher of record, xU­ni­verse­House also owns the ISBN num­ber on your book. You can end your con­tract but you’ll have to start over with a Word doc­u­ment and find your own sources for de­sign and dis­tri­b­u­tion. After spend­ing a lot of money, you’re back at square one.

You can re­pub­lish but you’ll also have to com­pete with cheap, “used” copies of your orig­i­nal xU­ni­verse­House edi­tion on Ama­zon.

And if you agreed to dis­trib­ute 100 books to xU­ni­verse­House’s list of “qual­i­fied re­view­ers,” you can count on see­ing dozens of fifty-cent “like new” copies of your book on eBay

Co-Pub­lish­ing

If a pub­lisher wants to ne­go­ti­ate a deal where it splits the pro­duc­tion costs with the au­thor and then splits the roy­al­ties, co-pub­lish­ing might qual­ify as one of the non-tra­di­tional pub­lish­ing mod­els that isn’t a scam, but I found a tiny hand­ful of op­er­a­tors who ap­peared to be play­ing that game straight.

When en­ter­ing into such a “part­ner­ship,” make sure that all the costs—pro­duc­tion, dis­tri­b­u­tion, and sell­ing—are fully dis­closed. Your pub­lish­ing part­ner may be able to in­vest sweat eq­uity or ac­cess out­sourced ser­vices at a re­duced cost, but you should un­der­stand the value of those ser­vices.

In­stall some qual­ity con­trol mea­sures. What re­course do you have if you find typos in your book that your pub­lisher’s ed­i­tor missed? Do you re­tain the right to ap­prove the cover de­sign?

Tak­ing Con­trol

Don’t fly your pub­lish­ing plane with the visor down. Writ­ing is an art but pub­lish­ing is a busi­ness. If you in­tend to share your work, run some num­bers and take con­trol.

Start with a hy­po­thet­i­cal cover price. Price is dri­ven by the mar­ket, not by your costs. If other books in your genre sell for $20, you need to find a way to prof­itably bring your book to mar­ket for $20.

Sub­tract 50% for the seller com­mis­sion (Light­ning Source al­lows you to set seller com­mis­sions as low as 20% but don’t ex­pect brick-and-mor­tar book­stores or non-tra­di­tional re­tail­ers to play along).

Do you know the cost to print, ship, and dis­trib­ute a book? Rep­utable pub­lish­ing ser­vices pro­vide a cost cal­cu­la­tor or at least a solid es­ti­mate.

Some­one spent money on edit­ing, cover de­sign, and type­set­ting. If that some­one is you, add up those costs and then amor­tize them over 100 books, 1000 books, 5000 books, etc. How many books do you have to sell be­fore the pro­duc­tion costs are paid and you can start tak­ing a profit? You can’t know how many books you’ll sell but fig­ure out where the break-even point is. If you have a tra­di­tional pub­lisher, find out how many books the pub­lisher needs to sell be­fore the “pro­duc­tion debt” is paid. This debt in­cludes any ad­vances against roy­al­ties paid to you when the deal was signed.

And though you may have thor­oughly en­joyed re­search­ing and writ­ing your book, if you’re se­ri­ously in the pub­lish­ing busi­ness, you’ll want to see your writ­ing hours paid for. You put 1000 hours or more into writ­ing your man­u­script but you’re the last link in the in­come chain. Know how many books you need to sell to start tak­ing roy­al­ties and then know how many books you need to re­ceive roy­al­ties for to com­pen­sate your pub­lish­ing com­pany’s “in-house writ­ing staff.”

It’s easy to see why so many writ­ers don’t pay at­ten­tion to these de­tails. Pub­lish­ing cost analy­sis can be dis­cour­ag­ing. Every­one down­stream of the pub­lisher gen­er­ally risks noth­ing yet makes a big­ger cut. Look­ing at books from a num­bers per­spec­tive, could you find a worse re­tail prod­uct?

All the same, peo­ple like you are out there writ­ing and mar­ket­ing good books for profit. Though the odds are against them, some find re­cep­tive au­di­ences. A few find fame and for­tune, ei­ther through care­ful plan­ning or dumb luck (or a bit of both).

Pub­lish­ing: Doing it Right

I’ve said it many times on this blog and I’ll say it again: Do your home­work! If you have pub­lished a book but don’t know the pub­lish­ing food chain ba­sics de­scribed in this ar­ti­cle, you’re swim­ming in shark-in­fested wa­ters. This ain’t rocket surgery. Read up on the biz for a few hours.

Phony pub­lish­ing com­pa­nies aren’t risk-tak­ers. They pro­vide bud­get ed­i­to­r­ial and de­sign ser­vices and then mark them up for a profit. You get less and pay the same prices you would pay a pro­fes­sional. Van­ity pub­lish­ers don’t get you book­store dis­tri­b­u­tion. Usu­ally, the smoke­screen is that they’ll get listed with Ama­zon.com and all the major book­stores. And after you’ve paid them to bro­ker pro­duc­tion ser­vices, you get to pay them a “pub­lisher’s roy­alty” on every book you sell.

True self-pub­lish­ers un­der­stand the risks and ad­just their ex­pec­ta­tions ac­cord­ingly. They in­vest in pro­fes­sional ed­i­tors, type­set­ters, and de­sign­ers and hold their con­trac­tors to the high­est stan­dards. They work with print­ers and dis­trib­u­tors who offer straight talk about costs and prof­its, and they make their own de­ci­sions about prices, seller com­mis­sions, and re­turn poli­cies. Some make peanuts on book sales but are able to use the fact that they “wrote the book on the sub­ject” to bring in con­sult­ing or con­tract work.

Make ob­jec­tive, fact-based de­ci­sions. Smart pub­lish­ers aren’t con­cerned about what the rumor mill has to say about self-pub­lish­ing or tra­di­tional pub­lish­ing on today’s forum dis­cus­sions. Self-pub­lish­ing is ideal for cer­tain au­thors in cer­tain cir­cum­stances and tra­di­tional pub­lish­ing is ideal for oth­ers. Prej­u­dice, gos­sip, and ig­no­rance con­tribute noth­ing to sound busi­ness choices. Choose your route care­fully.

Above all, re­mem­ber that you, your ideas, your time, and your work are valu­able. As­sume full con­trol over all these as­sets be­fore hand­ing them over to any third party. Any­one shar­ing your pub­lish­ing pie must ab­sorb cost or mit­i­gate risk if they are to be of any value to you.

Thou­sands of writ­ers are snook­ered by pub­lish­ing scams every year, mostly be­cause they’re afraid and they want an “ex­pert” to han­dle every­thing. If you use a tra­di­tional pub­lisher, hire a lawyer to re­view your con­tract; it’s a small price to pay for pro­tec­tion when deal­ing with a big com­pany. Oth­er­wise, heed the old adage: if you want a job done right…

See also [ Scams and Confidence Tricks ] Also see [ Authors of erotica ] and/or [ Authors of BDSM stories ]

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