Self Publishing

The Airleaf Morons

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Today, I picked up a letter sent to me in care of Mysteries To Die For, a bookstore in Thousand Oaks, California. The letter was from Airleaf Publishing, the vanity press company formerly known as Bookman Marketing, and they were offering to "sell MY GUN HAS BULLETS to a national audience!"  for the low, low price of $3000.

I wrote about these parasites back in November… when this same "opportunity" to flush your money down a toilet cost a whopping $7000. Since then, it appears that they’ve become a shade less greedy but monumentally more stupid.

The incompetence represented by this letter is so extreme, I almost don’t know where to begin. Let’s start with them sending this pitch to a successful, published author who has castigated them publicly for their business practices before.

And where do these idiots send their letter? They send it to me in care of a bookstore that’s already selling my books.

The folks at Airleaf Publishing are obviously trolling the catalogs at  iUniverse and other competing vanity presses,
figuring if the aspiring authors could be suckered once, they could be
suckered again.

But the dimwit who is doing the trolling apparently
doesn’t know when he’s picking books that are part of either Mystery Writers of America Presents or Authors
Guild’s Back-in-Print programs (both of which reprint
previously published books through iUniverse as a free service for their members).

The dimwit doesn’t realize that when he picks books from the MWA Presents or Back-In-Print authors,  he’s
dealing with experienced professionals who haven’t paid to be published and who know
better than to be suckered by an insanely pricey vanity press come-on.

The Airleaf Publishing corporate policy must be to hire people who are "mentally challenged" or born with only a brain stem…and to hope whoever gets their letters are just as stupid and have high credit lines on their Visa cards.

Scammer Sent to Slammer

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Writers’ Beware is reporting that Martha Ivery, the vanity press scammer and fake literary agent, was sentenced today to nearly six years in Federal prison for bilking aspiring writers out of hundreds of thousands of dollars with her many swindles under various aliases (Kelly O’Donnell Literary Agency, Craig Roussan, PressTige Publishing, New Millenium Publishing House, etc.).

Martha’s lawyer had argued for probation rather than jail time,
pleading serious mental illness, but the prosecution’s psychiatrist,
while acknowledging that Martha is one majorly fucked-up lady, did not
agree that this prevented her from distinguishing right from wrong. The
judge, fortunately, saw it the prosecution’s way.

Martha is
required to pay restitution to her victims (or, if they die, their
heirs), starting immediately, at the rate of 10% of everything she
earns or $100 per month, whichever is greater. Since the total
restitution amount is $728,248.10 (representing her "take" from nearly
300 victims), this is really more symbolic than anything else.

You can find a copy of her indictment here. Let’s hope this serves as a warning to all the other vanity press scammers out there (not that they are that hard to spot if you have an iota of common sense).

(Thanks to William Simon for the heads-up!)

The Desperate and the Impatient

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All aspiring writers are desperate to get into print. That’s a given. I certainly was, but that was before the advent of  POD vanity presses, which prey on the "I-want-it-now" impatience that afflicts so many aspiring writers these days. These aspiring writers just don’t want to invest the time and effort that’s a necessary part of shaping their voice, their skills and their careers. Bestselling Tess Gerritsen writes about that today:

What makes a new writer today think he should be immune to that
desperation I felt?  What makes him think this is SUPPOSED to be easy?
What makes him think his very first book is going to get published — or
deserves to get published?

I’ve lost count of how many crappy novels I wrote before I got my break. Tess wrote three unpublished books before she finally sold her fourth. And she knows another writer who wrote seven books before finally selling her eighth.

Think of her desperation, her
hunger, to be published.  It had to be there, driving her, or she would
have just given up.  But she just kept going and wrote manuscript #8. And it sold. Think about that — writing seven books that don’t sell.  Would you
have the persistence to start writing #8?  Do you accept the fact that,
yes, there’s an apprenticeship involved in being a writer, a period of
training that you will be forced to undergo before you finally
understand what the craft is all about?

No, it isn’t easy to get accepted by a publisher, and get paid for
your work.  It’s a lot easier to whip out the checkbook and pay a
vanity press to print your manuscript.

That’s the real danger posed by these vanity presses — besides the emptying of a gullible writer’s bank account. The self-publishing companies are also robbing the writer of the experience that’s required to become a successful writer (and part of that is learning to deal with, and learn from, rejection).  Too many aspiring writers fall for what appears to be  "the easy way" — when, in fact, it’s not — rather than
accept the fact that their books are unpublishable and that they have a lot more work to do on their writing.  They don’t want to work. They want a book now. Or at least the illusion of one. But it’s a career-sabotaging move…not to mention stupid and expensive.

And if you can just pay to get published, where’s the incentive to hone
your craft, to study your own work with a critical eye, to polish and
polish some more?  Where’s the incentive to write books number seven
and eight and nine if each one is just going to mean you have to whip
out that old checkbook again to pay to see yourself in print?

There isn’t any. Sure, there are a handful of people who have found a measure of success self-publishing, but for the vast majority it is a financial sink-hole and a self-destructive mistake.

UPDATE 11-26-2006: Author Mat Johnson blogs about how the lure of vanity presses is ruining African-American fiction.

If I had hit my wall just three, or even two years later, all of those
self-publishing options would have been available to me. As desperate
as I was, I don’t know if I would have said no to the idea. I don’t
think I would have known to. At the time I was working on that book, I
actually considered it good enough to be published. I might have jumped
at any opportunity not to take "No" for an answer.

[…]I saw a generation of black writers fall into this
trap, authors that could have been original voices that added to the
canon, who instead became literary canon fodder. They went pop, blew
up, and then almost instantly started vanishing, their worth dwindling
with their sales.

Sadly, instead of working actively on getting better, many of this crew instead try to falsely justify the merit of their work.

More Parasites

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A well-known author friend of mine got a letter the other day from the vanity press Airleaf Publishing regarding one of his older titles, which he republished for free a few years back through the Authors Guild’s Back-in-Print program at iUniverse. I’ve omitted the name of the book and the author:

For over four years, Airleaf Publishing & Book Selling Services has blazed a ground-breaking trail selling independantly published books directly to bookstores […] We recently discovered your book XYZ and we believe it has the potential to be a national bestseller. Your book comes highly recommended and is precisely the kind of book we have had the most success selling. That is why we extend to you thiis special invitation. We want to include XYZ in an unprecedented national publicity program. As part of this program, we will:
1. Place your book in 15 retail bookstores.
2. Assign a full-time telemarketer for daily calls to stores to sell your book and set-up signings.
3. Recommend your book in person to decision-makers at five regional bookstore chains.
4. Place your book with 24 others on our unique campaign website
5. Place your book on the homepage of our retail store bookselling website
6. Place your book for sale on amazon and periodically on ebay.
7. Produce a 30 second television commercial to 630,000 views, 240 times.
8. Include your book in a full color glossy newspaper insert delivered to 200,000 subscribers.
9. Include your book in an email campaign to 500,000 book club members.
10. Broadcast two ten minute interviews on national syndicated AM/FM radio shows.
Our goal is to put XYZ in bookstores nationwide and make X a household name. While we have spent thousands, your cost to participate is only $7000!

It’s astonishing to me that there are people who will fall for this. It’s obvious that Airleaf didn’t do any real research into the author…or they would have discovered that he’s already very successful and well-known, and that the book they think has great potential was original published in 1990, in paperback in 1991, and was nominated for the equivalent of the Academy Award for excellence in its genre. Clearly, they are just trawling through the lists of iUniverse, PublishAmerica, and Authorhouse titles looking for suckers who still have some credit left on their Visa cards.

Let’s analyze their "incredible" offer, shall we?

Read more

The Parasites of Publishing

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The multi-talented Keith Snyder makes my favorite comment yet about PublishAmerica, Authorhouse,  and other vanity presses. Brace yourselves, because he tells it like it is:

THESE PEOPLE ARE OUT TO SCAM YOU. There is nothing about that
question that’s the least bit in question, except in the minds of the
ignorant and naive.

If you want to see your stuff printed and bound, and get (wow!) an
ISBN number and see it (wow!) on Amazon, that’s your business.

But Jesus Christ, you legion of suckers, open your goddamn eyes.
Whether vanity presses have a place in the Grand Scheme of Things or
not, they are parasitic entities that base their business models on the
assumption that talentless wannabes will not only empty their bank
accounts, but volunteer to become shills for other talentless wannabes.

[…]On the other hand, do you want to be published? LEARN TO ####ING WRITE!

[…]Vanity press suckers can scream all they want that they ARE
published, they ARE they ARE they ARE!!!, but that’s all it is: Lots of
screaming.

There’s an actual publishing industry. It’s as screwed up as any
other industry–and mores screwed up than some–but it’s not evil.
There is no conspiracy to keep newbies out.

He is so right. It may be painful to hear, but that’s the  cold, hard truth.

Why Self-Published Books Fail

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If you bring up the harsh realities about self-publishing and print-on-demand vanity presses, you’re inevitably going to get trashed by legions of aspiring writers who think that writing a check to Authorhouse makes them a published author.  Which is why I thought it was pretty gutsy of bestselling author Tess Gerritsen to offer her opinion on why vanity press books inevitably fail. She lays the blame primarily on lack of distribution to brick-and-mortar stores and the no-returns policy that most of these so-called publishers have. She says it doesn’t necessarily have to do with the quality of the books.

I agree with her — except on the quality issue.  I think she’s being nice.  From my conversations with booksellers, their decision not to stock self-published titles has just as much to do with the quality of the books (or lack thereof).  I’m talking both about the way they are written and the way they are printed and bound. The cold, hard, unpleasant truth is that there’s a good reason that most of these authors go to vanity presses…because their manuscripts are unsaleable, unreadable crap that no agent will represent and that no editor would ever publish. Vanity press titles usually look terrible, too, inside and out. On top of that, Tess points out that booksellers find self-published authors difficult to deal with.

I was reminded of this at a booksigning at a Barnes and Noble in New
Hampshire.  After the signing, the events coordinator thanked me for
being “so easy to work with — unlike some other authors.”

“But I would think that most authors are pretty nice,” I said.

“Most are,” she said.  “But the self-published ones are horrible.”
Then she described an incident that had happened earlier that week.  A
local self-published author had requested that the store arrange a
booksigning for him, and she had turned him down flat.  Enraged, he’d
thrown the book on the floor and asked: “When the hell am I ever going
to get a signing in this store?”

“When pigs fly,” she’d snapped at him.  The man couldn’t accept the
fact that their store almost never hosted signings by self-published
authors — even if the author was local.

I hear this a lot from my bookseller friends. The problem, they say, is that people buy the iUniverse hype — that writing a check makes them a published author — and are shocked when booksellers don’t agree.

The Fine Print of Self-Publishing

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I firmly believe it’s a mistake to pay to have your book published by a vanity press and that it’s tantamount to flushing your money down a toilet. But if you are intent on doing it anyway, then you must read THE FINE PRINT OF SELF-PUBLISHING by Mark Levine first.  He analyzes the major vanity presses and their contracts, their pluses and minuses, and gives you a thorough understanding of how that business works. 

He starts by talking about how he chose the vanity press route for his first book:

"In 1994, when I finished the novel, I put it into the hands of a few big-time publishing houses. They all told me the same thing. ‘We like the writing, but in order for us to sell it, you have to rewrite this and rewrite that, then send it back to us.’ I wasn’t about to start rewriting my book so that maybe some traditional publisher would take it."

To me, that attitude pretty much sums up the problem with most of the writers who go the self-publishing route.  He goes on to say his book was awarded ‘Book of the Year’ by the publisher he paid to publish his book, making it a dubious honor at best, and the fact that he’s proud of it, and touts it in his book, made me wonder about the guy and his credibilty (he claims that President Clinton read the book and that’s certainly worth touting).  On the other hand, he recognizes that a vanity press publication is, at best, a small step towards becoming a publisher yourself or landing a traditi0nal publishing contract. 

But Levine quickly won me over with his knowledge and professionalism in his approach towards his topic.  Levine is obviously pro-vanity press, but even with that bias, he does a remarkably thorough job analyzing the companies and their practices, even singling out the worst offenders by name (Authorhouse and PublishAmerica among them) and detailing exactly what they are doing wrong, line by line, in their contracts. During the research phase of his book, he even succeeded in getting some publishers to adjust their contracts to be more author-friendly.

The book is breezily written and very informative. THE FINE PRINT OF SELF-PUBLISHING is a long overdue, much-needed book and is worth buying whether you’re contemplating self-publishing or not simply for the education Levine gives in how to read a publishing contract and understand the terms.

Where I Can Go?

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I got this comment here today:

hi i have sent in my manuscript to tate. i also got a contract. Im only
15 and at first before the price it looked like a good place to get a
book published. But now that i’ve seen the 4000 investment pay it
doesnt seem to good. I took a look at iuniverse but it dosent publish
childrens books. Do you have any sugestions on were i can go? Thanks

The important thing now is to keep writing. Never, I repeat NEVER, pay to have your book published. If someone offers to publish your book in return for money, that should be a big warning sign to you that they are not a real publisher but rather a "vanity press" or worse, an out-right scam.

If you really feel you’re ready to submit your book for publication, only approach reputable publishers. You can start by looking at who published the books that you enjoy reading, then look them up in the Writers Market and see if they are accepting  unsolicited submissions (meaning not from agent).

But I would say that, at this point, you are better off concentrating more on refining your skills than getting published.  Take some writing courses and read as much as you can. But the most important thing of all is to just keep writing!

The Sobol Award

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Victoria Strauss, a crusader against publishing scams, is warning aspiring writers  to be wary of The Sobol Award contest. She writes, in part:

[…]the contest is being run by an
organization that apparently will eventually transform itself into a
literary agency, it is, in effect, a reading fee (according to the
contest rules, literary representation isn’t limited to the 10
winners–offers can be extended to semi-finalists).

[…]This is tantamount to signing with a literary agent whose background
you haven’t checked or aren’t able to research, and, in my view, is the
main argument for avoiding the contest.

Also, I’d never
advise a writer to pay $85 even for a contest of proven, unimpeachable
reputation.

Good advice. If you were to ask me, I’d say save your money and submit your manuscript instead to an established literary agency or reputable publisher that doesn’t charge you anything to read your work.

(Thanks to Tari Akpodiete for the heads up)