publishing – Page 14 – Patricia J. Parsons

Backstory, Electronic Publishing, Publishing

When a publisher stops publishing: A writer takes control

Posted on 31 Oct 201331 Oct 2013 by Patricia J. Parsons

So, it actually happens. In fact, it happens more often than you might think. And it has happened to me more than once, although I’m happy to say that not as often as it hasn’t! Publishers go out of business for one reason or another.

The backstory: Just like most serious writers out there, I had always gravitated toward traditional publishers. They have the experience. They have the expertise. They have the money. Well, maybe this last one is not a given. In any case, until recently, it was probably the only route to being taken seriously as an author, although it has to be said that in some circles this is still the case. Nevertheless, on almost a dozen occasions, I went through the long, drawn out process of querying, waiting, submitting, waiting, reviewing, waiting, editing, waiting and so it goes. Eventually the books saw the light of day and I moved on. But what happens to your property (your book that you slaved over for a chunk of your life) when your publisher ceases to publish? Notwithstanding the legal issues of who owns copyright (you should), here’s one of my stories.

In 2008 I finally found a publisher for my memoir about being the mom to an elite ballet dancer who happened to be a boy in a hockey-mad country. The publisher was a small one with a years-long publishing record and the publisher loved the story. When the book was published in the spring of 2009, I hosted the book launch, bringing my son, the ballet dancer, and one of his female partners from the National Ballet of Canada back to Halifax to entertain my captive audience. Of course they came to see him dance, but had to listen to me talk about the book! It was all very exciting.

Another Pointe of View: The Life & Times of a Ballet Mom didn’t really do very well, and the publisher was not into electronic publishing at all, so it was never available as a downloadable e-book, effectively cutting off a significant and increasing proportion of the potential readership. The publisher sent me 100 books that I did not order, and they sat untouched in my office. (I’m sorry, but I’m not one of those people who are prepared to sell books out of the trunk of a car. Nor do I think that people interested in ballet stories are likely to buy them that way. But that’s just me.)

For the next two years I tried to get the publisher to send me a royalty statement: even if a book sells not a single copy, the author is entitled to see the statements, and in fact the publisher was bound by our contract to send me one periodically. The truth, however, was as low as the sales might have been, I knew that there had been sales since several people mentioned to me that they had bought it and had enjoyed it. So, imagine my surprise when I received a letter one day in 2011 indicating to me that I owed the publisher $1800.00!

The letter was from a woman who indicated she had been hired by the publisher to wind down operations – this was the first I had heard. She told me that the owner of the company was ill and would be retiring thus freeing the authors from any further obligations to the publisher except for this unpaid bill for 100 copies of my book (how it amounted to that much money I’ll never know). M y response was as follows: I most certainly was not going to pay any money for books I did not order – she could have them back if she was prepared to send money for the shipping; nor was I going to pay money to a publisher who had not once provided me with a royalty statement and was therefore in breach of contract. I asked for all rights to revert to me and I wanted it in writing. That letter came and not another word was uttered about money owning. I guess threatening to have my lawyer in touch with them did the trick.

So there I was with the book that I might as well have published myself. So, what do you do with a property that returns to you?

The newly designed cover for 'Ballet Mom' created for me by Tugboat Design — The newly designed cover for ‘Ballet Mom’ created for me by Tugboat Design

I decided that the evolution in publishing over the past several years provided me with a significant opportunity to revisit the book and see if I could garner a new audience for it. At this point the remnants of the publisher were unable to provide me with the final, edited manuscript in editable form, so I took the uneditable form and had it converted, then began the process of updating the work.

I decided that the book might find an audience these days with the e-book readers. I hired a book cover designer to come up with a more eye-catching cover, and then finished formatting the manuscript for electronic downloads. Then I published myself it via Kindle Direct and began letting people know that it’s available.

It’s funny how things have changed over the past several years. With Twitter and Facebook and other online possibilities, I had a request for a copy for review within a week from an international dance magazine who evidently had not heard of it before despite my publisher’s so-called promotion based on the marketing plan that I had delivered to her.

I think that my next step will be to make updated hard-copies available as well, thus making the ones currently available from online sellers (and from which authors receive not a single cent in royalties once a book is out of print) outdated and unwanted.

But what did I learn from all of this (and what could I offer as advice to other writers?)?

Don’t trust your publisher to market your book for you. (I already knew this, but the experience brought it into sharp focus.)
Publishers go out of business and leave you high and dry.
Authors need to keep a certain amount of control over their properties, even when signing contracts with traditional publishers.
If you have a well-edited manuscript (read: professionally edited), you can feel good about indie publishing.

But most importantly I learned that…

You can breathe new life into old work.

…and that’s what I’m going to do with several other books, published by traditional publishers before the electronic era whose rights have reverted to me. Stay tuned!

Book covers

The book cover debate: Here we go again

Posted on 18 Jul 2013 by Patricia J. Parsons

Almost two years ago to the day, I wrote a backstory about my book cover adventures. Then back in May of this, I wrote about the beginning of my newest book cover adventure starting with the news from my editor at that, as he said in an email, “Time and budgetary restraints being what they are, we’re unable to ask our designers to come up with a cover completely from scratch. Rather, it falls to you (and to me)…” And that’s what got me thinking about the differences (or lack thereof) between traditional and independent publishing. At that time I lamented that if I have to design my own cover, what in the world are publishers paying those designers to do exactly?

So, I went on to the web site where this publisher buys stock photos and drawings to search through thousands of images using a variety of relevant search terms. I narrowed it down to a few, modified them in Photoshop, added the appropriate cover text, ran the design by my in-house consultant (my husband) and sent the mock-up along to my editor. A month or so later (he apologized for taking so long to get back to me – evidently during conference season it’s hard to find their marketers. It occurs to me that if you’re at conferences selling books, then you are a sales person. If you are a marketer, I thought that you worked on marketing strategy including cover design – but I digress), he emailed me telling me that my cover mock-up was clever, but they didn’t think it really represented the book very well. Never mind that I don’t think a single member of the ‘marketing team’ has actually read the book.

Then he sent me a stock photo that they thought was appropriate. It. Was. Not. And it wasn’t clever. And it wasn’t interesting. And it wasn’t an image that a single one of my intended readers (this is targeted non-fiction this time) could identify with or would even click on to get further information – and make no mistake, that’s how books are bought these days, particular this kind since they are not designed to go to book stores.

life without end — My first-ever book published by a now-defunct Toronto publisher. Twenty-four years ago, designers actually designed clever covers. It’s time for them to start again.

As any writer of book-length work realizes, the old maxim “You can’t tell a book by its cover” is becoming more and more irrelevant. You might not be able to tell a lot about what’s behind that cover just by seeing the image and text, but in my view (a) you ought to be able to, and (b) that cover really does need to be dynamite these days.

I recently read a marketing study where eBook covers had been changed and sales tracked before and after the change. Just as you might expect, improving the cover increased sales. Although this is not an eBook (but there will be an electronic version naturally), sales will accrue through online channels. This means that the potential buyers will be moved to either explore further or not by what they see on that cover. The truth is, though, that no one has the definitive answer to the question of what makes a truly good book cover design. That’s because each book is unique. So where does that leave us?

Just by coincidence, or perhaps serendipity, The New Yorker online published a piece today titled The Decline and Fall of the Book Cover. The writer Tim Kreider says,”… publishing houses hire professional designers for books’ covers and allow their authors very little say over them…” Clearly he doesn’t know about smaller publishers who seem to have less than no money these days for design. He did however describe his own recent experience in which he seemed to have embarked on a similar back and forth between him and his publisher on the design of his book cover. When he suggested that the cover he liked the least was always the one they seem to like the best, I was on his side again. However, he seems to think that well-designed book covers are on their way out, blaming the electronic book trend for this phenomenon. Book covers, he believes, are dull and getting duller. I happen to think that book cover design is going to be even more important as we move ever deeper into electronic purchasing and electronic reading.

I will say that I was completely in agreement with him at the end of the piece when he and his publisher finally agreed on the cover design for the new book. He describes it this way: “…a result nobody would voluntarily have chosen but which everyone could acquiesce to, if only out of exhaustion.”

I am sorely afraid that this is what will eventually become the cover my new book. And it had better happen fast because it’s on the publisher’s fall list.

Again the question: What makes a good cover design? No one really knows these days. While I await my editor’s next move (back to the drawing board he said yesterday after he finally, a month later, responded to my email detailing why I thought his suggestion was lame) I’d be interested to know what draws you into a book that no one has actually recommended to you. Is it that cover?

Backstory, Book covers, Publishing, Self-Publishing

Finding a home for the next book: Traditional or self-publishing is the question

Posted on 9 May 2013 by Patricia J. Parsons

I received an email yesterday from my editor at the University of Toronto Press with the news that we’re now embarking on the cover design for my new book. Although this is good news (I had been wondering where we were in the process after I sent him the final edits back in January before I went on vacation, it got me thinking yet again about the traditional book publishing process .

This marks the ninth time (ten if you count a second edition) that I’ve been through this traditional publishing process where control is largely given over to the publisher. The truth is that I’ve been more or less happy with the outcomes as I look at them winking at me from the top shelf above me; the process, however, has not been without considerable frustration. I’ve also gone the self-publishing route three times now, and I’m kind of at a crossroads. I have a new book ready to make the rounds – and have queried a couple of agents already – but I’m still wondering if I should do it myself.

This reflection on my publishing adventures resulted this time from my editor’s simple statement in his email: “…Time and budgetary restraints being what they are, we’re unable to ask our designers to come up with a cover completely from scratch. Rather, it falls to you (and to me)…” and then we’re to send this to the so-called designers. It seems to me that a designer should be doing the designing, and if he or she isn’t doing the designing, what in the world is he or she being paid to do?

This might seem to you to be the moment in time when I make that decision to move to self-publishing for that next book, but I’m also reeling from yet another telephone call from iUniverse – an attempt to sell me yet more services thinly disguised as a wonderful opportunity for me.

Here’s what happened earlier this week.

At dinner time one evening (they are always at dinner time when I’m feeling just ready to punch the next telemarketer who calls despite being on the do-not-call list) the phone rang. The caller was a “marketing specialist” or consultant or manager or some such thing; iUniverse seems to either have an enormous staff or massive turnover since this is the third or fourth such person to whom I have evidently been assigned. Several incarnations ago I asked them not to call me with marketing ideas ever again.

If you’ve read my blog for a while, you know that my avocation is writing historical fiction – I do love that research and the need to shed everyday life to get into the head of characters from long-ago times and places. Grace Note: In Hildegard’s Shadow was published by iUniverse a couple of years ago now. It was selected as an Editor’s Choice book (meaning that since I’d paid to have it professionally edited and I didn’t sound like a moron it would get this stamp), and thereafter chosen as a “Rising Star” (not sure how high up the scale of non-moronic a book has to be to receive this elevation). All of the editing etc. that was done made the book more polished and professional to be sure, but it did not come cheap. And make no mistake, every time anyone called after that to extol the virtues of my book, they were indeed trying to sell me services. This time it was that it is so good that it should be a movie. Would you be interested in having it shown to Thruline Entertainment?

I told him to send me an email and hung up (I was more polite than that, but that’s the edited version of the story).

The email arrived in due course (read; immediately). Here’s what he said in part:

I called in earlier today to inform you that your book, “Grace Note” can be adapted into a motion picture.

Hollywood Coverage: Your book has all the elements Hollywood wants — an exciting plot, well-developed characters and fresh content — yet there’s still a crucial piece you need in order to be taken seriously by established entertainment executives.

We would like to know if you’d be interested to have your books presented to our newly acquired partner, THRULINE Entertainment. THRULINE is a Hollywood production company and they are basically looking for good books to adapt into a movie.

The contract has just been sealed last August and basically we want to impress our new partner. We don’t want to provide them with a “just-an-ordinary” material. We are putting our best foot forward because we want to prolong this contract.

If you’re interested, your book just needs a Script coverage in order for us to present this to production companies and producers. That is the basic tool that they would look for instead of reading the whole book.

He then went on to tell me that the two-part script coverage would be done by a professional who has done this before etc. What he did not tell me was the price or any reference to the fact that he wants to sell me a service, but I knew that this was precisely what was happening. And indeed research on Thruline uncovers a company with self-described ties to the Hollywood machine that works with self-publishing companies to part authors from their money. Well, they didn’t’ say it that way but I can read between the lines!

Of course, if your book is really adaptable as a movie, you can send it to an agent who does this kind of thing. Options on books can and are taken from the book itself. And doesn’t it make sense that someone who is actually interested in adapting your book might actually have to read the book? Yes, script “coverages” are done, but really? I actually had an earlier book optioned and learned that the vast majority of optioned books never even make it to treatment phase.

The iUniverse price for this script coverage is $859.00.

This is what I said in my response to the email:

Thanks for this. Don‘t bother telephoning me. I’m not paying upwards of $900 for any more service from iUniverse. If you think the book is good enough to be sold to “Hollywood” then I think you should be willing to put up the money for a percentage on the back end. Otherwise, we have nothing to talk about. I’m an accomplished writer – I can do this myself.

I think it’s time iUniverse took a different tack when it comes to ‘services’ for writers.

But call he did. This time I didn’t answer. So where does this story lead me? Well, this morning as I checked my Twitter feed I came across a link to a blog post titled “Publishing 101 – Money” on The Passive Voice blog whose author considers whether or not the price of self-publishing is worth it. She and I agree that it is, but it does seem to me that there is a limit to what one should reasonably spend.

Self-publishing requires an author to be a writer, editor, interior book designer, cover designer, marketer and promoter. So is this so different from traditional publishing these days?

When an editor at a traditional publishing house tells me that he is “unable to ask [their] designers to come up with a cover completely from scratch…” it seems that the two publish models are getting closer together.

So, am I any closer to a decision about my next book’s home? Not really.