I had a new experience recently – someone cold-called my family’s house and left a message on the answering machine, claiming to be a publisher “very interested” in Seeing by Moonlight
Needless to say, I am skeptical when they reach out by phone; especially when the voice seems to be reading the name of my book awkwardly into a script.
I looked up the company, and they present themselves as a one-stop shop for author services – editing, publishing, promotion, all of it, a la carte or as a package. Nothing about their site indicated any critical discernment; if your money’s good, they will happily take it and (probably) provide you with a book-like product posted on Amazon, Goodreads et al. You will also have the exciting option of paying for PR, paying for reviews, paying for all sorts of things. Will they be the best version of said things? Who can ever say? You only have the one book, so you won’t get to compare the results with anything.
As I said in my lengthy breakdown of the costs of publishing Stages of Sleep
If, however, you are trying to produce a professional-grade product while simultaneously being thrifty about your out-of-pocket costs; then the devil is really, really in the details.
Sites like this primarily work as middlemen. They book an author, then matchmake them with someone providing an essential service – e.g. an editor. They probably have a network of freelancers who work for a certain rate; and the “publisher” takes a healthy markup for putting the two of you together. Ditto artwork, publicity…none of these creatives are likely earning an in-house salary, they’re just taking assignments as they come in while they hustle for a living like the rest of us. You have no idea how much experience they have, how much attention they will be able to pay to your book given the size of the fee, or even whether they work within (or even much like) your genre, and you might not get much hand in choosing them. If you have hired such a service, the service assumes you don’t know the landscape so well.
As I said in that prior post, as an independent author you have to consider yourself the manager of a professional process far beyond writing – editing, design/layout, cover artwork, publicity/marketing, distribution. Through some combination of DIY and hiring, you have to see to the completion of these tasks. A legitimate “big” publisher can cover them all, and will assume a share of the risk by doing so with professional personnel without making you pay for it all up front. Needless to say, they do not extend such risk to just anyone.
A middleman servicer catering to independents places all the risk on you by having you pay out-of-pocket up-front. If you end up with a wildly-successful book, they get a giant chunk of it, and who is to say how much they actually helped? If it performs as the average independent book performs, they still have your money. So if it even needs saying as advice, don’t just read the blurbs on their site. Google. Google deep and Google hard.
Some of what they are offering isn’t difficult to at least comparison shop by one’s self. When I was looking for a copy editor, a single post on Craigslist produced well over 150 responses. I filtered it down to the dozen or so that sounded most approachable; this included eliminating some of those who had the most “big” publishing house experience, as I knew I would never be able to approach their quotes. I sent each of these candidates the same sample chapter; provided the overall word count of the book, and asked them to extrapolate from that an estimate for the hours required to edit the entire book, and a quote to match. Three candidates emerged who had exemplary scrutiny and mastery of grammar, and whom I could afford; and the final call was a gut one based on rapport and my comfort with their methods. And I was very happy with the editor I hired and have retained her services on all three of my books.
A “publisher” trafficking in author services might well have connected me with someone of equal quality; but then I would have had to pay them as well as the editor, PLUS give up some of my book sales. To the extent that editing polish positively impacts sales (and if I haven’t said it enough, professional editing is something you cannot do without if you want your book taken seriously), I achieved the same result with less money just by managing that aspect of the process myself.
Saying more along these lines would probably be redundant; the point is primarily to raise a warning flag that the marketplace is evolving in a new direction. Call them useful to amateurs or exploitative of same, but such companies are no longer just setting up websites and hoping some old-fashioned SEO will steer you to them. They are hunting. Someone is likely curating and selling the names of authors publishing independently; either by searching the Kindle store, or perhaps by buying a list from one of the services MF Thomas and I used in publishing our two collaborations. Competitors will start hunting too, in order to keep up; it’s just how marketplaces work.
Doing it by phone is a tell. A scripted telemarketer works by volume and on commission. So someone out there has written a script designed to coax independent authors into signing up with one of these “publishers”. I would be curious to read that script – but not curious enough to actually return their call and listen to it. If the publisher is primarily fishing for inexperienced authors, then you can intuit the business model: get the money from you upfront, and if you don’t like the quality, odds are it was the only book you were ever going to write anyway. (Was that brutal? Probably. So is being a writer.)
I remember back when I worked in script development at a feature film company. The VP that I worked under was very good at networking and sales conversations and loved movies, but wasn’t a patient reader. Literary agents got wise that when he started telling them how much he loved a script and wanted our company to be able to shop it exclusively to a couple of studios, he might not have even read it. Some would start quizzing him on details, and so he kept me by the phone so he could execute the bluff.
That might be one good thing to remember if someone claiming to be a “publisher” starts flattering you by phone. Find out if they have even read the thing, and be ready to disrupt the script by asking a few questions. If they are in sales mode, they don’t want to discuss numbers until they feel like they have softened you up enough, so go ahead and skip to the meat. Ask if you are expected to pay for services upfront. Ask what rights they are looking to acquire, and for how long. Ask what royalties they expect. Find out if they are taking any risk at all, or if you’re just another sales lead to them. If all the risk is on you, and it won’t harm them at all if your book only sells five copies, don’t be afraid to ask why you need them at all.