Independent Publishers

August 28, 2008
Zoe left me a comment on the bestseller blog post from the other day and I started answering and realized it would make a decent blog post in itself, so here goes:

Zoe,
I'm not sure I would say I'm not a fan of the "indie" way in that my first novel, Dirty Deeds, was published by a small independent press, formerly High Country, now called, I believe, Ingalls Publishing.

In fact, for a year or two I reviewed books for ForeWord Magazine, which is essentially Publishers Weekly aimed at the independent publishing market.

I can't always define "independent press." I someone ironically defined it as not being owned by Bertelsmann, Disney, or Rupert Murdoch. By that definition, I believe Kensington is an "independent press" although by all other definitions Kensington is no more independent than Bantam (part of Random, which is owned by Bertelsmann, which is a Germany-based publishing conglomerate with publishing houses all over the world).

In fact, I think independent publishers are great. Here's my problem with them:

They have no money.
Typically they have poor distribution, ie., they can't get your books into bookstores.
They're understaffed, which means they're slow.

Let's take each one at a time and I'll provide my opinions and experiences. Your mileage may vary.

They have no money.

I gave a talk to some would-be writers several years ago and asked them what a publisher was. Then I gave them probably the only definition of a publisher that anyone needs:

A publisher is someone with money that wants to publish something.

Bantam, for instance, is a publishing house and they have a lot of money. I don't know who's running Bantam these days, but they're part of Random, Inc., which is owned by Bertelsmann. The point being, anyway, that someone up the line has a few billion dollars rattling around in their vaults and they decided they wanted to turn their few billion dollars (or marks or euros, as the case may be) into, hopefully, several billion dollars. (Versus the old joke, How do you make a small fortune in publishing? Start with a large fortune.)

Unfortunately, a lot of indie publishers are underfunded. It's a labor of love and they thought it would be nifty to publish books because they love books and they're enamored with the idea of being a publisher and by golly, maybe they'll even make a ton of money doing it. (In which case, don't try to publish fiction, for God sakes!). So they typically don't pay an advance, or if they do, it's very small because all their money is going into production, and they probably can't afford a really great cover artist so they hire their niece or they use clipart, and then they really can't afford to warehouse your spare books so they use their garage or they try to get you to warehouse them and sell them out of the back of your car on consignment. And then they discover that any ads, mailings, etc. are expensive and what they assumed was a business with very low overhead starts to look like any other business with hidden costs and advanced reading copies are pricey and most aren't reviewed anyway, and a booth at the Book Expo of America costs thousands of dollars and the freelance copyeditor they did (or did not) hire wants more money (or some) and...

Actually, the publishers of Dirty Deeds weren't too bad about this (except for maybe the cover art). They did not pay advances, however and they did encourage me (it wasn't required) to take some copies and hand-sell them on consignment. (I did, 500, and I sold about half until this year I gave up and donated them to an outfit that sends books to troops overseas).

But before Dirty Deeds I had a novel called Blood Secrets, which was picked up to be published by Write Way Publishing, a small publisher out of  Colorado. They were gaining a reputation, they published in hardcover, they had some award nominations, she flipped for real money for classy cover art by one of the top book cover artists and then...

Well, she overextended, made some strategic mistakes, found herself with $100,000+ in returns and declared bankruptcy. Luckily for me (I think), before Blood Secrets was published, so she just released the rights to me. For other authors, she was unwilling to release the rights because she was hoping to squeeze every penny out of any potential movie or paperback sales in order to get out from under the creditors. I believe the remaining writers eventually sued her, but I don't have details other than a general dissatisfaction for everybody.

They have poor distribution.

In the U.S., bookstores and libraries essentially get their books from two places: Ingram and Baker & Taylor. Ingram mostly handles books for bookstores, B&T mostly for libraries. If you're an indie and you want to get your books distributed by them, you gotta pay and you gotta apply but mostly, remember, Ingram and B&T make their money through volume, so they're not all that excited when a small press applies that's only publishing 5 or 6 books a year and selling 1000 copies.

There are other distributors and it's something of a growing area and the number of small presses appears to be tipping the hands of Ingram and B&T, but distribution is a huge freakin' problem for indies. Dirty Deeds was distributed primarily, I think, by Biblio. Last summer I did a library talk and the bookseller who was selling books there couldn't get copies of Dirty Deeds, so as a result, there weren't any there to be sold. Welcome to distribution issues. (Years back I read a column by a writer who'd had his first book published by Penguin and he asked them at the time why his book wasn't in grocery stores or airports and they told him Penguin books were only at bookstores. As he put it, if you want a Penguin, go to a bookstore or Antarctica.)

Midnight Ink, at least on the surface, seemed to be okay with distribution. Their parent company, Llewellyn, is something like the world's 2nd or 1st largest publisher of new age and tarot books and although booksellers I talked to never heard of Midnight Ink, they almost all heard of Llewellyn. (This pointed as well to a certain branding issue, but that's beyond this post). Still, my books didn't always end up in the bookstores, even when I was notifying them locally, etc. That has something to do with sales, reviews, etc.. Bookstores are funny. If you're a Borders or B&N, et al., and the first book sells, say, 4 copies that they optimistically ordered, they don't seem to say, "Oh, he sold all 4, let's order more." They sit. Then the next book comes out and they look at the computer record and see the last book sold 4 copies, so they order... 3. Or 2. Unless you're a monster success or have been frontlisted on a major publishers catalogue. It's a particularly dispiriting way that booksellers' computer systems have been set up to kill writer's careers and actually sell fewer books, but again, let's not go there today.

Welcome to publishing.

They're understaffed, which means they're slow.

High Country, the folks that published Dirty Deeds, consisted of the Ingalls, one editor and an office manager and a part-time marketing guy.

Typically what happens these days is that once writers and aspiring writers discover there's an indie publisher who accepts unagented manuscripts, they swarm them. And suddenly the (one) editor receives 300 manuscripts a week.

Now, one of the best small presses around is Poison Pen Press, run by Barbara Peters (owner of the Poison Pen Bookstore in, I think it's Phoenix, AZ, although it might be Scottsdale) and her husband Robert (Rosenwald?), who is a businessman. Things may have changed a bit in recent years, but 4 or 5 years ago here's how PPP worked. You sent in a partial, it was sent to a cadre of pre-editors who then took months and months to read the manuscript and/or told you to get lost or to read the full. Then more months passed. Then, if a majority approved it, they send it on to Barbara, who spends months and months reading it before, in my case, rejecting it. In my case, twice, I believe, the entire process took 13 to 15 months. Also, this is a personal take, but one that's sort of a core of truth at most of publishing:

In both cases the pre-editors loved--and I really mean loved; the coordinator, a guy with the unlikely name of Monty Montee, told me he'd never seen a manuscript that received such universal nods and thumbs-ups from the review board--the manuscript, which then went to Barbara who turned it down.

Well, it's her company, she can do what she wants, right?

Compare this to dealing with the big houses via an agent, response time is typically 2 to 4 weeks, with 4 weeks being the most common timeframe. (4 weeks or never, I say somewhat ruefully).

And I never quite know what to make of a small press that demands you not send your manuscript to someone else while they consider it, then take a year to get around to reading it. They argue they don't want to waste their time... but apparently it's okay if the writer does.

Oh well.

So, am I opposed to small presses? No. I'm grateful to them. But at this point in my career, they're not the way to go for a variety of reasons I won't go into here. If your goal is primarily to get published, I think indies are awesome. Are they easier to break into? I used to think so, but I'm not sure that's really true any more. Too many good writers, a lot of them who fell off the big publisher wagon and are looking for a place to land.

If you have bills to pay and are trying to make a living writing (like, say, me), then indies can be a problem.

My suspicion is that we're going to see more and more indies (because the technology and the Internet makes it easy, or at least relatively easier), partly because the big publishing houses don't make enough money to warrant publishing books that sell fewer than 5000 copies (which is most of them). So they're going to publish blockbusters they can make millions off and leave everything else to the indies. And if the indies start making money or have a blockbuster...

The big publishing houses will buy them or throw lots of money at the writer to entice them away.

Cheers,

Mark Terry