When “Too Good To Be True” Is Just Plain Wrong

Over recent days I have been surprised by some of the reactions I have been hearing about my new company, IFWG Publishing, by the writing community around the world. It was not what I expected. I was, perhaps, a little naive. I can sum the general responses in one sentence: "It’s too good to be true!" I feel compelled to dispel that stink bomb.

IFWG Publishing was created by writers for writers, and we believe that we are giving authors the best service they could find anywhere, whether it be in self-publishing, or traditional. We term our services as ‘hybrid’, because we don’t fit the mold of either traditional or self-publishing, mainly because we are author-centric. Other blog items covers that stuff 🙂

What got me was our quarterly contest. Listen folks! Every three months we run a short story contest where up to 33 finalists get published for FREE in an anthology, and will get marketed. The winner will also have one of his or her major works published for FREE, and will get marketed. Every three months!!!! And some people think we are scamming. Sheesh.

We are running this contest for two reasons. Firstly, it gives authors a real chance to experience publishing and get some of their material into the industry and reader world. It helps them, and it costs them very little indeed (time and creativity). For us, it draws in (theoretically) hundreds of talented writers and we can tap into this group, and help publish genuine talent. Authors make money, we make money. Simple business. Symbiosis.

So why so cynical, writing world? I suspect there are a lot of reasons, but perhaps the biggest is that the publishing industry, almost more than any other, has a dismal track record, where there are in fact scammers galore trawling the seas of lost and disillusioned authors. I can’t really blame them.

We are a new company and our first titles are just about to roll off the presses. We are running our very first quarterly contest, and so there are no previous awards to demonstrate our street cred. The starting gun had only fired fourteen days ago. When I responded to one particularly cynical writer, I ended up being quite brief. I asked him to visit our site and pick up what our ethos is all about, and if still not satisfied, to bookmark our site and visit it in 3 months. That is what it is all about. We need to prove ourselves by delivering.

However, there is a bit of a dilemma in play here. We still need enough material to allow delivery. We need authors to believe in us and we can produce quality titles. We need entrants to our contests so that the field is outstanding. We need people to understand what we are about and put their trust in us.

I hope you are one such person.

Commentary: I am an author – how do I get published?

It all depends on what you want to do with your story, and with your career.

1. You can try to publish your work through small presses – some are more picky about quality and polish than large presses, but there are also fringe/specialist presses that aren’t fussy. If you find and befriend the latter, you might be able to publish quickly. If all you want is to see your work printed with limited market penetration, this is one way to do it.

2. If you are dead keen on getting street cred in the publishing world, without compromise, you have a long journey and you should just keep trying until you get the break. In that case, it is NOT smart to show more than a few pages of your serious material in public access Internet sites (like this) – otherwise you lose what some publishers consider important – "first publishing rights".

3. You can self publish. There are options here. You can do it all yourself, buy your ISBN, get copyright, go through services like Createspace and end up spending fairly small amounts of money and you have something someone can buy through Amazon. It doesn’t market your product – that is up to you, and there is no professional polish, formatting, editing, done. For the vast majority of people who do this, they will have sub 100 units sold, the majority by you, family and friends. But you might think this is ok

4. You can self publish through a self-publishing company. They use Createspace, Booksurge, Ingram and other services, depending on how the company is set up, and many of them are mercenary. They will charge quite high for the services and they will not be fussy about the quality of your work. If your work is unpolished or (forgive me) crap, they wont care, and it will be reflected in the product. They will not edit your work unless you pay for it, and the editor isn’t always THAT good. If you pay for cover art, they will provide it. If you want it marketed, they will do it for money, otherwise, the vast majority will do nothing. Sales are rarely good, much like doing it yourself. Again, this might be what you want.

5. There are a few companies out there that offer a form of hybrid service – you pay them to publish you, and they look after full service, and may even refuse to publish you until a minimum standard is met, despite the client’s willingness to pay. This is the best of both worlds. Again, sales are not necessarily great, but at least you are given the equipment to optimise your chances.

With regard to self publishing, it has a lot to do with the final product. How good it is. Traditional publishers will openly say that a self-published work spells the doom of the title ever transferring into traditional publication. Bullshit. Matthew Reilly, Christopher Paolini and Grisham are examples of the contrary. The fact is that if you sell between about 2000 and 5000 units, agents and publishers will start showing interest. Having said this, boy do you have to work to get your stuff marketed, and also… it has to be good. There is no quick way there.

Also, those of you who want to hold out to get the traditional path break – think long and hard about that too. Luck aside (hey, I would like to win Lottery too), it is a long journey. Most specialised small presses will publish you but is it success? Look at the quality of their work – many are as nearly appalling as most self-published works. Limited. Almost worthless.

Now to dispel the biggest myths. First, if you actually get the break and publish your work through a tradpublisher, don’t give up your day job. On average, a successful writer needs about 10 novels drawing in royalties before a reasonable income can be got. Secondly, when a traditional publisher offers to publish you, they will probably invest about 50K worth of print run (about 5000 units) and spread it among the 120,000 outlets (work that out) and then they will wait and see. Most outlets will try a new author/title out for about a week or two, and if no sale, they will return it for pulping. If it isn’t received well within about 2 weeks, a publisher will simply let the title go to pasture – and the publisher owns the rights to the novel, so the author can’t do anything with it, except try to drum up interest. That’s it, you see, tradpub or not, new writers need to do the work. Publishers will not invest marketing money (beyond about 10k) if your name isn’t Dan Brown.

So where do you go? I think it is relatively simple. You give yourself every chance possible to get your name out there, and do it smartly. Most self-publishing activities, if handled well – the right publisher, the right polish, the right marketing, and the right product – has to be good, will never harm your chances to get traditionally published, but at least you get a foot into the industry and you LEARN from it. Research every step of the way.

A Simplified Analytical Model Describing the Differences Between Traditional and Self-Publishing

This is a copy of a blog post I placed today in the IFWG Publishing site.

I have been involved in many discussions of late, on the differences between Self Publishing using (Print On Demand technology) and traditional publishing, and I have read so many commentaries on the topic on the Internet, that my own views have solidified somewhat, and I feel an urge to discuss them.

I also want to dispel some myths.

I don’t want to dwell on self-publishing efforts by authors who do much of the logistics by themselves, but I believe that this analysis does largely cover the same challenges and opportunities as companies that provide self-publishing services.

A good focus point for this discussion is to try to think of publishing, for an author, as a simplified linear equation:

Title Success refers to the end goal – to have a title that sells well and contributes to the success of an author;

Quality of Title is self-evident – the better the creative work, the better chance it will sell well. This is not a given though, as it is my belief that many excellent titles just take too long to be recognised, if at all.

Quality of Publisher. This factor represents several elements – it refers to the publisher’s requirements to ensure polish of text, printing, cover art, etc. There needs to be an expectation in the industry that a given publisher delivers.

Publisher Marketing Effort. This refers to the extent to which the publisher will support marketing the title to the industry and reading public.

Author Marketing Effort. This refers to the extent to which the author makes an individual effort in marketing the title, both in terms of assisting the publisher, as well as pure individual effort.

There are other influences, but they collectively cannot match any of the factors represented above. Luck is one, and there is little point in discussing it. The best example is the alignment of some titles, and their coincidental exposure, with a world fad – the Dan Browns, the Harry Potters. If it happens, then it happens. Winning lottery happens too.

Each of these factors that collectively contributes to Title Success behaves differently between traditional and POD publisher effort. The following table discusses them:

Success Factor	Traditional Publishing	Self Publishing
Quality of Title	Publishers are generally conservative & will only publish titles from “tried and true” authors and celebrities. It is notoriously difficult for new authors to get a notable publisher to publish them. While dependent on the publisher, titles are generally of high quality, in line with the conservative model.	Most publishers have no interest at all in the quality of the title. They will publish anything the author wants, as long as it is paid for. Authors are in the difficult situation of having to judge the quality of their own work, and unfortunately most of them are seriously biased due to lack of professional help or experience.
Quality of Publisher	Leading publishing houses have professionals who will polish titles to an excellent standard, and provide artwork, including covers, of high grade. There are also notable exceptions to this, depending on the maturity of a given company, as well as their target readers.	Publishers vary in quality, and many should not be in business. Because most work on an authors-pay basis, they have little, if any, interest in polish. There are countless examples of titles that are self-published with appalling typeset, grammar, spelling errors, and artwork.
Publisher Marketing Effort	Publishers tend to spend minimally on new titles, and rely on their sample effort to determine if further spending is required. Often, this initial effort does little to further the title’s progress. The author is stuck with the publisher’s effort because the title is under complete control of the publisher.	Publishers will only market if they are paid to do so, in most cases. Even then, it is relatively minor and they tend not to have the market penetration of traditional publishers. In most cases, however, the title is not bound to the self-publishing effort – the author still has control.
Author Marketing Effort	Good publishers will work with the author, but at a minimal level. There is an expectation that the author will work hard to market the title and it is in fact in the author’s interest to do this, as it may assist in getting the sales needed to attract publisher interest to continue with it.	Publishing companies will make it clear to the author that marketing is generally up to them, and that success will be determined by that effort. This locks the author into a great deal of time commitment, and perhaps money. This does not bode well for authors who have little aptitude for this discipline.

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As you can see in the table above, most categories, be they traditional or using the self-publishing paradigm, have negative features. Few have positive. The industry is geared toward business, not the author. This is obscene, and it has been like this from the very start.

However, I think the industry is changing – mainly due to technological innovation, where some of the negative factors are being undermined, re-evaluated, if you will. For example, self-publishing started off as vanity presses, where the author would have to cough up a great deal of money in order for print-runs and binding to take place. This was the only way printing could take place back then. These businesses worked with models where only a small number of customers were needed. Then came the Internet, digital printing, just-in-time printing technologies. Suddenly it was a lot cheaper and faster to publish a book with high grade printing, paper and binding. This is goodness. This phenomenon, along with others, doesn’t per se improve the authors’ lot, but it enabled the industry to be flexible enough to allow for the possibility of better deals for authors.

From the perspective of traditional publishing, there is a proliferation of new small publishers who genuinely want to publish new titles from new authors and are willing to find them. They work hard and don’t necessarily make a lot of money, but they are able to publish, because it is cheaper to do so. I respect these companies to no end. My own company, IFWG Publishing, intends to go down that road with a new imprint within a year.

With completely different dynamics, there is a small subset of the POD/self-publishing industry that is also looking to provide a better deal for authors. I call it hybrid publishing. This is where the publisher chooses to make policy decisions that provide a stronger emphasis on authors’ interests. In the case of my company, IFWG Publishing, this entails:

Not accepting just any title for publishing. It has to have a minimum standard. The philosophy is really very simple: authors can only grow if they can lift their standard to a publishable level; and our company will have better market penetration for titles if all the titles have a reputation of quality. Symbiosis.
Minimum marketing. Our company must provide a reasonable level of marketing support, even if it only entails good working relationships with authors and the provision of good advice. We can and do more than that.
Decent pricing. We simply believe that if we have highly competitive pricing, then we will attract more authors, and more authors will be able to afford to publish their work.
The company authors are authors themselves. We want to help authors grow and we know their motivations. This adds support to the growth of author careers.

I really don’t know where the industry is going to settle, if it will ever settle. What I do know is that the two classic models of publishing, which have existed in one form or another for many years, are not working for authors. This seems incredibly stupid to me because it is clear that readers (whether they be e-readers or print readers) are insatiable and love good new work. It’s what makes writers write, and many publishers publish. If tapped, it can also make publishers run successful businesses. I believe in my company, in part because I we can contribute to changing this injustice.

A Call For A Children’s Book Illustrator! – CLOSED

This request has closed – an illustrator has been appointed.

Hi there!

One of the nice things about being in the publishing business is that I can pick and choose what special projects I want to be involved with. This is such a case.

A very good friend of mine, and an excellent author, has written a short children’s piece. It is about 5000 words long and takes the reader through a futuristic, phantasmagoria of a journey. It was conceived to be heavily reliant on excellent artwork – and a fair amount of it.

This isn’t the type of work that should commission an artist – it is as reliant on the imagination and skills of the illustrator as it is with the writer – and I have advised my friend that what he needs is an artist who works in colour to collaborate with him. 50/50 royalties, in actual terms.

If you are an artist and want to work on a part-time project, to collaborate with my friend on this book, please contact me. Leave your email via a comment on this blog entry, and I will make contact with you. I can look at your credentials (sample art etc), and if you look like you are well matched with my friend, then I can get you to look at my friend’s story. The next step would then be for you to get in contact with the writer and see if you are happy to work together. I know that my friend is happy to allow a lot of your creativity to influence the work – again, a collaboration.

I am a publisher, and my friend has committed to turn to my company first when the work is nearing completion. I am also happy to provide some detached, publishing comments on the journey this collaboration will follow. All goodness, I believe. I believe this effort will take months – at least six.

Just to reiterate what I inferred above. This is the creative phase and is not a commission. My friend did this work for free, investing in the possibility of publication. The artist will need to follow the same path. However, if the product turns out as exciting as I think it will, the artist will have equal share of royalty returns.

Please! If you think you can do this, leave your details!!!

Gerry
Chief Editor
IFWG Publishing

Commentary: IFWG Publishing’s “Social Contract”

The last few weeks have been heady days indeed. IFWG Publishing has been created, and all the necessary technical and procedural elements have been put into place to actually allow us to publish. Now the hard work begins.

Somehow, someway, despite the hectic pace, I actually had moments where I was able to contemplate the bigger picture, and review why we are doing what we are doing. We want to run a business – that’s a given. We want to make a living doing what we like best, in the industry that stimulates us the most, and we want to be rewarded for hard work and innovation. This is true, very true, but we also have an ethos – a philosophy that permeates all elements of what we think and do. We want to help good writers to be better writers. We want to publish good work and get the buzz.

I have just described to you, the reader, what we want to do, but we have to prove it to you too, and win your heart and soul. The biggest obstacle to this, in my view, is the fact that we are a self-publishing company (I should note here, however, that we certainly do more than what a self publishing company would normally do, and it is definitely part of our plan to also have a traditional publishing imprint).

Self publishing has an enormous stigma and this is our clear challenge to overcome. Many people – including those in the industry – intentionally or via ignorance, interchange ‘self publishing’ with ‘vanity press’, or dead end, low quality products. It isn’t surprising, because we have a publishing industry in a technological, economic, and cultural hiatus. All you have to do is spend half an hour on Twitter, or visit one of the hundreds of blogs out there in the Internet, to get a sense of the excitement about where the industry is headed. What we do know is that an an author, or a small self-publishing press, CAN print high quality books, given the skills and effort applied to it, and it can be marketed to a reasonable degree. It is equally well known that new authors entering the business will still look to keeping their day jobs for many years to come (if not forever) because the efforts by large publishing companies to invest in ’emerging authors’ is conservative indeed. With some few exceptions, regardless of self publishing or not, the onus on marketing has fallen to the author, and perhaps a third party, if they can be afforded.

In my estimation the real obstacle for ’emerging authors’ is not the constant barrage of failed queries (which are symptoms), it is the conservative nature of the industry itself, where authors are commodities, not human beings. The irony is that for every potential great writer that gets discouraged, there is a financial investment lost to those same companies. It is an incredible waste.

So I thought about how we could do things differently, and it occurred to me that what we needed was something analogous to a ‘social contract’ – where there are two parties of very different ilk, who have an agreement about how things are done (this is my definition, as it is hardly the sociopolitical definition). In other words, we need to be able to convey to authors what we can do for them, and at the same time describe what they can do for us. For instance, we can publish an author at an incredibly low price compared to most of the self-publishing industry and which would have been unheard of only a few years ago. That is one of our commitments. However, we also require quality – we need to maintain a standard in the industry that will, over time, prove that a self-publishing company can produce titles that a retail store will gladly place on their shelves. Authors will certainly gain from that! Authors in this relationship need to work beyond their submitted manuscript level – they need to be willing to rewrite and work with editors – and pay for the effort.

On a similar level, marketing is critical and has a place in the ‘social contract’. We are committed to market your work if you publish through us, but we can only do so much. But we will help, and advise. We will help you, help yourself. Your commitment, is to participate in the marketing process, assuming you want to make a success of this.

There are other examples, but I will leave it at that. It is all about relationships. Ultimately, it is about making good authors better authors.

I hope that many of you who read this get a sense of what we are trying to do, and join in the ‘social contract’.

A Copy of A Response to An Emerging Author, Frustrated With Rejection Letters

You have my sympathies, Furball, as I have been through this, and so have many of my friends, including my fellow cofounders of IFWG Publishing. This was part of the reason why we founded our company.

I have read some revealing articles by publishers and agents about what motivates acceptance of new talent etc, and it is a tangled web – very difficult to separate and thoroughly analyze. I think we all know that one telling factor is simply the skills and taste (and perhaps even the moods) of agents and submission editors. They are busy folk and they rely on a trained eye and their "gut feel" when skimming query letters and synopses (if they get as far as synopses). Many will claim that they are so well trained they can tell by the quality of the query letter whether it is worth steaming on or not, but there are plenty of authors who have been rejected, to only "come good" by the 100th attempt, to question the quality of these folk who represented the 99 initial rejections. I wish there was a database out there somewhere that keeps track of agencies that missed opportunities. It would be telling indeed.

Then there is simple business. Most large publishing houses (and reflected by the backdrop of agents) make most of their money from established writers or celebrities. This is where they spend most of their marketing money and they know that newbies don’t return much with their first few Titles. They are not very investment oriented – they want the fast buck, often driven by their shareholders. This doesn’t help the new writer trying to get a break.

There are other reasons, but it is pointless to go on. You know, despite this, I genuinely believe that a good writer will come good eventually, more often than not. I also believe that even established writers have to market themselves – it is a simple fact, and there is good literature out there on that topic as well. As one wise editor once said, "once you get published, that is when the journey begins." So guys, those of you who haven’t been published, remember there is a journey after THAT.

Some of the strategies that I think can help get the foot in the door are related to credentials and publicity. And which tool is most important to get there? Your writing. Try to win competitions. Try to sell as many short stories to magazines and anthologies (print and electronic) as you can. Target the bigger names – for instance, there are a bunch of sci-fi magazines where if you publish with them, you automatically qualify for entry into the Science Fiction Writers of America association. Every milestone will be another dot point on your CV which is attached to your query letter. Another way to get cred is to publish through companies like ours – and you have to help work the publicity. Once you sell enough units, you get street cred. People sit up and take notice. There are notable examples of this happening (think John Grisham, think Christopher Paolini, think Matthew Reilly).

Sorry, Furball – started to soapbox. In a nutshell, you are dead right. I say don’t give up, though – build a network of friends in the industry and place yourself in a position where luck is minimized.

cheers

Gerry
Chief Editor

Publishing and Author Help

I have something in common with a lot of people out there in the world – we want to be full time writers. Not necessarily successful, not necessarily filthy rich (both of these are desirable but optional), but we all want to do what we love, as a profession. Some of us have what it takes, some of us don’t. I am not here writing about those who don’t – that is a very personal journey, and we should all at least have a chance at getting properly assessed, and have the appropriate experience and perhaps training, to come to a definitive decision.

I am writing this blog to you, the person in my situation, and I am assuming you have what it takes.

About a year and a half ago I made a fair number of friends of people like you, and several of them have become as close a friend as you can get while not being on the same continent. We spent a lot of time coaching each other and participated in short story challenges – all of this has become invaluable in improving our mastery of the craft, and we all had/have other projects. Then, not sure how long ago, we explored POD and other publishing concepts, and one of us actually published his first novel, via POD, and learned much from the exercise. While none of us have published through traditional publishing houses, we all have much to share with others.

So, we created a Guild, based on a more confined Guild we were previous members of, and we call ourselves the International Fantasy Writers Guild – because fantasy is the prime genre among us. We are, however, equally comfortable with Science Fiction, and any number of genres and subgenres in that space. The purpose of the Guild is twofold – to supply the usual shared community networking that sites like that provide, but with two important differences – firstly, with membership regions so that work can be discussed without ruining "first publishing rights" which can occur in open Internet sites; and secondly, we will form a POD group that will specialise in the genres aforementioned, and which will be particularly generous to author interests. We also will not compromise quality.

I have blogged this now as we are actually ramping up our activities and will in fact start publishing over the next coming weeks, perhaps few months.

We are still getting our proverbials together, but our intentions are clear, and we are able to publish ebooks, kindle, and softcover books now, if we want to.

I invite you to join us, or at least check us out. If you want to go the traditional path, be my guest – hey, even with this stuff happening, I would like that break myself, but I also believe there is a place here for those who want to publish, and also to learn by sharing with others.

This is the place to go, but it is still a bit rough. Email me and I can give you more information if you have any questions.