CAN'T TELL THE SHYSTERS FROM THE PUBLISHERS

Please read this carefully if you are an author looking to indie publish. This post was re-blogged from LET'S GET DIGITAL Blog and David Gaughran.

The Author Exploitation Business

Posted on May 4, 2013 by davidgaughran

Writing is a glamorous occupation – at least from the outside. Popular depictions of our profession tend to leave out all the other stuff that comes with the territory: carpal tunnel syndrome, liver failure, penury, and madness.
Okay, okay, I jest. I love being a writer. Sharing stories with the world and getting paid for it is bloody brilliant. It’s a dream job, and like any profession with a horde of neophytes seeking to break in, there are plenty of sharks waiting to chew them to bits.
Publishing is a screwed up business. The often labyrinthine path to success makes it much easier for those with nefarious intentions to scam the unsuspecting. But it doesn’t help that so many organizations who claim to help writers, to respect them, to assist them along the path to publication are actually screwing them over.
Before the digital revolution made self-publishing viable on a wide scale, the dividing lines were easier to spot. Traditional publishers paid you if they wanted to buy the rights to your novel. Self-publishers were people who filled their garages with books and tried to hawk them at events. And vanity presses were the scammers, luring the unsuspecting with false promises and roundly condemned by self-publishers and traditional publishers alike.
Today it’s very different. The scammy vanity presses are owned by traditional publishers who are marketing them as the “easy” way to self-publish – when it’s nothing more than a horrifically expensive and terribly ineffective way to publish your work, guaranteed to kill your book’s chance of success stone dead, while emptying your bank account in the process.
Some of you might think: hey, it’s just business. Caveat emptor and all that. And don’t these people know how to use Google?
That’s easy to say from our position of experience. Do you remember how naive you were at the start? Do you remember just how badly you wanted to get published? Do you remember the crushing grind of the query-go-round?
I’m not surprised people get scammed. When you want something so badly, and you can’t seem to make progress towards that goal – no matter how hard you work – you start to go crazy. You get desperate.
And it’s much harder to tell the scammers from the legitimate organizations when they are owned by the same people.
Take Penguin-owned Author Solutions, one of the worst vanity presses out there. Here’s how they hoodwink inexperienced writers into using their horribly expensive service.
If you Google a term like “find a publisher” the results are littered with sites like FindYourPublisher.com (which I’m not going to link to because that will help their SEO, but you can cut-and-paste that address).
The website purports to be an independent resource, helping to pair you with the most suitable publishing company. Or as they put it:

dedicated to helping both first-time and experienced authors identify the most suitable indie book publishing company for their book. With the information you provide about your book and goals, FYP makes a recommendation as to which indie book publisher has the best publishing package to help you reach your publishing objectives.

Below this message is an online questionnaire asking you about your book. When you have completed that and handed over your phone number, the site makes a recommendation based on your answers.
Except the only companies recommended are Trafford, AuthorHouse, Xlibris, and iUniverse – all of which are scammy vanity presses, all owned by Author Solutions. And, fitting with the rest of the pattern, FindYourPublisher.com is just one of many (many!) such sites owned and operated by Author Solutions, purporting to make independent recommendations, but only recommending Author Solutions companies.
I have sympathy for those hoodwinked by awful companies like Author Solutions. The dividing lines aren’t as obvious as they were. And inexperienced writers naively assume that a company like Penguin has their best interests at heart. Maybe it’s the cuddly logo.
Newsflash: Penguin doesn’t care about writers
When Penguin bought the world’s biggest vanity press for $116m last July, many people in the publishing business gave them a pass. They claimed that Penguin would clean up the cesspool. But instead Author Solutions CEO Kevin Weiss was given a seat on the Penguin board.
A seat on the board!
Emily Suess wrote an excellent guest post here back in February, detailing how the slick Author Solutions scam hadn’t changed one bit since the Penguin takeover.
It’s now almost a year since Penguin bought the company (instead of buying, say, Goodreads, but I digress). It should be clear to everyone now that Penguin has no intention of changing Author Solutions’ scammy approach. In fact, Penguin just announced plans to take the scam global.
Penguin has been looking under the Author Solutions hood for 10 months now. Its conclusion was this: we can make this bigger. We can take this scam on the road and start exploiting writers all over the planet.
And Penguin is still getting a pass for this crap.
The Penguin Omerta
The Publishers Weekly piece on Penguin’s aggressive expansion plans for Author Solutions makes no mention of the company being a universally reviled vanity press that has cheated 150,000 writers out of their savings.
This is something I’ve been noticing for a while, and Publishers Weekly isn’t alone. The pieces in The Bookseller, GalleyCat, and Digital Book World also make no mention of the widespread criticism that Author Solutions has attracted, nor do they mention that the company is currently the subject of a class action suit for their deceptive practices.
More disturbingly, my comment pointing this out appears to have been scrubbed from The Bookseller, is stuck in the moderation queue on Digital Book World’s piece (despite explicitly stating that they had posted it).
The reaction at the London Book Fair was similar. No-one from traditional publishing wanted to talk about Penguin’s ownership of Author Solutions. No-one wants to talk about how a supposedly legitimate publisher now owns the most successful author scamming organization on the planet.
These guys are probably taking their cue from the New York Times, who won’t mention anything remotely critical about Author Solutions, but are happy to spend lots of time showing them in a positive light (like here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).
Writer Beware
The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) has done sterling work over the years warning writers away from people like Author Solutions both on their own site, and through their industry watchdog Writer Beware.
However, I would love to see them go one step further.
Remember those awful Random House digital-first imprints? Public pressure forced Random House to change the horribly one-sided terms it was offering writers. That result was achieved after Writer Beware blogged about it, SFWA president John Scalzi followed up, and SFWA itself threatened to de-list Random House as a qualifying market.
What Author Solutions is doing to writers is far, far worse.
Isn’t it time to do something about this? Isn’t it time to threaten to de-list Penguin as a qualifying market if they don’t clean up Author Solutions?
Hands Up If You Don’t Own A Vanity Press
There’s only problem with this approach. Where do you stop? Because you would have to threaten to do the same with all these guys too:
1. Simon & Schuster hired Author Solutions to run their own scammy vanity press – Archway Publishing. If that wasn’t enough, they then offered a bounty to bloggers to lie about the company.
2. Harper Collins-owned Thomas Nelson have their own crappy vanity operation called West Bow Press – also “powered” by Author Solutions.
3. Harlequin, never afraid to turn down a penny, jumped in the game a few years ago. Author Solutions provided the white-label vanity operation for them.
4. Showing that it’s not just the larger publishers, Hay House contracted Author Solutions to set up Balboa Press – another scammy, crappy, overpriced vanity press.
If it was down to me, I would threaten to de-list all these guys until they cleaned house, but Penguin would be a good start, given they (a) it all comes back to Author Solutions, (b) Penguin owns Author Solutions, (c) Penguin has shown no interest in addressing concerns, and (d) Penguin is planning a massive expansion of the Author Solutions scam.
Writers Digest & Lulu
I’m sure Digital Book World’s reluctance to mention the problems with Author Solutions has nothing to do with the fact that they are owned by F+W Media, which also owns yet another crappy vanity press – Abbot Press (which has some of the worst prices out there).
In a refreshing change of pace, this crappy vanity press is not actually powered by Author Solutions. Abbot Press is a division of Writers Digest. Yes, that Writers Digest.
If that catches you by surprise, I’m sorry to say that Writers Digest went over to the dark side a few years back, and now spam their subscribers with crap like this.
I’m sure Author Solutions was disappointed to miss out on that deal but at least they can console themselves with the new partnership they struck with  Lulu last month to provide premium (i.e. overpriced and ineffective) marketing services to Lulu customers.
That’s right. Lulu made a deal with the devil.
How Can We Fight Back?
Penguin think they can continue to ride out the storm, ignoring the criticism and collecting their ill-gotten gains, but if we make enough noise, they will have to respond. That starts with sharing this post, or, even better, blogging about it yourself.
But it also means reaching out to inexperienced writers and trying to steer them away from these crooks. We need to get the message out that self-publishing is not the impossible task it’s painted as. Sarah Woodbury has a helpful post on the basics here, and I have another here. Feel free to point newbies to them, or write your own.
Each time you see an article talking about Author Solutions and not mentioning all the issues, comment underneath and call them on it. Even if the media don’t change their one-eyed approach, readers will see the comments.
If you’re a member of a writers organization like SFWA, RWA, or MWA, ask what they are doing about Penguin. Ask them why they haven’t threatened to de-list Penguin. And keep pressing them! The SFWA (and the RWA) were really strong in response to Random House. We need the same from them again.
150,000 writers have been screwed over already. I think that’s enough. Don’t you?

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CAN A SINGLE LINE IGNITE A FULL LENGTH NOVEL?

I got to wondering how many of you, or if any of you, have ever been spurred into a brand new novel by a simple line that worked its magical way into your thoughts and wouldn't leave you alone until you created a story to match its magic? I know this question is directed at authors, but many readers are also interested in the thought process of how a novel comes into being and what motivates authors, so I hope non-authors will find this blog of interest as well.

"There are demons within us all just as surely as there is the goodness of Christ. Love is blind to both..."

 That line crept into my imagination and haunted me until I wrote my latest Gothic Historical Romance, PASSION FOR VENGEANCE

What about you? How many authors have been piqued by a line that crossed their thoughts? Or, is the power of just one line enough to launch a whole story? I believe it is. 

And just so you can't call me a "one line wonder," I've just started a brand new Gothic Historical Romance, WHERE EVIL DWELLS. And what was the line that started me off on this one? Well, two, but the one I will share because it is the most powerful....


"I'm afraid I've been romancing death more than anyone of flesh and blood..."

So, another line from my fertile imagination has the power to ignite a novel into existence, even the book cover too! Below is the cover for my newest Gothic Historical Romance work in progress, born of one single line...

 As an author, has a single line, sprung out of nowhere and grabbed your imagination,
 spurred a full length novel? I would love to hear your stories. 

Leave your comments and share your experiences.

MIXED MEDIA: BOOK TRAILERS AND THE WRITTEN WORD

So, I have indeed been negligent with my own blog. December 2012 came with a blog, the new New Year waved by and Spring came sneaking in without a single new blog. Thank goodness I never set a schedule for blogging.....LOL. I wanted to start on a new blog with the topic of Book Trailers.

For as long as there have been feature films, there have been movie trailers in advance to advertise the film.....to tease the viewer with the most exciting collage of the best and most titillating scenes from the movie. Movie trailers are meant to entice the movie goer into coming to see the feature film when it is released. They are mostly short, quick, and to the point. No excess fat. They obviously work because no film is ever released without a movie trailer in advance. Movie trailers are a staple of movie making.

But what does film have to do with books? The written word. Film is a different beast than the written word....than a book. It's a totally different experience. The visual, candy for the eyes of films, as opposed to the written, words for the brain. But is there really that much difference or just a difference in how we are getting the information to the one place it all goes to anyway--our brain?

Book trailers, or basically movie trailers for books, have been around for some time but considered a relatively new tool in the author's toolkit. But do book trailers work? If you pose that question to any authors group, you are bound to get an equal divide between "Yes" and "No." Being a self-pubbed author, I have the luxury of tracking my sales online at both Amazon and Barnes and Noble daily (hourly for those obsessed with such things). This gives me the ability to somewhat gauge how any promotion tool I use worked or didn't. If I get sales after doing a Guest Blog, an interview or posting a book trailer, I consider it a safe bet that the promotion worked. Those who are contracted authors, unfortunately, aren't so lucky. You don't know your sales so you have no way to know what is working and what isn't on a daily or even monthly basis.

For me, book trailers work. As a matter of fact, they work better than some other tried and true methods. Plus, they are an awful lot of fun to do if you want to do them yourself. You can use Windows Movie Maker to create a simple but effective book trailer. Or, if you have the budget, get one made with all the bells and whistles and special effects. Some detractors point that a book is not a film and book trailers are not true to the written word. I wonder how that is. Don't we use a visual medium, the book cover, to sell and promote our books? The visual is very much a part of the written word. Our words create "visual worlds." The book trailer is merely eye-candy promoting our written words. There is no sin in embracing book trailers to sell books. I would go so far as to say that if your book trailer did not sell even one book, then perhaps the book trailer wasn't produced for maximum effect. Okay, so what is maximum effect? Don't make your book trailer over one minute with excessive text. Today's attention span is very limited. Don't tell your whole story in the book trailer. Use evocative images moving quickly. Include succinct blurbs and text that tease. Make that potential reader want to know more about the book and buy it.

A well put together book trailer can sell books. It can. Don't dismiss book trailers. Try your hand at producing one. Check other book trailers out there and see what is possible. I would love to hear comments form authors and readers on book trailers. Do they work for you? Why and why not?

I've included several of my own book trailers. I wanted to include one of my Brenda Strange Supernatural Mysteries book trailer, but it has been lost in a computer crash. Some are done by me and others by a more seasoned professional. None are overly slick but simple for anyone to create.

THE NEXT BIG THING BLOG HOP

It's December 26, the day after Christmas and I hope everyone overstuffed themselves with food and celebrated with beloved family and cherished friends.

And I'm happy that you made it to the Henderson Files where I'm so delighted to have been tagged to be part of the wild and exciting The Next Big Thing Blog Hop. It's like a chain letter of authors passing along or "tagging" new authors for the following week. It's a unique way to find out what new book an author is working on or a new release. In my case, I want to tell you about my upcoming new Gothic Historical Romance, PASSION FOR VENGEANCE,  but also have fun with my current Gothic as well. I was tagged by lesbian Historical Romance author T.T. Thomas. Thanks bunches, Tarra. 

The fun part is that each author gets the same ten questions. They are fun and hopefully the readers will find them equally so. Don't forget to check at the bottom of my final answer for the author I've tagged for next week's The Next Big Thing Blog Hop!
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What is the working title of the book?

Title of my new lesbian Gothic Historical Romance is PASSION FOR VENGEANCE. I’m hoping for a Spring 2013 release. This is the first Internet release of the cover for the book.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I’ve written two previous lesbian Gothic Historicals that have pretty much followed the tried and true formula for successful Gothics but I was interested in exploring the relationship between dark and light and how life situations can impact a woman to plunge into the darker aspects of her soul.

What genre does your book fall under?

Gothic Historical Romance

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in the movie rendition?

Oh, what fun! You mean I get to play Hollywood Producer and Casting Agent? Since PASSION FOR VENGEANCE won’t be published until Spring 2013, I’m hesitant to give readers predisposed images of the characters. I prefer my readers to use their imaginations with the words I use. If they are expertly written, then a reader should have a powerful picture of what I want them to see. However, there is one actress that I feel is so perfect, that I think I can take the chance.....

 Emily Blunt would make a perfect Emma Stiles from the forthcoming PASSION FOR VENGEANCE

And just to keep playing casting agent, I thought it would be fun to cast the leading characters in my current and newest Gothic Historical Romance, CASTLE OF DARK SHADOWS, now available at Amazon as a Kindle eBook and paperback, also at Barnes and Noble online as an ePub eBook.

 Natalie Portman as "Marion Dunraven" from CASTLE OF DARK SHADOWS

  Alexandra Breckinridge as "Olivia Hampton" from CASTLE   OF DARK SHADOWS

 What is the one sentence synopsis of your book, PASSION FOR VENGEANCE?

 A woman, wracked by pain and a dark, haunted past finds salvation in the arms of another woman in an old, fading family plantation in the decade following the American Civil War.

What is the larger synopsis of your book, PASSION FOR VENGEANCE?

Jane Havens is the young heiress to the once powerful and glorious Havenswood, the now faded estate of the famous and decorated Colonel Vincent Havens, a Civil War Union hero. Her older brother, Cole Havens, current Master of Havenswood, is unable to restore the splendor of Havenswood to its days of glory. Into the midst of the crumbling plantation is thrust Emma Stiles, a mysterious young woman who is hired as governess to young Henry Havens, the youngest of the Havens family.

But with the arrival of Emma Stiles, long hidden and painful skeletons in the Havens closet are finally exposed but none could compare to the darkest, most destructive secret that lies hidden within the soul of Emma Stiles. When Jane and Emma fall madly in love, and passions and lust collide with secrets and dark desires for vengeance, no one in Havenswood is safe from the explosive consequences.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I have my own indie imprint, Blanca Rosa Publishing. I no longer sign contracts with publishers.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

I can normally write and publish a novel-length book within one year. 

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I think I pretty much summed that up in the second question. I am constantly exploring my need to spread my wings and push myself to embrace something I haven't tried before. 

What else about your book might pique the readers interest?

With PASSION FOR VENGEANCE, I've broken from my previous two Gothic Historical Romances. There is deeper character explorations.....Deeper and more erotic sex (some may actually wonder if the old Patty G. Henderson has been kidnapped and a replica put in her place).....and complete instructions on how to make "the Green Fairy," or better known as Absinthe, the favorite drink of bohemians and "outsiders" everywhere. 

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Thank you so much for stopping by The Henderson Files.....Next week, I've tagged author Sarah Ettritch for the January 2nd The Next Big Thing Blog Hop. Sarah has written fantasy and science fiction novels including the Rymellan Series, the Threaded Through Time series and other faves such as The Salbine Sisters.