Someone recently asked me a question about a specific publishing company: was the company legitimate?
This so-called publishing company probably is not a traditional publisher, because generally there’s not a lot of doubt about whether a publisher is an actual traditional publisher or something else: if the former, they don’t charge fees for anything; if the latter, they do.
There IS still a question about whether a small traditional publisher is being run into the ground by people who have artistic judgment but no business sense. That happens, it produces real problems for any authors in that publisher’s pipeline, it’s not good, but that’s a separate concern. A publisher that isn’t charging fees is definitely a traditional publisher.
However, there is some flex. So, in case anybody finds this helpful, here are the basic categories of publishers and pretend-publishers who aren’t Big Five publishers and a few strategies that may help aspiring authors evaluate them.
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Mid-sized to small traditional publishers: Probably pays a small advance or no advance; does not charge fees; does a good job with the books they take on; does not accept just any book; may accept submissions only from agents or may accept submissions direct from authors — maybe only established authors. This category includes Fairwood Press and Severn House. The former has published recent books by Naomi Kritzer and Sharon Shinn. The latter has been publishing titles by Barbara Hambly for years.
Hybrid publishers: Charges fees that are in the general neighborhood of reasonable. Does a good job producing books. Expects to make money from sales of books as well as from fees paid by authors. Therefore, does not accept just any random book. There’s an application process of some kind because they only take on books they think will sell. This kind of publisher is useful for authors with more money than time: the author is paying the publisher to do some things so they don’t have to learn how to do it all themselves. Jane Friedman has a series of posts about hybrid publishers here, here, and here. The last of the linked posts is about red flags, because hybrid publishers grade into —
Vanity presses: Pretends to be selective and pretends that books go through a vetting process before being accepted. This is basically a fake process because they really accept all or nearly all books submitted to them. Charges high fees for inferior products. Does not expect to make money from book sales. All the money made by a vanity publisher comes from fees paid by the author. Grades into —
Scammers: Charges moderate to exorbitant fees for services that may or may not be provided at all. In many cases, charge fees for services that are literally impossible to provide, such as “worldwide distribution of your physical book in 40,000 book stores” for $500. How anybody can imagine that’s possible is beyond me, but people really do fall for it; that’s why these scammers exist.
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How do you evaluate a publisher that charges fees?
Step One: Always begin by googling “publisher name writer beware.” What people are going to do when Victoria Strauss finally retires from pointing spotlights at scammers, I really do not know. Regardless, if you find a long, detailed post at Writer Beware analyzing a terrible contract or explaining that there’s no such thing as “insurance against returns” or whatever, you’re done. Tell the scammer to get lost and block their attempts to contact you until they give up and go away.
If there’s nothing at Writer Beware, go to Step Two.
Step Two: Examine the publisher’s website. Locate some books they claim to have published.
Go to Amazon and look at those books. I would actually not click on a link provided by the putative publisher. I would go directly to Amazon and search for the book there and then look, because cheap knockoff copies of real books are sometimes offered for sale and just to be sure I would want to find the book myself by title and author. Do those books exist? Is the presentation professional? Actually look at the details and the publisher’s name that is listed. Download samples and look at those. Do these look like real books on the inside? Is the formatting good? Is the quality of the writing adequate or better?
What is the sales rank? No sales rank probably means the book has never sold a copy, but I hear it can also mean it hasn’t sold a copy in a few years. A sales rank in five figures is good. A sales rank of three million is awful. The Publisher’s Rocket sales calculator says that a sales rank of 100,000 translates to the sale of about one book per day. That is definitely not always true, but it lets you estimate roughly (very roughly) whether a book is selling kind of okay or not at all.
Look at the author page for the author. Is there one? Is this someone who has published multiple books through this same publisher? Obviously a single person is not likely to be stung by a scammer over and over.
Step Three: Examine what the publisher is offering.
Look at how much the putative publisher charges for what services. Compare this to a hybrid publisher you know is real.
Look at what the putative publisher promises. Compare this to a hybrid publisher you know is real.
Read promises, assurances, and services as critically as possible. If you’ve never heard of a service such as returnability insurance, google “returnability insurance writer beware.”
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If you decide to self-publish, great, that’s fine, but everyone needs to be aware that lots and lots and lots of scammers pretend to be “Amazon Publishing” or “Kindle Publishing” or a thousand iterations on that theme.
Amazon shuts look-alike scammers down, but there are always more. How can you be absolutely sure you are looking at the REAL KDP and not some scammer’s website?
Do you buy stuff from Amazon? You know you’re looking at the real Amazon when you go to the Amazon website, right? Then go to Amazon, immediately scroll right down to the bottom, and look through the links down there. There are a bunch. One is the real KDP. Click on that link. Now you are at the real KDP site for sure. You’re safe to proceed.
The other website to use for self-publishing is Draft to Digital. As far as I know, there aren’t millions of scammers trying to pretend they’re Draft to Digital. D to D distributes to almost every platform, including Amazon if you want (if you’re using KDP, you select everything except Amazon at D to D). Last I heard, D to D did not distribute to Google Play. That’s because Google Play is insanely annoying to work with. You can publish your books via Google Play by listing them there yourself, after which you will understand why no one wants to bother and everybody hates working with their author portal. Insanely annoying is putting it mildly. I’d suggest KDP and D to D and call it good.
If you want to pursue self publishing, it really isn’t hard, though time invested in reading about self-publishing is a good idea before you jump in with both feet. Topics to consider: cover art and design; book description; metadata, keyword, and category best practices; formatting the interior; formatting the actual novel; promotion and marketing.
One way to begin is to go to Amazon and look at the 100 bestselling titles in your genre — look at the covers, read the book descriptions, look at the sample and consciously notice the formatting, look at the details and the categories.
The most important thing to remember when self-publishing is that you don’t have to do everything right from the beginning; that most mistakes are fixable; that lots of people are happy to offer advice and pointers about where to find reliable information; and that you shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
In my opinion, it’s just like writing a novel: You learn to write novels by writing novels. You learn to self-publish effectively by self-publishing. There will always be lots more to learn about writing novels and about self-publishing. That’s fine. If you want to self-publish, you have to start somewhere, so … start somewhere.
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This is interesting! A couple of days ago I received an Amazon preordered ebook – a reissue, but it’s been unavailable for a while and I’d never managed to find a copy, so I was very much looking forward to reading it. But it’s riddled with scanning errors. I can tolerate a few, but after a dozen or so I gave up reporting them and just returned the book.
Normally I wouldn’t think of contacting the author directly, but maybe I should? I hate the idea of just leaving a bad review, but it’s not as if it was KU – I think it’s what might be considered a mid-price book. And it obviously spoiled my enjoyment of the book.
It’s certainly made me appreciate more all the effort you put into proofreading your books.
Gill, over the past three years, I’ve sure learned how hard it is to get rid of typos. The learning process included two or three readers who contacted me and said, “I hope you don’t mind, I love this book, but the typos did interfere with the reading experience. If you want, I could send you a list of all the typos I found.”
And, while I have no idea how this other author would react, my reaction was “YES, PLEASE! I will fix that! Thank you! Would you like to proofread my next book?”
It’s almost inconceivable to me that a self-published author would be anything be grateful, though you never know.
The author can’t get the publisher to fix anything, generally, so there’s probably no point if the book was traditionally published. But who knows, maybe this particular author could get her particular publisher to fix typos.
Thank you – it’s traditionally published as far as I know, so maybe reporting to Amazon is the best way to go, as I believe they pass on these reports to the publishers. These are scanning errors, I believe, (‘mo’ for ‘me’ etc). I do feel they should at least have glanced through the book before publishing. It made me think they may be one of the scammers you discuss.
Could be, and Amazon should take down the fake knockoff copies of real books and crush the scammers, but they don’t, unless the author is famous.
Usually scammers target bestselling books, so not sure that applies here.
Here’s the post that brought this to my attention. It would never have occurred to me that this was going on, if I hadn’t tripped over the linked article.
I mostly read on my ereader these days, but the others still buy hard copy books, and I’ve seen some really badly formatted books from self-published authors or really small presses that I suspect are the author under a business name. To anyone intending to self-publish, I strongly second the recommendation to look at the formatting of professionally published books and duplicate it. Readers notice when it looks like you threw a MS Word document onto the page, and it’s not a good look. Seen more than one example of that. And that’s one of the better and more identifiable ‘not professional’ indicators. Others can only be described as ‘doesn’t look right, and is somehow difficult to read.’ We had one where the hard copy text line spacing was all over the map, and crooked besides. I still wonder how that happened.
There are also printers, who will charge you to make N many copies of your book. You can tell them because their website geek about the wonderfulness of the printers and book binding machines, not their new publishing paradigm.