CHAPTER 4
The Profile of a Great Self-Publishing Company
In the first four editions of this book, I spent a chapter analyzing most of the major self-publishing companies, providing details about their services, printing fees, royalty structures, and contract terms. While this was one of the chapters people liked best, this level of detail had an unforeseen consequence: companies changed their offerings, website links, and other information so often that the material was outdated before the book even came out.
Another problem with covering specific companies was that some of them went out of business or shifted from being great companies to ones I wouldn’t recommend; by then I was married to these guys, in a way that only a large offset print run can tie a man down. The best example of this is BookPros, which abruptly filed for bankruptcy in May 2011. I had rated the company as an “Outstanding” publisher and was as shocked as anyone when the CEO called to tell me the news. One of the realities of offset printing is that if you still have 2,000+ copies of your book in print featuring a review of BookPros, it’s staying in print. (Thanks to the flexibility of e-book publishing, however, I was able to remove BookPros from the e-book version within days of the company going out of business.)
With this edition, I decided to focus on the method of analysis I use when determining how to rate publishing companies, so that you can compare them yourself. Not to get all Zen on you, but as the great Chinese proverb states, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” Choosing the right self-publishing company isn’t the most profound thing you’ll do in your life, and I’m certainly no Lao Tzu, but this little journey you’re on is important, and I’m here to show you the way.
A Good Reputation Among Writers
Every self-publishing company, including the good ones, has its share of disgruntled authors. With access to review sites, blogs, and social media, even authors who have no legitimate complaints about a company use these forums to cloud a company’s reputation. Yes, there are legitimate complaints that should be aired to warn others, but most of the complaints I’ve seen about good companies are just postings by authors who didn’t read their contracts; these authors would have posted the same complaint about any publisher they worked with.
I talk to a lot of authors, and some of the gripes that I hear are unfair to the publishers. If you spend a few hundred or even a few thousand dollars to publish your book, don’t expect to be treated the way that Scholastic treats J. K. Rowling. Again, it’s about living in the real world. So long as the publisher provides what its contract agrees to provide in a competent and professional manner, and within the time frame set forth in the contract, the publisher has done its job. However, if the publisher lied to an author to get him or her into the contract and the author can prove it (keep your emails!), then complaints carry more weight.
Remember, self-publishing companies are basically acting as general contractors with regard to publishing your book. When considering a publisher, talk to authors who’ve already published with the company. Do not pay too much attention to authors who complain that a self-publishing company didn’t help them sell books. If you take time and investigate the complaints, you’ll see that most of these authors had (a) unrealistic expectations and/or (b) sold virtually no books. Their disappointment in their books’ sales unfairly turned into disappointment in the publisher. But this is still self-publishing, and the author is ultimately responsible for making his or her book sell.
Self-publishing is one of the few industries where more than 90 percent of a company’s customer base will lose money after paying for products and services. So, when you poll other authors who’ve used a particular company, you have to take everything with a grain of salt. Focus on questions like: Did the company provide the work on time? Did you like the design work? Did the company respond promptly to questions? The good companies work hard to deliver the services they offer. The good ones also are honest and upfront with prospective authors about the realities of self-publishing. The bad companies tell potential clients whatever they want to hear in order to make a sale.
When researching companies, you can also contact the Better Business Bureau (“BBB”) in the state or city in which a publisher is located. The BBB will have a record of complaints even if the publisher isn’t a member. If you only see a few complaints and they have been resolved, don’t worry about it. If you see dozens of unresolved complaints, that’s a problem.
An “A” or “A+” rating with the BBB doesn’t mean a publisher never gets complaints. It means that the publisher has followed the BBB procedures to resolve these concerns. For the best read on a company, you should look at the actual number of complaints. For example, as of April 2013, Author Solutions, Inc. (parent company of iUniverse, Trafford, Xlibris, and others) had 334 complaints filed over a thirty-six-month period.30 Another large self-publishing company, Lulu.com, had 113 during that same period.31 These companies are much bigger than most, and with more customers come more complaints—but a complaint a day to the BBB should give you pause; after all, these figures only cover the people who took the time to file a complaint. Meaning, if hundreds of complaints were filed, there could be hundreds or thousands more that were never documented.
Some websites provide warnings about shady publishers, but many of these contain only unverified claims written by disgruntled authors. An honest review is one thing, but fabricated rants are another. While these sites can be helpful, they allow authors to complain about issues that either they caused themselves or that aren’t accurate. Even when publishers provide documentation to prove their case, some of these sites refuse to remove or modify the complaint. Thus, good publishers can get an unfair rap on these sites, which include Absolute Write, Writer Beware, and Writers Weekly.
The Independent Publishing Magazine (www. theindependentpublishingmagazine.com) is run by Mick Rooney, who writes in-depth reviews of self-publishing companies. While he does allow comments from customers of the companies reviewed, Mick does a great job of making sure that the content he provides is accurate and unbiased.
Thanks to the mask of anonymity offered by social media, it’s not as easy as it once was to get an accurate review of a company online. But if on balance the positives are strong, you’ve talked to several customers who’ve had a good experience, and the company has a solid BBB rating with few complaints, you can feel confident that the publisher you’re considering has a solid reputation.
Tips for Determining a Publisher’s Reputation:
A User-Friendly, Updated Website
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder—but a clunky website that makes it hard to learn about a company’s services isn’t pretty. Of all the factors I use in analyzing a potential publishing company, website presentation is not the most important; service, work product, printing markups, and fair royalties far exceed that. But if you’re unable to get the basic information you need to make informed decisions about a company’s services from its website, that’s a problem.
The first thing I notice about a website is how current and modern the design is. I don’t mean “modern” like the site of a slick New York ad agency. I mean “modern” as in it looks like it was designed in the past few years. A company that doesn’t spend the time or effort to update its website may not be spending the time or effort to improve and update its publishing process and services. If a company’s website looks like it was designed in 1999, do you really want that company designing your book cover?
Yes, this type of analysis hurts the mom-and-pop companies, as most do not have the resources to compete with up-to-date website technology and design. But the fact is, I would never use an online service provider of any type that didn’t have a great-looking website. If the front-facing website is clunky and hard to navigate, what will their back-end system be like?
At my company, we spend extra time making sure our sites look consistent in all widely used Internet browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Yes, it’s an investment, but as of May 2013, 13 percent of people used Explorer, 28 percent used Firefox, 53 percent used Chrome, and 4 percent used Safari.32 So, if you’re one of the nearly third who use Firefox and a company’s website looks like a garbled mess, that doesn’t mean that the company can’t provide decent services, but it can and should lead to other thoughts, like whether the company has enough resources to properly maintain all aspects of its business.33 It’s tough for small-and medium-sized companies to do it all. The CreateSpaces and Lulus of the world have hundreds of people to do everything. The rest of us need to strategically allocate our resources to make sure we can compete.
Some self-publishing companies purposely make it hard for potential customers to find out many details on their website without first making the customers provide a slew of contact information. Coincidentally, those companies are the same ones whose business strategies are based on not wanting authors to know the price of services until after the author has been hooked by the pitch. A publisher’s website needs to allow visitors easy access to information about its services and fee structure. If the website is difficult to navigate, or missing critical information, there could be something the publisher doesn’t want you to see while you’re in the researching stage.
Tips for Assessing a Publisher’s Website:
An Honest Sales Process
Most authors dream of being seated at a table in a Barnes & Noble with a line wrapping around the store, adoring fans each gripping multiple copies of the author’s book. Disreputable companies prey on that dream; reputable ones don’t.
There are self-publishing companies that strive to sell you the services you need and can afford, and those intent on sucking money out of you by falsely stroking your ego. If you’ve forgotten the odds of attaining financial success from book sales, go back and read the introduction. I am CEO of a company that has a self-publishing division, and I’m telling you—the odds are against you making back your money. Even though you’ve heard this statistic here and probably a number of other places as well, some companies have salespeople so slick that they can sell publishing services for thousands of dollars without the author ever even signing a contract.
The most predatory sales techniques in the industry are those used by the Author Solutions conglomerate of companies, which includes AuthorHouse, Balboa Press, CrossBooks, iUniverse, Trafford, WestBow Press, and Xlibris. Their tactics are high-pressure and constant, until people actually break down and purchase. Whether Author Solutions’s new owner, Penguin, will stop such sales techniques is unknown.
Last year I got a call from a woman asking me if I could give her some advice about how to get her money back from AuthorHouse. She didn’t have a contract. In fact, she hadn’t agreed to any terms at all—just rattled off her credit card number to the persistent AuthorHouse salesperson who sold her a down payment on a publishing package for $1,500. (I wrote about it in a blog post titled “How Author Solutions Did $1,000,000 in Sales.”34)
Numerous blog posts and actual accountings of Author Solutions’s sales techniques are available online. One of the most comprehensive is “Author Solutions & iUniverse Complaints: The Complete Index” by journalist and blogger Emily Suess.35 Another blog post worth reading on the subject is “Author Solutions: The Evil Galactic Empire of Self-Publishing” by author and blogger Amanda Taylor . 36 Taylor was a naïve, unpublished writer seeking her publishing dreams, and was totally sucked in by Xlibris’s sales techniques. Her story is like so many others out there.
The purpose of this section is not to harp only on Author Solutions. There are other companies that employ similar sales techniques. I point out Author Solutions because they now own and/or operate so many companies (on behalf of traditional publishers) and seem to be a place where a number of unsuspecting new authors find themselves.
Unfortunately, some religious self-publishing companies employ high-pressure sales techniques under the guise of shared faith, reminding the author that coming together for a business purpose is preordained by God. No matter your religious beliefs, God does not want you to pay excessive printing markups that will then make your book unsellable.
If the sales process is an honest one, you should notice the following:
At first glance, you may not see how these factors help me determine how honest a company’s sales pitch is. But a technique used by unscrupulous companies is to withhold their contracts or pricing information from the website. This is because they don’t want the author to think about contracts and fees until the salesperson has had enough time to build a rapport with the prospective author, selling them on the dream. As the author begins to trust the salesperson, their defenses come down and they are less likely to question the red flags in front of them.
In previous editions of my book, I would never give a publisher high marks if it didn’t either have its contract on the website or available immediately upon asking. The same should hold true for you. If a publisher doesn’t want you to see the contract up front, you have to ask yourself why.
Why is email availability so important in the early stages of choosing a publisher? Because what a sales rep tells you on the phone doesn’t count. Those promises won’t make it into the contract, and as you’ll read in chapter 5, they likely won’t help you in a dispute, either. Companies like Author Solutions are set up so that the salesperson you’ve built the rapport with disappears once you’ve signed the contract. If reps start telling you about “getting X amount of free books if you order now” or an “X% discount on X package if you pay part now” and you don’t have that supported anywhere in writing, you might as well be talking to the wind. And if you visit a publisher’s website as a prospective customer and the publisher doesn’t make it easy to contact them via email, run away.
It’s also very important for a company to provide detailed information about how printing costs and royalties are determined. It’s up to you to compare those costs and calculations with those of other companies you’re considering, but you’ll need that information in order to compare. Just having a basic statement in the contract about royalty calculations or how much you will be charged to print copies of your own book isn’t sufficient. You need to see some actual examples to understand how the printing costs will affect your bottom line; that way you can determine what you might make in sales through various channels (wholesale, retail, and online).
How a company acts once you’ve engaged in initial communication is also instructive as to the honesty of their sales pitch. If the sales rep says you are “losing a lot of money by not publishing your book right now” or anything else that is remotely related to the marketability of your book (which the rep has not yet seen or read), something isn’t kosher. How could a sales rep possibly know if your book has any commercial viability just based on what you’ve told them about it? They couldn’t. First, they haven’t read it. Second, they are a sales rep, whose job it is to get you to sign up for publishing services. If a sales rep requests a copy of your manuscript, make sure in your next conversation you ask specific questions that only someone who read the book could answer.
Recently, I spoke with an author who relayed her experience with a Christian self-publishing company that claims that it only accepts 4 percent of all submitted manuscripts. (I’m not naming the company because I cannot independently verify the conversation; however, if you’ve heard the 4 percent line before, you’ll know who I’m talking about.) The company asked this author to submit a manuscript, which she did. A few days later, a salesperson called her and told her that the company wanted to offer her a contract. She asked if based on the company’s review of the manuscript they had any editing recommendations. There was a long pause. The author smartly asked, “Did anyone look at my book?” The answer was a sheepish “No, because every book needs editing.” It’s true that every book needs editing. It’s not true (or even plausible) that a publisher willing to accept a book without reviewing it first accepts only 4 percent of all submitted manuscripts.
It’s disappointing that this particular publisher would make this claim. Every single author I’ve spoken to about this company leads the conversation with some version of “I know my book is good because the publisher only accepts four percent of all books submitted.” That’s when I break the news that it would be almost statistically impossible for every author I talk to about this company to fall in the 4 percent.
If the only way to make initial contact with a company is via phone—or worse, by providing your own contact information or even your manuscript—predatory sales practices will likely follow. I’m a tire kicker. I want to be able to contact a company on my terms. I want to engage in Live Chat or send them an email before I take another step. I’m not saying you shouldn’t give a company your phone number (obviously, if you’re interested and you want them to contact you, that’s fine) or that you shouldn’t send them your manuscript (not even the boiler-room companies are going to steal it). I’m saying that unfortunately, in this industry, there are companies built around a sales model that involves a barrage of never-ending phone calls accompanied by high-pressure sales techniques. And, all of those companies have one thing in common: the only way you can make initial contact with them is by phone.
Tips for Determining an Honest Sales Practice:
Fair Publishing Fees
When it comes to publishing fees, there’s generally not an apples-to-apples comparison between companies; each company builds their own packages, and it isn’t always easy to tell how each package’s services are itemized and priced. What constitutes a fair publishing fee depends on many factors, including:
Choosing a publisher involves more than price comparisons. As with any other product or service, you get what you pay for. Very few books published by a company that charges $500 for a complete publishing package (including design, formatting, distribution, etc.) will look as good as one produced by a company where the cover designers and formatters are paid more. Some companies pay their formatters and cover designers more than what others charge for the entire process. In addition to package price, you also have to consider the printing markups and royalty structure of each publisher.
You usually get one shot to put your best book out there. I know the temptation of wanting it out immediately. Some self-publishing companies create a sales pitch that includes whipping the author into a frenzy over how much money they are potentially losing by not publishing immediately. That is a gimmick designed to make you take out your credit card. It’s not reality. If you’re reading this right now and you have yet to have your book professionally edited because you can’t afford to both edit and publish your book, pay what money you do have now to a qualified editor, and when you save up some more, you can think about publishing.
Assuming you have had your book professionally edited, and you still have a budget of under $1,500, save up until you can afford a publishing package that includes a custom-designed book cover and interior, not just template-based design. Your book will scream “self-published” if you don’t pay for quality design work. If your goal is to be discovered as an author, pay to do it right. If your goal is to provide a book for friends and family only, then one of these cheaper packages may work for you.
Don’t be fooled by the “Publish for $299” offers. Like any other bait-and-switch tactic, these are designed to get you in the door. Be wary of the “Free Self-Publishing” offers from companies like Lulu and CreateSpace as well. These might not cost you anything up front, but there is always a catch. Either the printing markups are higher than average, or the author is expected to handle much of the technical setup of the files prior to submission. (You’d basically be providing press-ready or nearly press-ready files.) If you’re looking for full-service, avoid the “free” stuff.
Once you get past the bait-and-switch packages, you’ll find that most publishers offer a complete package for between $1,500 and $5,000. No matter what company you choose, a quality basic publishing package should include:
These are the most basic criteria for a quality publishing package, but all are critical. After being in this business for nine years, the best advice I can give is don’t skimp on the basics. In the end, what you save up front will come back to haunt you. If your book is poorly edited or designed, every dollar you spend on production and marketing is a complete waste.
Tips for Choosing a Reasonably Priced Publishing Package:
High Production Value
Judging a self-publishing company’s production value can be difficult, given that you don’t know if the cover and interior choices of a given publication were made by the publisher or insisted upon by the author. Mixing barely competent designers and authors whose ideas need guidance can result in some horrific work. Of course, if the designers are top-quality professionals, and the authors still demand bad design choices, you end up in much the same place. At my company, our self-published titles have the same designers who design our traditionally published titles. So, how can the quality of design look so drastically different? For our traditionally published books, our designers, editors, and distributor have final say. For our self-published titles, the author does. And, since our self-published authors aren’t required to listen to our advice, there isn’t much we can do.
One of the most interesting experiments I’ve ever conducted during my research for the earlier editions of this book was to ask every publisher I knew that was using Lightning Source as its POD printer to send me a few sample books. I knew the physical quality of the books would be the same, but I wanted to see which titles the publisher would send. I didn’t say, “Send me your best stuff.” I just asked for some samples of whatever the publisher wanted to send. Would some send whatever they had lying around? Would they send what they perceived to be their best-designed books? I was surprised by how few publishers sent me books that any designer would want to claim. A few took the time to send me books that had the professional cover and interior that we as consumers expect from a book.
This exercise can tell you a lot about the publisher, and gives you a feel for their cover design and interior formatting ability. Try it. If a publisher won’t send you a sample at all, it could be for a number of reasons: (1) they’re cheap, (2) they don’t care enough to earn your business, or (3) they have no pride in their work product and are most concerned about getting your money. If they send you a sample book that looks terrible, what does that say about the publisher’s ability to judge high production value? (Obviously, this is a bit subjective, but when you see something horrible, you know it.) If the publisher sends you a book with high production value, you know at least the publisher understands what a good book should look like.
Since so many self-publishing companies and service providers use the same print-on-demand printer, the physical aspects of a book’s production (like binding, cover stock, etc.) may look the same. If you are considering a company that offers other short-run digital and offset printing options, then you definitely should request some samples.
Tips for Determining Production Value:
Low Printing Markups
Printing markups can kill your book before it’s even been printed. Print-on-demand technology is the reason that self-publishing has exploded during the past decade. But, this one-off, short-run printing is much more expensive on a per-unit basis than printing in larger runs. So, the costs to print a book via POD technology are already high. When a self-publishing company marks up printing costs 50–100 percent, or even 200 percent (yes, one publisher does it, as you’ll learn in chapter 8), your book becomes priced out of the range that anyone is likely to spe