Big House and Independent Publishing

I have decided that these two posts will be the last of the Imagi­Con inspired posts.   I learned so much while I was there, and was exposed to excit­ing new ways of look­ing at many top­ics I love, but the past two weeks have been too busy for me to even remem­ber half the details.  I’ll take it as a les­son learned, and try to pri­or­i­tize my time a lit­tle bet­ter so that I set those ideas down on pix­els before life inter­venes.  Most of the top­ics are inspir­ing and inter­est­ing enough that they’ll be rel­e­vant later, so I’ll just pick them up then.

Most of the pan­els I attended were in the Lit­er­ary Track, so most of my time was focused on hear­ing peo­ple speak about writ­ing, web tech­nolo­gies, and pub­lish­ing.   In my notes there are pages of links to check out, books to be watch­ing for, and ideas on how to become a bet­ter writer.  Not sur­pris­ingly, since Imagi­Con was packed with SF, hor­ror, and fan­tasy authors try­ing to sell their upcom­ing books, a big focus in almost all of the pan­els was on how to get pub­lished, types of pub­lish­ing, and mar­ket­ing strate­gies for writ­ten mate­ri­als.  The energy and enthu­si­asm made it evi­dent that this was the point in the process where the writ­ers were cur­rently embroiled.

Trade Pub­lish­ing

The tra­di­tional route for writ­ers is to go with a well known, estab­lished pub­lisher.  These are often referred to as big house or trade pub­lish­ers.  Get­ting their atten­tion has his­tor­i­cally been dif­fi­cult, with good rea­son.  They have thou­sands of man­u­scripts com­ing in every week, and they must triage mer­ci­lessly.  With the mar­ket on paper becom­ing more expen­sive, this process has got­ten even more ruth­less.  New authors are risky, and already estab­lished favorites of the house make most of the money for these pub­lish­ers.   If the first para­graph doesn’t grab the reader’s atten­tion, there’s a good chance the man­u­script will be returned, unread, with a form let­ter rejec­tion attached.

If a man­u­script makes it through a full read, but is rejected, the writer (and agent, if applic­a­ble) should dis­sect the per­sonal rejec­tion let­ter with care­ful atten­tion.  No mat­ter how tiny the adverb is, it is feed­back, and that is manna to a writer try­ing to force their way into the mar­ket­place.  To get pub­lished by the trade houses, an author often must com­pro­mise with ruth­less demands, accept page restric­tions, be will­ing to cut out their most pre­cious char­ac­ters or add new story arcs.  Style often is totally revised to fit in with the feel of the trade publisher’s other books.  It’s an incred­i­bly com­pet­i­tive mar­ket, and many bril­liant pieces of writ­ing sim­ply will not make it past the sev­eral steps required to con­form to a publisher’s standards.

After get­ting a book through the rig­ors of rewrites, edits, and re-edits, the pub­lisher prints a cer­tain num­ber of copies to be sold.  Tra­di­tion­ally, a book was given six months to move off of shelves before the extras were sent back to the ware­house.  Now, with ris­ing pub­li­ca­tion costs and com­pe­ti­tion, that time has been shaved back to closer to six weeks.  Luck­ily, an author with a big house does not have to do all the work pro­mot­ing their new book alone.  By sign­ing with that large, well known pub­lisher, the author has ensured that a built in mar­ket­ing house will be back­ing their work.

Small Pub­lish­ers

One alter­na­tive is to get pub­lished by a smaller house.  Most of the well known pub­lish­ers have many smaller com­pa­nies under their umbrella, but I’m not refer­ring to those. Rather, I’m focus­ing on the inde­pen­dent pub­lish­ers.  There are many rea­sons that these inde­pen­dent firms get a good share of real tal­ent that will never be exposed to the main­stream.   Try­ing to sell a man­u­script can meet with repeated dead ends.  Writ­ers often pre­fer more cre­ative license, and will not alter their art sim­ply to fall in line and con­form with the trade houses’ ideas of mar­ketable product.

Inde­pen­dent pub­lish­ers can be more flex­i­ble about words per man­u­script and often will take more risks, but they are not the estab­lished pow­er­houses the big con­glom­er­ates are.  Besides employ­ing edi­tors, copy edi­tors, and other employ­ees to make sure that the fin­ished prod­uct is clean and worth read­ing, there are the same issues of the cost of cre­at­ing the phys­i­cal prod­uct.  Paper costs mean that inde­pen­dent pub­lish­ers are often turn­ing to a “Print on Demand” model.  This is exactly what it sounds like.  Instead of print­ing a set num­ber of copies ahead of time, books are printed as demand dic­tates. Often an inde­pen­dent pub­lisher has only a regional mar­ket, and lim­ited mar­ket­ing.  The artist has a lot more mar­ket­ing to do, and of course many writ­ers cringe at this prospect.   There is also the risk of being taken advan­tage of by preda­tors who will steal your work.  The author has to be pre­pared for these pit­falls.  Real­iz­ing there are still respon­si­bil­i­ties to your work far after the book is printed is crucial.

To be hon­est, I already had a fair amount of famil­iar­ity with most of the infor­ma­tion I’ve writ­ten here before attend­ing Imagicon.  Tomorrow, I plan to write more about dif­fer­ent avenues of pub­lish­ing, and more fresh infor­ma­tion.  Alter­na­tive media, espe­cially ebooks and self-publishing as options are becom­ing increas­ingly viable in today’s market.