Why we research publishers

…Because stuff like this keeps happening, to people who should maybe know better, but let greed, hope, and inexperience cloud their judgment.

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Case 1. Silver Publishing

When I first started looking at publishing erotic romance in the summer of 2011, there was a rock-star publisher rising in the ranks, with some gorgeous covers, great writers, and good editors. I looked at their site. I heard stories of outrageously high royalties paid to some writers, and stories of other writers who hadn’t been paid at all. I asked someone in the business, a pro who knew much of the dirt on nearly *everyone* in the romance genre.

She said: ‘You didn’t hear this from me, because there are Silver supporters who will harass and try to blacklist anyone who speaks up. Do not sign with this company. Do not send them anything. Don’t even query them.’

Less than a year later, irregular doings at Silver Publishing were much more out in the open, if at least as hotly denied by the aforementioned supporters.

As of last Monday, all the excreta hit the fan. Silver Publishing has died in a flurry of shell companies, tax evasion, unpaid royalties, liquidation of property, and the flight of its proprietor to South Africa. You can begin to get a clear picture of timelines and discoveries starting off at Tymber Dalton’s blog, where she gives links to some ruthless sleuthing by several angry writers. It’s only because of their efforts that authorities were called in, and writers will get rights back to their books.

One of the most heartbreaking parts of this story? A few Silver authors knew exactly what was going on as far back as the summer of 2012, around the time of a Silver-sponsored writers’ retreat at a luxurious resort. They said nothing as the owner overextended himself and began openly ransacking authors’ royalties for personal expenses. Some of them encouraged new authors to sign up. Silver continued to post submissions calls. Major review and author promotion sites were kept in the dark. Why? Because as some wise and/or suspicious authors were getting their rights back from Silver, Silver needed a steady stream of new authors and books to keep up the Ponzi scheme.

This is not only why we research publishers before we query them, we keep abreast of the industry and its undercurrents. No publisher is immune to downturns in trends, even the honest ones.

A lot of eager loyalists will ask ‘what’s the harm?’

You lose first publishing rights, no matter what. Your book is now ‘used up’ by the market. If it has a great track record it might be picked up by a new publisher. If an author has too many low-selling books, they might have to change pen names to break away from that stigma. Or self-publish their old books. In a really bad situation, the author can lose all rights to their own work for years, while the publisher’s assets are sorted out by creditors.

Why the emphasis on first rights? A debut novel has the same weird status as an upper-class virgin in a patriarchal society: it’s untouched, an unknown quantity, able to be molded and pitched to best effect to just the right readership. Publishers like first rights to new novels, since novelty can sell.

Once that’s gone, it’s gone.

Case 2. New, little, inexperienced publisher I can’t name.

Silver is a case of a publisher imploding at the end, after a slow decline that effectively hid its house-of-cards problems from many authors.

But once a new author learns to dissect ad-copy and do research, possible problem publishers can show their stripes from the beginning.

On an online forum, I read a recent discussion about a SFF convention organizer’s dilemma: his fellow organizers had invited a new publisher in their area, because there were a lot of fan fiction writers and original fiction writers among the convention membership. No one bothered to effectively research this publisher beforehand.

Thanks to the forum discussion, it’s been shown that the publisher has two books out in two years of being in business. One of those is by an author whose previous book was vanity published by a notorious for-pay publisher; he appears to be one owner of the publishing company. The other book is by the other owner, and doesn’t even show up on Amazon.

The publishers are a husband and wife team who show very little evidence of verifiable publishing/marketing/editing experience. Their website copy is full of the same spiel found in many new and inexperienced publishers, essentially boiling down to ‘Let us make your dream of publishing come true’. There’s no indication the publishers have any experience in writing or marketing SFF genre novels. Much less proof that they can actually match bigger, well-established genre publishers in the areas of editing, formatting, and marketing…thus, no proof that they’ll earn the royalty income from other authors’ books. Especially if, as is often the case, they make their authors do all or most of the selling.

They started their press to publish their own books. That’s fine, as long as they’re the only ones risking rights and future sales while they learn the business. The moment they begin to recruit, it becomes a problem. The fact that they’ll be recruiting at a convention where the membership is predisposed to trust them under the assumed badge of ‘authority’ is another problem.

The convention organizer is now left with the choice of:

1. Uninviting this publisher and looking rude. People who’ve run cons for years have absolutely no difficulty doing this, by the way. It avoids many future headaches. 

2. Keeping the publisher as an advertised guest, and not providing convention members with any corrections to the misinformation surely to follow. This also opens up the convention to exposure if there is later bad blood between angry authors and the publisher. See Choice 1.

3. Keeping the publisher as a guest, but offering another panel on pitfalls in publishing, to give general strategies on ways to research publishers.

I have no idea what the organizer will do.

I’ve seen this same thing go on at small media conventions, writers’ workshops, and community fairs for years. If an author meets representatives of *any* publisher at any gathering, it’s a good idea to verify everything the rep says before offering them the author’s hard work. Some great small publishers show up at cons. They won’t mind questions at all. Some charlatans show up, too, knowing they have an audience predisposed to listen to anything they say.

Can you predict every publisher meltdown in time to safely escape with your rights and reputation intact? Nope. Which is why paying attention to the market and being skeptical is so important.