sàds

If you're a writer, you've probably heard of BookExpo America . Although it describes itself as "the premier event for the North American publishing industry," in recent years it has shrunk considerably, both in exhibitors and attendance. There are those who question its relevance, not to mention its survival (see Mike Shatzkin's interesting essay on the dwindling of BEA , and the changes in publishing and book retailing that have driven this). Nevertheless, for many writers BEA retains its gloss as a kind of book industry Mecca, a place to make pilgrimage in hope of establishing contacts, promoting a recently-published book, or even attracting the interest of a publisher or agent. And wherever there's something writers want, there are people waiting to take their money. I touched on this issue last week, with a post about vanity publisher SterlingHouse Publishing , which sells its authors face time at BEA for astronomical prices. I would not be at all surpris...

Writer Beware will be attending BookExpo America this year! Mystery Writers of America has generously offered to host us in its booth ( Booth 3828 ). We'll be handing out literature and talking about Writer Beware all day Saturday and Sunday, so please stop by and visit us. Look forward to seeing you there! - Ann C. Crispin - Victoria Strauss - Rich White

One of two covers for this week's edition of Publishers Weekly features SterlingHouse Publisher and a number of its writers--just in time for Book Expo America . Over the SterlingHouse logo and seven author photos floats the cover caption "Hot New Authors." If you're a Writer Beware regular, you may know that SterlingHouse is one of a number of publishers included on our Thumbs Down Publisher List . Why? Because SterlingHouse's contracts require writers to buy bulk quantities of their own finished books (550 books is a typical number, for a total cost of just under $7,000)--a fact that is not revealed anywhere on SterlingHouse's several websites. Recently, SterlingHouse added an interesting twist to its vanity-style contracts by offering some writers a small advance ($250 to $500, in contracts Writer Beware has seen). The buyback clause is still included, so writers still wind up considerably out of pocket--but now they can in honesty (well, half-honesty) sa...

A little less than a year ago, I blogged on ebook giveaway experiments by major publishers (including Tor, Random House, and St. Martin's Press), and the question of whether such giveaways could boost print sales. At the time of my blog post, what reports there were (from both industry sources and individual authors) indicated that sales could indeed benefit. Now someone is trying to quantify that information. Bloggasm reports that a doctoral student, John Hilton , is collecting data on the sales impact of ebook giveaways. He has identified approximately 40 titles for which a free e-version was released after the p-version was published, and tracked Bookscan numbers for eight weeks on both sides of the e-release. Results so far are interesting. While four of the five Random House books Hilton identified showed an uptick in sales post-e-version, 20 of 24 Tor titles showed a decrease . Why the difference? "One possible explanation is that by making the free books available fo...

On the heels of Queryfail and Agentfail and all the anti-agent feeling generated thereby, agent Nathan Bransford hosted a Be An Agent For a Day contest. The goal of the contest: to see whether people could pick the three published authors from a group of fifty query letters (all posted on Nathan's blog). Nathan posted the results a couple of weeks ago. None of the published books were among the most-picked queries (the one that became a NYT bestseller had a pick rate of just 15%) and only two of the more than 300 people who participated in the contest picked all three. What to take from this contest? First off, it demonstrates how subjective these choices are. Agents' decisions are informed by their experience and their knowledge of the market, but the bottom line is that one person's "Gotta have it" is another's "not for me." Most queries get multiply rejected, even for manuscripts that go on to become extremely successful books. Nathan's oth...

In my last post , I discussed the misleading appropriation by self-publishing conglomerate Author Solutions (parent company of AuthorHouse , iUniverse , Xlibris , and Trafford ) of the term "independent publisher." The flip side of this is the growing tendency among self-published authors to call themselves "independent authors" or "indie authors." I don't know where this term came from, or who originated it; but I'm seeing it a lot these days (Google it to see what I mean), and, stickler for precision that I am, it bugs the crap out of me. If you are a true self-publisher--if you've handled every aspect of publication on your own--then yes, you can accurately call yourself an independent author, in at least one of the senses below. If, however, you've used a POD self-publishing service, here are three reasons why the term won't fly. 1. It's inaccurate. You didn't publish on your own. You hired a service to publish for you. If...

Back around the turn of the century, a certain author mill headquartered in Frederick, Maryland decided it wanted to distance itself from the business model of the then-new print-on-demand self-publishing services--because even though it followed most of the same practices (little editorial gatekeeping, minimal distribution, no marketing, and reliance on digital technology), it didn't charge an upfront fee, and even paid a miniscule "advance." So it invented the term "traditional publisher"--intended specifically to denote a publisher that did not require its authors to pay upfront, and thus was not a vanity publisher. "Traditional publisher" has come into wide usage over the past ten years. This is unfortunate, for it's a meaningless term. Commercial or trade publishing, in which authors are not required to pay for publication, is neither more nor less traditional than vanity publishing or self-publishing, both of which have been around for just a...