A writing friend recently sent a new “publishing opportunity” to me. I’m not going to name-and-shame the particular company, because I don’t think they’re being malicious in this case, merely naive, but it’s a great example of a terrible trend in this industry. Here’s the opportunity, scraped from their site (non-relevant information cut):

 Enter our competition for the opportunity to have your book published in 2012. [...] Should your entry be successful, a publishing contract will be offered to you. [...]

The books will be published through Lightning Source Australia and distributed through Dennis Jones and Associates. Morris Publishing Australia will handle all cover design and setup for printing, and develop a marketing campaign for the book, all at no cost to the author.   

We are looking for books in the following groups: 

• Confident readers (7+) - generally between 8000 and 20,000 words.
• Independent readers (9+) - generally between 25,000 and 50,000 words
• Teenage readers (12+) - generally between 40,000 and 80,000 words
• Young adult readers (14+) - generally between 40,000 and 80,000 words. 
• Adult fiction.

 Can you see what’s wrong with it?  

 No information

If you win this competition, “a publishing contract” will be offered to you. Now, that’s not like saying “a TV” will be offered to you. Publishing contracts aren’t something you can pick up at Harvey Norman’s - there are a lot of ins and outs that go into making a contract good or bad. I’m not expecting them to lay it all out there online, but at a bare minimum it should stipulate:

• What rights they’re planning to take, in what territories, for how long, and whether exclusively or not, and what payment are they expecting for each of these rights?
• What are the reversion clauses?
• Which subsidiary rights are they keeping (movie adaptations, audiobooks, foreign language etc)
• What the payment will be - advance, flat fee, royalties - in what schedule (half on delivery, all on publication, 50% in ten years’ time?)
• What the publishing schedule will be - when will these books be published
• Where will these books be published? (having a distributor doesn’t necessarily mean the books will actually make it into the stores, even if it’s a large and reputable one like Dennis Jones &A)
• What kind of print runs, what format, and what RRP are they intending?
•  What is this “marketing campaign”? How much are they spending, what are they planning to do, what evidence do they have that this will be effective? Is the marketing package contractually obligated (and does it obligate the author in any way) or are they free to change their minds later?

 That’s just to start with. Would you be interested in a contract that took all your rights permanently with no committment of when they had to publish by, for a 1% royalty that would not be paid until 12 months after sale, with a 100 print run, where marketing is them telling their neighbours they’re publishing some books? Because there’s nothing in their explanation up above that suggests their contract is any better than that.

 No experience

There’s no evidence of experience publishing other people’s work. (In fact, if you read their about page, which I won’t post, it clearly shows an older couple who’ve self-publishing two of the wife’s children’s books and decided this publishing thing’s a go.) There’s no evidence of any kind of marketing experience (and their website design is a clear indicator that they’re about five years out of date with technology).

They’re offering to publish in five completely different genres. One of those is open - “Adult fiction” - that includes literary, science fiction, romance, westerns, pulp, horror, yada yada yada. Each of those genres requires different editing voices and techniques, different tone in cover and production, and completely different marketing strategies and techniques, to sell both to bookstores and to the public.

There’s a good reason publishing houses have imprints. You need to actually know a genre before you publish in it. You need an idea of what works, you need to know what’s already out there, who’s buying what right now. You need to create a ‘brand’ for bookstores, so they know what to expect from you when you come knocking with your next release list. Five different genres isn’t a brand, it’s a mess.

There’s no evidence they know how to publish in any of those genres, except possibly children’s fiction (of which they’ve managed two, neither of which I’ve heard of or seen.) You wouldn’t want a doctor with no medical experience doing open heart-surgery on you; why go with someone who has no idea what they’re doing with your precious book?

Not to mention they're going to do all the typesetting, "setting up for printing", cover design and layout for your book. And we have no idea how well they can do these things. For all we know, they're using Microsoft Word.

The problem

 They’re not the only ones with sites like this. Offers like this are springing up all over the place, as people publish that memoir they’ve always been meaning to write and figure out that publishing’s actually pretty easy. Now, mostly they’re not trying to be sneaky or evil. This is just ignorance - they don’t know just how much they don’t know. There is an enormous difference between selling your own intellectual property and selling someone else’s, and this is a very large, lumbering and convoluted industry to get your head around. But they don’t realise that - they don’t see how it’s any different from Bill across the road who makes a fortune reselling stuff on ebay. You’re just selling things, right? Even better, you’re just getting other people to sell things. Easy as. To those people we say “look, it’s great that you’re enthusiastic, but this is actually a bit more involved that you thought. How about you do some research on this stuff for about twelve months and then try again?”.

 But there are other organisations that aren’t as benign. Ones with terrible clauses in their submission agreements that state (for example) that once you submit, you can’t withdraw, you automatically accept the contract offered to you (that you haven’t seen yet) with no chance for negotiation or appeal, and you can’t submit anywhere else in the meantime. I’ve seen these clauses. I’ve run the hell the other way, and you should, too.

 The problem is that when so many places don’t bother to stipulate things like this - the basic things you need to know before you can even tell if something’s worth your time, or if it’s safe to enter - is that people forget to think. They think that’s the norm, that it’s acceptable to have no idea what you’re submitting for. They forget that they need to consider these things - that protecting their intellectual property is their business, not the company’s. It just encourages that ridiculous notion that writers shouldn’t bother their pretty heads about nasty things like intellectual property.

 Publishing isn’t hard, but it is hard work. You need to do your homework. If you don’t understand things like rights licensing, reversion clauses, royalties, sell-through, distribution, etc you shouldn’t be publishing until you do. It’s not difficult to learn, if this is business you really want to get into. But skipping the learning because you “just want to do the story stuff” is practicing medicine without a license, and somebody’s lungs are going to end up in their spleen. Probably yours.

 So next time you see one of these fabulous offers, stop and really look at what they’re telling you. If you see the words “a publishing contract”, I want you to substitute that with “Maise and Chaisty”. If you see “marketing campaign”, substitute with “A Squeaky Bithwitt”.

What on earth do these things mean? Exactly. Now you can see what they’re really telling you.