OK, so I have a question (or, questions) after seeing the full-page IUniverse ad today on p. 2 of the NYTBR:
What do you folks think about IUniverse, XLibris, Author House and other such adventures in POD self-publishing? ( I mean, the kind where you have to fork over your own cold hard cash. The ad for IUniverse is asking for a grand in exchange for a quotient of marketing support courtesy of Barnes & Noble.)
I'm seriously considering doing something like this, and somewhat aware of the associated (esp. contractual) hazards. But to be candid, I'm tired of the hoop-jump I'm experiencing wrt certain of my manuscripts, and thinking that I generally have to invest in my own PR anyway. $1000? Sounds like a lot, but it isn't. And like the rest of you, I presume, I figure I've been around long enough to drum up some interest in my work.
I've read the comparative (online) reports of these services. It seems to me, at any rate, that they're altering the publishing landscape by offering publishing models somewhat betwixt & between vanity press and standard publishing arrangements.
But really, I'm less interested in the more abstract ramifications than I am in sheer down & dirty pragmatics. Love to hear what you all have to say.
Best,
Joe
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It's a rip-off. You're not going to sell any books, you're not going to get into any bookstores, or your book will likely look like a pile of shit (are you a professional cover artist? can you afford one? can you tell a good-looking book from bad?) regardless of its content.
Sure, lots of small presses don't have a lot of bookstore penetration, but FC2, university press, Soft Skull, etc. titles look good and there is a certain cachet there. With iUniverse, you're just hoisting a sign reading "I AM A SUCKER" over your head, and most of your company will be semi-literate authors writing about the New World Order and how Jesus is going to come back and teach liberals a lesson. I wrote about the composition of these POD vanity presses a few years ago, and don't see how anything has changed since then:
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0111,mamatas,23054,8.html
A few years ago, iUniverse had the "back in print" program for mystery writers and other midlist authors whose books had fallen out of print. Even though these were commercial titles from commercial authors that had already sold tens of thousands of copies, most of the stuff iuniverse put back into print through this program sold fewer than 100 new copies.
You're paying $1000 for an opportunity to spend another $1000 just to buy copies of your book and fail to sell them to either stores or the general public. You'd be better off taking that grand to a bank and putting it in a CD...or hell, to the dog track.
Haven't seen the advertisement you reference, although just to mention the TImes did a notable article on IUniverse sometime in April 2005. And here's a 2002 article from the Times, so this apparently has become a perennial story -- perhaps, with the inevitable PI avalanche building momentum each year -- since 2000, now I see after googling some more. Apparently, it takes awhile for those academic-publishing sedatives to start wearing off because, you know, the virtual doors and windows have been thrown wide open for awhile now -- the convicts can escape if they want -- and the weather is quite fine on the other side. How slowly the living dead awaken to the possibilities -- a testimony to how strongly and systematically brainwashed we have been.
http://tech2.nytimes.com/mem/technology/techreview.html?res=9803EEDF143DF934A25753C1A9649C8B63
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B02E4DD103EF937A15757C0A9639C8B63
http://tech2.nytimes.com/mem/technology/techreview.html?res=9C00E4D91031F933A15757C0A9669C8B63
Here are some other links you may or may not have seen already:
http://www.lulu.com/
http://www.cafepress.com [not recommending this service, since they exact a good chunk of the profits, only see the community message boards or forums for a plethora of info related to your pragmatic inquiries. Last time I read the forums, they had information on purchasing ISBN's and promoting to Amazon. They have changed the format somewhat since then. Also to say, as far as I have read-up on the subject, you want to have your own or shared-interest collective's batch of ISBN's -- they are sold in bulk. With your own batch of 10, it's like having one's own publishing shingle. You can purchase them directly off of the ISBN in bulk amounts.] Lulu probably has message boards, too.
http://forums.cafepress.com/eve/ubb.x
http://forums.cafepress.com/eve/forums/a/frm/f/314104
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1205143,00.html
http://books.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1710311,00.html
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1766492,00.html
The best standout PR investment is nickel-dime cheap: http://www.godaddy.com or some service along that particular line. Hosting, same deal, about 3-4 dollars per month. And then web design/dreamweaver away to your creative marketing content.
;)
Well, why on Earth did you give away the copyright, Kass, and to whom? That's generally not something a legitimate publisher demands, or even could demand. I've published a number of books and retain the copyrights, and it's not like I'm some financial wizard or bestselling author.
As far as the other questions, the issue goes beyond the company one keeps as well. POD, like any technology, has embedded within it an associated economy. POD is low-cost but high-margin, meaning that if you do spend thousands promoting your book, you actually start losing money on the margin after selling your 300th copy or so. You would have been better off having a local printing press print up 1000 copies, then storing them in your garage, and selling them. (Essentially, a POD title costs $4 each, for example, while printing up 1000 would cost $2 per...you get to keep the extra $2 on a sale.) Kelly Link has done very well this way.
You can also POD yourself, by contracting directly with LSI, which is all iUniverse does anyway. $800 of that $1000 just goes to iUniverse to make sure its shareholders are happy. It's not a public utility, it runs on the same profit-over-all ethos as any publisher, except instead of you being a vendor (selling them writing), you're a customer (buying their services). How would you rather tangle with a big firm -- vendors certainly have a bit more power.
As far as people needing an imprint to tell them what they should be reading, well, how many iUniverse or XLIbris titles have the participants in this blog purchased? Even the basics of setting a book as returnable and giving the wholesalers a real discount is more difficult with one of these POD vanities.
While businesses are bad and evil and all that, the fact is that knowing how to properly edit, copy edit, produce, cover, and publicize a book is a complex suite of skills. It can't be done well at the prices iUniverse is charging, and for the number of books it handles...and indeed, were it to do it too well, it iUniverse would lose its greatest income stream: suckers buying hundreds of copies of their own books at inflated prices in the hope of reselling them.
The question is: can you, Matt or Kass or whomever, edit, copyedit, proofread, design, art direct, ship, and promote a book as well as people who does all these things for a living, the first time out, for about 1/30th of the price that publishers do? If your answer is yes, then sure, why not gamble a few grand on it.
But I suspect the answer is no for most people.
I don't mean to flood the blog with comments on this subject, but I did dig this up:
http://leegoldberg.typepad.com/a_writers_life/2005/05/iuniverse_by_th.html
Out of 18,000 books iUniverse published in 2004, only 83 titles sold at least 500 copies and a mere 14 showed up on the shelves of Barnes & Noble (as national purchases).
2004
18,108: Total number of titles published
14: Number of titles sold through B&N's bricks-and-mortar stores (nationally)
83: Number of titles that sold at least 500 copies
792,814: Number of copies printed
32,445: Number of copies sold of iUniverse's top seller, If I Knew Then by Amy Fisher
3) Not to hurt anyone's feelings, Nick, esp. my own, but I've been rejected by Soft Skull (the memoir that I can't seem to place) and FC2 (a novel that I'm less worried about placing). I don't think a survey of what the authors here are publishing, esp. in light of the fact that I know most of them (you) personally and am intimately acquainted with their (your) work, is any kind of verification, yea or nay, as to the efficacy of the POD companies.
I'm unsure what this means. I'm familiar with a number of the participants of this blog (Lance's and Davis's work especially), but I don't think I asked for what anyone was publishing. More to the point, the efficacy of POD companies is almost entirely divorced from the content of their titles. Clearly, there is all kind of content made available via POD firms — indeed, I'd guess that it reflects the proportions of the publishing industry, with most stuff being commercial fiction or instructional material, and with innovative fiction being the tiniest sliver of it all.
POD firms are designed to sell books to authors, not to readers. Attempting to actually have people outside of your personal "pocket market" buy your stuff is actually read as interference by these firms. That's what it boils down to. Ads? Ads say all sorts of things, certainly we know this.
Thanks for the note, re: academic publishing. I had heard of some presses doing that and being criticized for the same by the NWU etc, but didn't realize it was very widespread in academic circles. My one academic title didn't involve the surrender of copyright.
As far as paying a grand for your local B&N to stock a book, a little pencil and paper work suggests that the only beneficiary of this will be iUniverse. Let's say the royalty is 7.5% on $14.95. You paid $1000 for your book to be available in as many as three stores (if you have three B&Ns local to you) and let's say they each buy five.
These are high numbers, btw. I'd bet it's one store, stocking three copies. Anyway, you'd make $1.21 a book. The three stores would have to sell 275 copies each for you to make their grand back. An individual store doesn't often sell more than 50 copies of anything but top-top bestsellers over the course of a year.
Or, if you just self-pubbed, you could probably go to the community relations manager of the store and get the books stocked with nothing more than a pleasant phone manner or a slightly desperate smile. But even then...it's a handful of copies. At the very least, academic and small presses can get library sales in the hundreds.
iUniverse, on the other hand, gets to keep your thousand bucks whether those initial three, five, or fifteen copies sell or not, and whether there are any re-orders or not.
To me, there seem to be sufficient small presses that going the POD vanity route, even after rejections from Soft Skull or FC2 (full disclosure: I was an editor at Soft Skull years ago, and they published a novella of mine in 2001 and another is forthcoming this year; FC2, or at least the indentured graduate students down in FL, is currently reading a collection of mine — I'll likely get my rejection or perhaps if the stars align and the baby Jesus smiles upon me sufficiently a thrilling acceptance before the summer is out) doesn't make too much economic sense, or even academic sense.
I'd just keep submitting. If that didn't work, I'd likely make the work available on an interesting website, with paper copies generated via lulu for people who like to read on the toilet. Or, if I had money to spend and an accountant familiar enough with small business to make sure I got lots of write-offs, I'd get a local printing press and book designer together, and make 1000 copies of my book and sell them out of a car trunk if I must. All of those seem to me — and as I alluded to, I've been following the POD and vanity debates for years — to make much better economic and artistic sense than iUniverse.
Well, it strikes me that the only people who are explicitly and loudly claiming that POD vanity production really is a new paradigm in publishing are:
a. sellers of POD vanity production services,
b. individuals who recently purchased some of those same services, and
c. credulous journalists of the recapitulate-the-press-release school of journalism.
Groups b and c depend on turnover. As the scales fall from the eyes of older customers, they are replaced. Every few months a new set of press releases are sent out and picked up by reporters who, three months ago, were in college or the mail room.
POD vanity elides into the questions of POD generally (useful for short runs, or to keep backlist works in print) and vanity generally (obviously a sucker bet)...but ultimately leads to the worst of both worlds. You $1000+ ultimately pays simply for a potential book, and one that even with blurbs and lots of friends and potentially even classroom placements isn't going to do very well.
I think that there is a certain inescapable arrogance involved in POD vanities. Surely, publishing is largely broken, but that doesn't mean that people with no experience, no skills in production, and who use a turnkey service designed to drain money from them and not make money for them is a superior solution. Indeed, it can't be a superior solution.
Poetry long ago abandoned a commercial context, thus Ponzi scheme-style contests for publication, but as you had mentioned a novel and a memoir, two forms that retain a commercial context. Trying to half-step around that context by entering another context, that of simply being the consumer of various virtual services, isn't going to work.
More simply: tens of thousands of people have already been burned by POD vanity presses. Why would Joe Amato be different? What makes Joe Amato the .02% who will succeed, when even commercial writers with their backlist titles on POD can't sell more than 25 units. At least with Amway, another well-known scam, .2% of people actually succeed in climbing that pyramid.
Coming late to this one (reading manuscripts in our current Ponzi sche--, er, contest), I just thought I'd put in my scattered thoughts, as someone who has a lot of experience in this realm.
1. I agree with all of what Nick says about iUniverse. I say that as someone who rejected iU. in my choice to self-publish my own first book, stupidly giving my made up press such a clever name (smile) that I had to keep it in business by doing other peoples' books after my own and thus becoming a legitimate "small press."
2. Sales are a secondary concern in any kind of fiction publishing that people on this list would be concerned with. ANY kind. Nick, if numbers for the industry at large were available, would they be statistically much better than those you cite for iUniverse books? Very few books published by anyone these days make money, particularly (non-genre) fiction and (non-self-help, non-celebrity-written) poetry. But then, who's in it for the money? It's funny, it took a business consultant to point this out to me -- as I was looking to make my press economically viable, he said to me, You have to ask yourself why you are doing this. Is it about making money? Or is it about getting your work out, or giving yourself credentials that will help you otherwise in your career, however you define that career? The most important goal should be defined -- that is what you are really after. Then, how much of a sacrifice are you willing to make for it? The cost of effectively printing & promoting a title is roughly $6-7000. For that you can do you own book, pretend you didn't do your own book (with a made-up company, ISBN, etc.), advertise it, & likely get it reviewed here and there. Your time does not figure into that 7 thou. You will spend all of your available time on your new venture. There's always another way to promote, market, cross-pollenate, etc.
3. One of the most interesting paradigms in small press publishing that I know of is Geoffrey Gatza's BlazeVox Books. (Disclosure: GG works as a designer for Starcherone, and BlazeVox published my novella, Bhang.) BlazeVox has a couple dozen books in its imprint, set up by BlazeVox/GG as pdf's, then all done through Cafe Press, printed one at a time as ordered. His authors can also then purchase bulk copy orders cheaper than Cafe Press charges, printed by some of the better digital printers, like Fidlar Doubleday (I've used Bookmobile as well; both are cheap & good, so I never want to say one is better than the other -- but these 2 are the best I know). These are used as review copies, for author readings, etc. In the poetry world particularly, a book can pick up steam on the basis of internet buzz, and while figues aren't available, I have reason to believe that BlazeVox's publication of Kent Johnson's Epigramitis is doing fairly well. What makes BlazeVox fascinating to me is that Gatza has invested no upfront capital in the venture, yet the books get noticed. Kent Johnson's book has been discussed on Ron Silliman's blog, for instance. Of course, that's part of the incendiary strategy of Johnson's book, epigrams (sometimes nasty) about 88 living American poets. But nevertheless, the press project attracted a figure like Johnson, & other similarly interesting weird-fun poets, and audiences orf various degrees, thus proving there's ways of starting a press without ANY money (assuming you have software).
4. I've given up for the most part on B&N "brick and mortar" stores. Starcherone Books was turned away early in our career with thpose stores in a rejection letter from B&N which said, in part, that they saw little relation between sales figures and actually having the books in the stores. I know our books do get into some B&Ns through Small Press Distribution, and perhaps through some college bookstore B&Ns. But really they are just not interested in us, so at a certain point, do you keep trying to get the vapid queen of the cheerleaders to agree finally to go out with you for one anti-climactic evening, or do you look for experiences that will be more thoughtful and rewarding?
In all, yes, I think there is a new paradigm, but it has many aspects and potential strategies, as well as different assumptions. You can't beat the big boys at their own game -- whether that be the NY mainstream scene, the chain bookstores, or profitability generally, etc. But if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need.
1. Literature does not operate in the same space-time as product-driven capitalism. OK, if your one or two of your "modalities" is fine with the B&N 3-month window for selling a new book.... But, as I said somewhere back there, I like the Emerson quote, "I don't read a book until it's at least a year old"; I think that's how Literature works. B&N wouldn't have any such books for Ralph Waldo, except commercial successes. I don't believe that's what he's talking about. What's the difference between a dozen people & an audience? Time, if the work is worthy enough. How many more people than that read Renaissance court poets, whose hand-written manuscripts were circulated from person to person? Little magazines and small press efforts have always been in this environment; if it's the RIGHT 12 people, you've got germinative possibilities.
Not suggesting one requires the Countess of Pembroke or other aristocrats as your readers; tho I suppose it wouldn't hurt... There's many such instances -- the surrealists or the situationists; Black Mountain poets; many of Frank O'Hara's most highly regarded poems today were first written to people in letters... Not that this is the most desireable state of affairs for circulating new writing. But given a choice between this and a "modality" that B&N would find acceptable -- gosh, I don't even have a choice here -- "write the other way I cannot" (I think that's Melville). (Why oh why do I always speak other people's words?)
2. I like Chain -- sad to say I picked up the issues I own in a $2 each bin at the Minneapolis Book Fair a couple years ago. I too agree with the necessity of paying full price, even donating to keep small mags/presses going. Incidentally, Starcherone is in the midst ofits annual fundraising drive ....
Congratulations, man!!! That's excellent news!!!
Geoffrey Gatza to the rescue again! Yes, Joe, congrats.
Hey, Raw Dog, I'm a dummy (tho my operation is more or less the same as yours, with the exception that I went non-profit -- my hand doesn't go into my pocket, it's always stuck out oin mid-air, asking): who/what is LSI?
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