Re: We Interrupt This Submission . . .

On Sat, 20 Dec 2008 19:39:55 +0000,
green_knight@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Catja Pafort) wrote:

Jonathan L Cunningham wrote:

Of course you can - but if you want quality, you'd better be prepared to
pay a substantial chunk of money. You want, at the very least, a cover

Say goodbye to £2K. (I've costed them.)

So have I. I don't know how carefully you've looked into it, or how much
time you've spent, but although you *can* easily spend £2K or more, you
could get a good job done for substantially less - more like a tenth of
that, although you might be safer to budget nearer £500. It depends on
how much editing is needed (you can budget a fixed amount for cover
art).

The minimum editing you need is a copy edit (a fresh set of eyes to read

Yes. You also need to do production editing (which comes after the copy
edit).


Of course, you might get someone you know to do it, but if you want
someone who knows what they're doing, someone who has training and/or
experience, they will expect professional wages. At the cut-price rate
of £15/h (the Society for Editors and Proofreaders reccommends £20/h
minimum rate, _which is the going rate for professionals_), that would
still cost you around £1K for the copy edit alone.

I know someone who will do it for £100/day - and she thinks she can copy
edit a typical novel in one day. I think she's wrong - but I also think
she would absorb the cost of it taking longer, i.e. I think she would
still do it for £100, even if it took her two or three days. There's no
reason why a 80K word novel should take longer than that.

(As someone who occasionally copy edits and who hangs out with copy
editors, I have a stake in this. Those guys are _good_.)

You get what you pay for. If I'm paying for the copy editing, I would be
satisfied with merely good. Or even satisfactory. I *know* that there
will always be typos, even after you've paid your £1K. So, you get 99%
of the typos for £1K. I'll get 98% of the typos for £200.

And most readers won't care about a few typos anyway. Is it really worth
the extra £800? I don't think so. YMMV.

And this is the product that the world will judge you by, your visiting
card, the thing that makes people decide whether they are going to give
you their hard-earned money or not. Having a first page of awkward
sentences is not a good use of your time and money.

Awkward sentences is part of *editing* - not part of copy-editing. It's
a different job. You may pay the same person to do both - but I
wouldn't. Copy-editing is a different (and cheaper) skill. to buy in.

If I were to publish your book for you (as a hypothetical example <g>),
I would look at your manuscript. If it needed a lot of editing, I'd tell
you - and tell you to go away and get it edited. And that would be *my*
decision. If it needed a lot of copy-editing, but I otherwise liked it,
I'd pay someone else to do it. I wouldn't do the copy-editing myself.
(Actually, I might, if I liked the story enough. I find copy-editing
quite relaxing...)

You get something back for having a car. You might not get anything back
on your books.

Your point?

Unless you can afford to write the money off completely, you don't have
the money to self-publish a book.

Unless I can afford to write off the money completely, I can't afford to
own a car, either. But I have a car.

If I had a book I wanted to self publish (and assuming I couldn't
persuade somebody to do the copy-editing for two pints of beer, which is
a false assumption, since I know someone who would, considerably cheaper
than hiring Mrs. X, who would charge at least £100) and it was a choice
between self-publishing or owning a car. Well... I don't use my car
much, at present, and I've got the second part of "Easy come, easy go"
down to a fine art. [I'm still working on the first part.]

If I had starving children to feed, the decision might be different. But
I don't.

You missed my point. If (and it's a huge if) a mere individual could get
books into bookstores, then surely it would be much easier for an
established small press to do so.

Not necessarily. Because for every individual who can do it there are
hundreds who can't

Ok, you don't accept the hypothetical.

It's like I said, "Suppose vampires are real" and you say, "but they
aren't". There's not a lot I can say to that.

If you are interested in the case that some - a few - people can get
their books into bookstores, well, you are back to talking about the
real world. Because that's true. ("Eragon" is an example that comes to
mind, and I saw a new book by that author in my *supermarket*. Now
that's what I call successful salesmanship.)

Therefore, rather than doing it
yourself (or myself) it would be better to get your book published
quickly by a small press than wait years in the hope that a big
publisher would take it on.

Small press vs. big publisher is a legitimate decision. I don't think
'published quickly' does, or should come into it

Why not? It's a major consideration for me. Apart from general laziness,
the idea that I might have to wait a year for a rejection, and may have
to go through a dozen publishers is a *major* demotivating factor for
me.

Wait twelve years to get published?

It's about the strongest reason I can think of for attempting to
self-publish. (Not that I think I'd be successful at it - that's a
strong reason for *not* self-publishing.)

The only advantage of going with a big publisher (now, in the real
world) is that they can get your books into bookstores. Take away that
advantage, and they have little extra to offer.

Err, capital? Guaranteed income for the writer? A publisher pays you an
advance, as long as you turn the mss in on time, that's it. You can

Same with a small press. (Or some of them.)

write the next or retire to the Bahamas or do whatever you like. A small
publisher might pay an advance - but most pay _considerably_ less than
large publishers. They also do not have the money to invest in the
things that might give your book a better chance of success.

The big publishers may have the money - but they don't spend it on you!!

Ok, submitting to a big publisher is a bit like buying a lottery ticket
(for a lottery to be held in three years time). They *might* decide to
heavily promote the book of an unknown author. But it's not the way to
bet.

I said in a previous post that I have enough confidence in my writing
that I would be willing to self-publish *If* I thought I could get my
books into major bookstores. (Which, alas, I have no confidence that I
could actually achieve.) That doesn't mean I think my writing is so
brilliant a major publisher would spend millions promoting it. The very
best I'd hope for is that they might actually publish the book. Perhaps
my ego is not big enough...

And part of that problem is having a good prouct. And you only get a

Well, if it's my book, then naturally it's a good product. <g>

good product if you can attract good writers right out of the starting

Well, we are back to the hypothetical again: *if* small presses could
get their books into major chains of bookstores, then some would be
better than others. Good writers would submit to the successful ones.

And here I thought we were talking about the real world. Damn.

No. I really wasn't.

I write SF. I like to speculate about how things might be different.
That includes speculating about how publishing might be different.

Ebooks are cheaper by an order of magnitude - the warehousing and

Or were you making some other point?

The point that even when you remove a lot of the apparent costs of
publishing, and circumvent the 'can't get a foot in the door' problem,
publishing quality books *still* takes capital,

Ok. One of the things where we may differ is that "running a business" -
and I speak from experience - is *very* much more expensive than doing
things on the cheap.

Hiring a professional editor (say) as a full time job, is probably an
order of magnitude more expensive than paying a retired professional
editor, who wants to earn a bit of pin money, to do the same job.

If you are a "real business" (as opposed to a self-publisher) you cannot
afford to work that way: you *have* to hire people, or set up ongoing
contractual relationships with "suppliers" who will charge professional
rates.

As a different example, I am (currently stalled) translating an 18th
century french classic into english. This is something I might well be
tempted to self-publish (using a POD service) when it is finished.

Since I don't speak french, I will need to get my translation checked,
before I dare reveal it. Will I hire a professional translator?

No. A retired French teacher, married to a French wife, and an interest
in 18th century French philosophers, who has spent half his time in
France for the last forty years, has offered to check it.

I've already presented him with one phrase that had me completely
stumped. He took one look, laughed at my attempt, and gave me a correct
translation... and said I would have lost marks if he had been markimg
my work. (He also said that the rest of my translation was quite good,
even though I haven't "polished" it yet - which is encouraging.)

Anyway, if you were an editor at Penguin (or some other big publisher)
and you decided the world neede a new translation of this work (the last
one was in the 1960s), it would cost you a *lot* more than it will cost
me.

and *still* is a risky business,

That seems to me to be an argument why *you* don't want to self-publish.

You don't like the risk. That's fair. I'm risk averse too - it's just
that, having been in a well-paid job and now being skint, my attitude to
money has changed. I could lose a few thousand pounds (which I can't
afford) without losing any sleep over it. I've lost far more than that
for much more stupid reasons than self-publishing a book that flopped.

I'd avoid such a company (or person). It sounds like they don't
understand their own business, nor have any desire to succeed at it.

On the contrary. They understand their business very well, they do their
P&L with care, and they don't have the capital to eat returns on a
hundred thousand printed copies.

Oh, poo! I'm not talking about print runs of a hundred thousand copies.

More like 5000, at most. A small press could make a decent amount on
publishing ten books a year at that sort of print run - and even it
total that's only half your print run of a 100,000.

I want a publisher who can give an honest estimate of how many copies
they are likely to sell, who can meet that target, exceed it, and who is
interested in buying further books from me because they have profited.

Hmm. I have a friend whose last book, hardback, from a small press had a
print run of 350 books. That's how many they think they can sell to
libraries. It's a legitimate and long-established small press which
publishes lots of books - not some new amateur set up.

It really isn't worth his while to write for them, even though the
chances are very good they'd buy his next book. He doesn't want a
publisher who will give him an honest (and very accurate) estimate - he
wants one which will do a larger print-run! <g>

Jonathan

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Relevant Pages

  • Re: Beginning, Middle and End
    ... Money always flows to the writer. ... Well, it will, if you self-publish and it turns out that people buy the ... addressed envelope to a conventional publisher. ...
    (rec.arts.sf.composition)
  • Re: We Interrupt This Submission . . .
    ... pay a substantial chunk of money. ... you their hard-earned money or not. ... you have less time per title, and unless your titles sell, you're ... Small press vs. big publisher is a legitimate decision. ...
    (rec.arts.sf.composition)
  • Re: Beginning, Middle and End
    ... Money always flows to the writer. ... Well, it will, if you self-publish and it turns out that people buy the ... publishing a book means that the following things will happen: ... and _they_ will pay for everything ...
    (rec.arts.sf.composition)
  • Re: David Gerrold : A Method For Madness
    ... actually pay for. ... If a publisher doesn't offer enough money to make ... I'm not speaking of a set of standalone novels that share ...
    (rec.arts.sf.written)
  • Re: Cancelled contract
    ... > Last year I signed a contract with a very small publisher to ... > that he couldn't pay me an advance, ... > entitled to money for all the work I did. ...
    (misc.writing)