Last week, I wrote about the differences, slim though they are, between vanity presses and subsidy presses. In the comments, Jennifer wrote, “What a publisher calls itself does not matter. What matters are the terms of the contract.” True. A company can call itself whatever it chooses, but whether it’s …
Category: Publishing
Vanity press vs. subsidy: What’s the difference?
Q: Earlier you talked about the difference between royalty publishing and a subsidy press. I’ve heard other writers complain about “vanity presses.” Is there a difference between a subsidy press and a vanity press? A: Depends on who you ask. Some people think so-called “traditional publishing” is the only true …
When self-publishing, consider your profit potential
Whether you’re buying publishing services from a single vendor or from a set of freelancers, you have to do a cold calculation. Can you sell enough copies of your book to recoup your investment? In an earlier post, I talked about some of the costs that go into producing a …
What having a publisher gets you
The self-publishing revolution has a lot of writers asking whether they even need a publisher. It’s a fair question. So let’s take a look at what a publisher does for an author. First and foremost, as I’ve said before, the publisher pays the bill. That is, the publisher fronts all …
Why the traditional publishing model is broken
As we discussed last week, in the royalty or “traditional” publishing model, the publisher pays the author for rights to publish a book. That’s the simple explanation, but in fact there are all kinds of complications in this system. The up-front payment authors receive for their book is called an advance, …
How publishing works
I once sat across a coffee shop table with a client and outlined the publishing process for him. He was astounded. It never occurred to him that someone else would bear the cost of producing his book. He was more familiar with the manufacturing business model, where if you want …
Q&A: Do we really need Microsoft Word?
I’ve been asking myself this question lately, because Microsoft’s business strategy has turned positively creepy. To encourage people to move to its new subscription model, Office 365, Microsoft changed the licensing on Office 2013 to tie each copy of Office to a specific piece of hardware. In other words, if …
Counting the costs of self-publishing
The announcement by Jerry B. Jenkins that his Christian Writers Guild is getting into the author services business created a bit of a ruckus in the publishing business. Victoria Strauss put together a great analysis of CWG Publishing over at the Writer Beware blog. Some people are calling CWGP a …