Essay Online

How to get a book deal without being scammed is a hurdle for any writers. Publishers Are Not Exempt From Questionable Practices.

Keep These Warning Signs in Mind

Charges a fee to read your manuscript.

You are providing the product for them to sell. Why should you have to pay to see if they are interested in your work?

Offers subsidy contracts

(you pay them to have your book published) when they promote themselves as commercial publishers. Are POD (publish-on-demand) publishers, such as authorshouse, IUniverse, and Xlibris, legitimate publishers? Yes as long as the author realizes the costs and the limitations of POD publishing. Publish On Demand books are rarely stocked in bookstores.

Bait and Switch

There are some publishers who hide behind the mask of respectability and call themselves ‘traditional’ when in fact they are a vanity press. How can you tell? Look at their websites, if the focus is on recruiting writers rather than promoting the books they publish, it’s a huge red flag.

Other publishers ‘will accept’ your manuscript and then come back a few weeks later and say that their list for the next season is full but they would dearly love to publish your book. You just need to share the risk with them by giving them some money.

A new twist is to tell the author that their project has merit but the author will have to find an investor to sponsor their title. The publisher isn’t asking the author directly for any funds but many authors shell out the necessary dollars rather than try and find an ‘investor.’

Rebates

The publisher says that any fees you pay them will be completely refunded once your book reaches a certain sales level, usually in the thousands. Or that they will provide a comparable number of ‘free’ copies when the magic sales level has been reached.

A twist on rebates is that the publisher will match your monetary contribution in marketing efforts for your title. Publishers are supposed to market their own titles. The match most likely will not be in advertising dollars, review copies sent, or book tour expenses but the efforts of the in house staff. Efforts that probably won’t be focused specifically on your title.

How to get a book deal without getting scammed is possible for any author. Just keep these warning signs in mind.

How to get a book published is a question every author asks themselves.

How difficult is it to get a book published by a commercial book publisher? Well the odds are better gambling in Las Vegas. It has been estimated that 25 million people in the United States consider themselves writers and only 5% have been published anywhere. At any one time 5 to 6 million manuscripts are looking for a publishing home.

Most major book publishing houses, and many small presses, will not accept submissions that aren’t represented by a literary agent. During the research of The Publishing Primer: A Blueprint for an Author’s Success, we asked literary agents how many unsolicited query letters/proposals/sample chapters, they receive. For the typical agency it is close to 5000 per year. On the average these agents accepted only 11 new clients, that’s about 1out of every 500 submissions.

Of course writers submit to more than one agency in the hopes of obtaining representation which makes the odds a little better, but not much.

It has been estimated that the five large book publishing companies, Random House Inc., Penguin USA, Simon & Schuster, Time Warner and HarperCollins, account for nearly eighty percent of all book sales in the US. This has occurred for the same reasons any other industry goes through consolidation: by combining certain administrative or staff functions, costs can be reduced and profits increased. Publishing, relative to many other industries, has not enjoyed a high Return on Investment (ROI) for investors. Now, book publishers are much more focused on having every single book they publish be profitable. This means a more risk averse philosophy, with a preference for publishing authors with successful track records–a sound business strategy.

How to get a book published by a commercial book publisher isn’t an easy task, but with perseverance and a good book you can do it.

Authors in their quest to get published can fall victim to scams. Here’s a few tips to help you avoid the traps.

Online Matching Services and Email Blast Programs

These services, for a fee, put your query letter, synopsis and first chapter online. Acquisition editors and literary agents then have the opportunity to peruse the offerings. You have to ask yourself if you truly believe that the average literary agent, who receives 1100 unsolicited queries a year, has the time to look at these websites.

The reverse, or maybe it’s the inverse, are services that have databases of agents and publishers. You specify the genre of your book and up pops agents/publishers who have said they are interested in your genre. Sometimes the agents/publishers have provided their acquisition specs and sometimes the owner of the database has just input the information from other sources.

Finally there are services who will email blast your query letter to agents/publishers. If the participants have agreed to receive the query letters there is a higher probability you will be successful. But, again you have to wonder, with all the unpublished manuscripts out there looking for a publishing home, why would an agent/publisher feel it necessary to sign up for these types of services.

Book Doctors…but are they quacks?

The beginning author wonders: 1) Do I really have talent? 2) Is my book ready to be marketed, or does it need additional work?

One option is to hire an editing service, sometimes called a book doctor. This is not simply a copy editor who checks for grammar, sentence structure, and spelling. A book doctor looks at the plot, characters, dialogue, continuity and flow.

It almost seems like more people making a living selling editing services&ndashbook doctors, script doctors&ndashthan writers earning a living. In screenwriting, it has become an epidemic. Producers who run out of money have even taken up the script doctoring profession to pay the rent while they are “between films.”

Asking another person to re-write your work is problematic. Who knows your story better than you do? It is extremely difficult to evaluate how talented these editors are, to determine if they are really going to improve your work.

Fees for these services can range from several hundred dollars to five or ten thousand dollars.

Remember that all manuscripts need editing. And that one of the publisher’s jobs is to work with the writer on getting the manuscript ready to publish.

Another option is a critique service; this is usually less expensive. They provide a report of their view of what is good and bad about the work, and perhaps its market potential. They are, at best, just one person’s opinion. If the critique service isn’t a publisher, how do they know what will sell and what won’t.

Marketing Services

There are many companies who provide legitimate services to authors in marketing and promoting their titles. Just because a company requires a fee doesn’t mean it’s a scam.

Having said that, if your book is not offered with industry standard terms, bookstores are highly unlikely to stock it, no matter what the marketing efforts are. Your book must be returnable to the publisher through the major wholesalers. It must be offered with 90 days for payment. It must be offered with at least a 40% discount from the retail price. These terms must be offered from the publisher not the author &ndash unless of course the author is the publisher. Keep in mind that the author must own the ISBN, International Standard Book Number to be considered the publisher.

When a marketing company is unconcerned that the terms are not industry standard you should be concerned.