What I’m talking about here is Harlequin’s deceitful suggestion that by going through their vanity publishing arm, writers are going to receive the same kind of editing, marketing, publicity and bookstore placement that the authors published by their commercial operation receive.

This is not true at all, but boy do they make it look that way.

You don’t have to be a celebrity to be commercially published. You have to write a good book. Does lack of fame mean that you’re probably going to have to do things that Madonna really doesn’t need to do? Sure. But there’s a lot of things I have to do that Madonna doesn’t.

“All of the time taken cycling through reams of rejections can instead be applied to writing your next book.”

Most of the writers I know don’t stop writing while they’re shopping a new book around. You finish your first book, you get it to where you think it’s good enough to sell, you send it out to agents. While they’re thinking about whether or not they want to buy it, you get started on your next book. Sending out query letters and receiving rejections doesn’t take up all that much time.

I’d bet that the average amount of time writers spend reading those replies is less than the amount of time self-published writers have to spend towards promoting their books if they’re going it alone.

“So by self publishing through LULU.COM I’m saving money, lowering risk and most of all, saving effort.”

I’m not quite sure where you’re saving money with Lulu vs. being published by a commercial publisher. Authors whose books are picked up by honest-to-god commercial publishers get paid for their books. They do not pay to be published, they don’t pay for production or marketing or exposure, which is what Harlequin Horizons/DellArte is trying to rope people into doing. That’s why I quoted Yog’s Law above: Money flows toward the writer.

Same goes with lowering risk. I’m not sure where the risk is in submitting books to a commercial publisher or in querying agents who do the submitting for you. What’s at risk there, aside from the possibility of rejection?

If you’re only uploading the file to Lulu and from that point leaving it alone — not advertising it anywhere, not blogging about it, not paying for and maintaining (or paying someone else to maintain) a website about the book — just uploading, pushing “publish” and walking away, period the end, then I suppose you’re saving effort, yes. But how is anyone going to know your book exists? Any time or money you put in to promoting your book is effort.

So yes, going through Lulu or some other method of self-publishing guarantees that your book is printed. However, being printed does not necessarily mean sales. In fact, it very rarely results in sales of more than 200 copies. And, for books published through Harlequin Horizons/DellArte, the average sales for other Author House titles is a mere 41 copies.

From the author’s perspective, in a perfect world, their book will be printed by a “commercial” publisher with certainty. In the actual world, the probability that a commercial publisher ends up printing your book is closer to zero percent than to 100 percent unless you are Madonna or Sarah Palin, etc.

For print on demand (like LULU.COM) the probability that your book will get printed is 100 per cent.

So a better way to predict your “payoff” is to factor in the probability of getting published in the first place.

When you factor this in to the equation it becomes much more rational to consider self publishing (LULU.COM)

All of the time taken cycling through reams of rejections can instead be applied to writing your next book.

And another thing. I just recently finished and uploaded my manuscript to LULU.COM and it cost nothing (absolutely nothing) to get it added in as a full fledged, ready to print book complete with unique ISBN number.

So by self publishing through LULU.COM I’m saving money, lowering risk and most of all, saving effort. I can and have moved on to my next project.

-rob

I found this pricing page on AuthorHouse, but I’m not sure if it’s current or not. http://www.authorhouse.com/GetPublished/sellingprice.aspx

It appears they calculate the price point as printing costs plus royalty. I wonder how many folks actually choose the 5% option.

Of course, this is if the aspiring writer hasn’t done his/her research in the first place.

That being said, when I told people I was going to query literary agents, they questioned me in comments, asking, “Why not publish yourself?” or “Wouldn’t self-publishing be easier than going through this?”

I don’t know. To me, going through all the querying and rejections until a literary agent signs the author, seems a lot more easier than going through this. In the end, without knowing what you’re getting yourself into, just seems like a never-ending circle if you go through the route DellArte/Harlequin Horizons wants you to go through.

Just doesn’t seem worth it.

I do want to make one point about author’s copyrights. Although we all talk about how we “sold a book” to a commercial publisher, it’s a little more accurate to say that we licensed a book. Publishers almost never actually buy the rights except in work for hire situations. They license them for specific circumstances. So when DellArte (the new name) says, “With traditional publishing, a publisher will buy the rights to your book up front and then print your book,” they are being somewhat inaccurate.

In both cases the writer is licensing their 1st publication rights. With a vanity press, they are licensing their rights for free. With commercial publishing, they are being paid a fee for the license.

Again, thanks for a fantastic analysis of the money involved.

Mary Robinette Kowal
Secretary, SFWA

Writer Beware and the Bewares and Background Check forum at Absolute Write are two of them, but there are so very many more. I wish we could put big, blinky lights around ‘em (but not blink tags, < shudder>) so new writers would go there first and learn how to find agents and publishers who truly want to help them succeed before getting reeled in by something like Harlequin Horizons.

Over the next couple of days, I'm going to put together a link roundup of the places I visit, and update my much-neglected blogroll with those sites, too. I know I'm only one tiny corner of the internet here, but hell, if I can steer even one new writer towards those places, it's well worth it.

THANK YOU for taking the time to put the math out there. I wish there were a way to get all aspiring writers to read this. *sigh*

I have an acquaintance who, against all advice, went through AuthorHouse a long time ago. Poor guy still drives around with a trunk full of books. I never had the energy to do the math but I’ve always wondered what he paid to cart that trunk load of books around. Now I have a better idea.

It’s quite possible that the reader might happen to pick up a book where the copyright is owned by a book packager, (for example, Alloy Entertainment or TeknoBooks), not the author, but that’s a whole other kettle of worms.