Timothy's Thoughts

A post in the archives, A Review of WestBow Press , has been getting a lot of attention. People are continuing to ask questions—not only about WestBow Press but other similar companies as well. I try to answer their questions as well as I can, but sometimes it is anyone’s guess as to whether a vanity press is any good or not. So, I’m going to offer some of my thoughts on the vanity press industry and most of them aren’t good. The people who decide to go with a vanity press want one thing. They want their book published. They may have tried the traditional route or they may not have, but they’ve decided that they want their book published and they’re willing to pay for it. These people are not what I call self-publishing enthusiasts. They don’t get their kicks out of designing the book interior and cover. They’re willing to pay someone else to do that work for them. These are the customers of the vanity press industry. The vanity press industry uses a number of different methods to at...

S uposedly, you're twice as likely to get a traditional publishing contract by self-publishing a manuscript than by getting an agent. While that may seem like it ought not be the case, I think it makes sense. People who self-publish are a different breed of people than the traditional author. The author who is willing to self-publish does so with the idea that he will have to do most of the work. So while some traditional authors are sitting around debating how much work the publishing company should be doing that they aren't, the self-published author is out selling books. The result is that the manuscript that some people thought wouldn't sell proves that it will. There isn't a publisher around who wouldn't prefer an author who can sell books over one who just wants to write books.

R ecently, Seth Godin wrote about why he is Moving On and no longer communicating through traditionally published books. In response to that post, Michael Hyatt wrote Why Most Authors Should Not Emulate Seth Godin . He made four arguments against it. While I don’t totally agree with Seth Godin, I don’t agree with Mike’s arguments either. I will address each in turn. Most authors can’t get directly to their readers. If you read the Godin article, this is part of the reason Godin is saying goodbye to traditional publishing. His statement is that the author doesn’t sell to the reader but to the publisher. Mike rightly says that Seth Godin has a much larger platform than most of us, but I disagree with his statement that most authors can’t get direct access to the readers. In fact, when we look at the way the publishing industry works, if an author can’t get direct access to the readers he can’t get a publishing contract either. Publishers have the expectation that authors will bring read...

Y esterday, I read that publishers are accepting 1-2% of the books submitted to them, including those submitted by agents. The same blog post stated that 1-5% of self-published books are being picked up by traditional publishers. On the surface, this makes it appear that a self-published book is twice as likely to be selected by a traditional publisher as a book that has an agent. I want to take a closer look at this, but before we go too far, I want to point out that these numbers may not be completely accurate and it isn’t always easy to compare the self-published path to the traditionally published path. Still, if were willing to accept some uncertainty, this “fact” is interesting. Considering that publishers don’t like accepting unsolicited manuscripts without an agent, it isn’t too much of a stretch to assume that publishers are accepting 2% of the agented books submitted to them. But what is that in terms of the likelihood that one particular book—your book—will be picked up by ...

Unfortunately the answer is not more agents. Having more agents would not increase the number of books being published or purchased by consumers. The unwelcome truth is we need more readers and fewer writers. (Rachelle Gardner, comment to her Jan 13, 2010 blog post) F ewer writers. Now there’s a thought. I still have this image in my head of Rachelle reading through her slush pile with a sniper riffle in hand. “There’s an author who shouldn’t be writing.” Bang! “That’ll take care of that.” But I know that’s not what she meant. We obscure authors would love for the publishing industry to function more like the image we have of it in our heads. We finish a manuscript, send it to a few agents and they all are anxious to represent us. One of them sends it off to a few publishers and it starts a bidding war. But that rarely happens. We finish a manuscript and we can hardly get an agent to give us the time of day. And don’t even think about sending it to a publisher. They fact is that eve...

In business, there is a relationship between cost, schedule and quality that always exists. I don't know who originally thought of this. I certainly can't take credit for it, because I learned it from a mentor. The relationship is such that if we reduce the time to complete a project we must either throw more money at it to obtain more resources to do the same work or we must reduce the quality/scope of the project. If we want better quality, cost and schedule will take a hit and if we want to reduce cost then schedule and quality will take a hit. This relationship works fairly universally, so we can expect to see this same relationship at work within the publishing industry. One place we see it very clearly is in the differences between some of the publishing models used in the industry. Let's assume that the typical traditional publishing model in which the publisher pays the author a small advance, hopes to sell a few thousand books and has a budget of about $40,000 is ...