Indie Presses versus Big Publishing Houses
May 27, 2008
I had several exchanges of e-mails with my agent this weekend, largely concerning the potential of a couple of new small publishers who have made their presence known. She seemed to be asking me my opinion. (This is maddening, actually; I don't mind being asked my opinion, but I don't at all like feeling like I'm more clued in on the publishing market than my agent is). Anyway, I finally had to break things down this way:
I'm ambivalent about small presses. I've been published by two. High Country Publishers (now called something else, I think, like the Ingalls Publishing Group) and by Midnight Ink, which is a small imprint of a medium to large publisher. Neither experience, I explained to my agent, was financially satisfying.
I was being delicate. From an editing standpoint and dealing with the editors and to some extent (in as much as you ever really deal with the publisher him or herself) the publisher, the experiences were fine.
It was from the sales, distribution, marketing, advances, royalties, contracts point-of-view where things started to disintegrate pretty quickly.
So let me break down my thoughts for everyone here, noting that I'm not an expert and am mostly talking from an individual experience.
Is it easier to get published by a small press?
Hmmm, in theory. Easy is probably not the best word. Small presses--hence the name--don't necessarily publish a lot of books, so they can be pretty choosy as well. The flipside of the "easier" notion is that their standards are lower, which is puzzling from a writer's perspective; the reality might be that small presses are more likely to publish things that aren't necessarily marketable, don't have as strong a hook and in many cases aren't as polished as their big publishing house brethren. Many small presses publish things based entirely on the taste of the editor/publisher and that may have nothing to do with commercial sales potential.
Do small presses give large advances?
No. They don't have the money. If there are exceptions, I haven't heard of them.
Do small presses give any advances?
Sometimes. When I was published by High Country, no; when I was published by Midnight Ink, yes, although they were very small (I've gotten paid more for magazine articles).
Are small presses more willing to take a chance on something unique?
The assumption being that the reason you're being turned down by larger publishers is that you're too "unique," but I don't know. That seems to be the rumor, but I reviewed books for ForeWord Magazine, which focuses on independent and self-published titles and "poorly written" and/or "unmarketable" might have been better descriptors of the majority of the books. Not all, by any means, but the majority. I'm skeptical about this.
Are small presses more forgiving of lower sales?
Hmmm, the typical small press probably has lower expectations for overall sales numbers than a large NY publisher. That being said, my suspicion is that the question isn't about overall numbers, it's about sell-through. That is to say, if a big NY publisher prints 10,000 copies of your book and sells 8,000 copies, you may or may not be considered a success, depending on the editor and publisher's mood, bottom line, phases of the moon and current philosophy about returns and sell-through. A small press is more likely to try and print 2000 copies or 1000 copies and will probably be pretty happy with an 80% sell-through, which would be 1600 or 800 respectively. Neither of them will be happy with a 50% sell-through.
Do small presses have good distribution?
No. Well, define "good." Compared to, say, Random, Inc? No. Absolutely not. Bookstores know that if Random or Bantam or St. Martin's Press come out with their quarterly catalogue and there are, say, 150 titles in it, and they are pushing the top 15, they can safely order multiple copies of the top 15 books (the frontlist) and then look at their computer system to see how previous titles by the rest sold, and then for new authors, they can look at Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Kirkus or a few other trade journals to see what they're saying or, just as likely, if the cover looks good or the title sounds interesting or if their sales person said it sounded great, and order a couple copies. If Big Bill's New Publishing Venture sends their catalogue to the booksellers and they're skeptical of small presses (which they are), they may order a copy or two... or not. And if Big Bill's New Publishing Venture hasn't got an agreement with the two big distributors--Ingram and I'm currently blanking on the one that distributes mostly to libraries, sorry--then they go with a smaller distributor that bookstores may or may not deal with. DISTRIBUTION IS EVERYTHING. POOR DISTRIBUTION IS THE BIGGEST KILLER OF SMALL PRESSES.
Small presses are passionate about books otherwise they wouldn't do it.
In theory. I've given talks to would-be novelists where I ask the question: What is a publisher? The answer? A publisher is a person with money who wants to publish books. Period. There's no school for it, no license, no particular qualifications. So by that definition, any incompetent with a checkbook or line of credit can become a publisher. Some of them are savvier than others. Some of them are doing it for the passion. Some of them think it's a way to churn a buck that requires less work, overhead and upfront costs than, say, buying a Dominos Pizza franchise. Some of them are doing it because they thought it might be fun and they've got some money they're willing to piss away, so why not publishing. They're right about the overhead and upfront costs and probably wrong about the work and the eventual returns, although all you have to do is realize that authors get 8 to 10% of the costs of a book to wonder where the other 90% to 92% of the money goes. (Not all goes to the publisher, in case you were wondering).
Small presses will read unagented materials.
Usually. But typically if you have an agent and he/she sends a manuscript to a big NY publisher, you'll get a response in about 4 weeks, give or take. If you send a manuscript yourself off to a small press, the decision-making may take 3, 4, 8 months or longer. Poison Pen Press twice kept my manuscripts for over a year before turning them down. I've got a manuscript at a small press at the moment where they informed me early in the process that it would probably take 8 months to make a decision. (Their wording. What that means is, the manuscript is going to sit in a pile until somebody gets around to reading it). But yes, by all means, most small presses will look at your manuscript without an agent.
A small press will at least get me published so I can start my career.
This was pretty much the gist of my e-mail response to my agent. It comes down to this: if the goal is just to get published, then small presses are certainly a potential avenue. If you're looking at a fiction writing career, where you actually make real money and might be able to live off it, then small presses are something of a long shot. Also, if you publish a string of novels with small presses that routinely sell 2,000 or 3,000 or even 4,000 copies, by the standards of the small press you're pretty successful, but by the standards of a big New York publisher you're pretty much a failure and they may not view you as any kind of potential author for them. (It's entirely possible they won't care one way or the other. Some of the NY publishers/editors view small presses like minor league baseball teams that are grooming players for the big leagues and others don't view them as anything at all... some seem to pay no attention to small, independent presses at all, some just out of lack of interest and others as if the small presses are some sort of boring and uninteresting microscopic organisms of no inport). There are arguments on both sides of the fence, and I think you might decide--and it's a completely reasonable decision, in my opinion--that you'd rather get published and develop a readership of 1,000 or 2,000 or whatever than not get published at all. It may seem like an odd hobby that occasionally pays for itself, but hey, you're an author and that's good enough for you.
But the crux of the situation is often trying to decide where you fall on that continuum: career or just published. I'm not making value judgements. It depends entirely on what you want and where you are in your aspirations.
Cheers,
Mark Terry
posted by Mark Terry at 5:35 AM
19 Comments:
I only know of a handful of small presses that might actually serve as a starting point for a career. The rest are probably a waste of time, although like you said it depends on what the writer is looking for.
Nice post.
I agree it depends on what the author is looking for. I would imagine that if I had a book that I knew wasn't mainstream, and yet it was a book I adored and was passionate about, I could see trying to go a small-press route to hopefully find an audience for it. But I have worked as a consultant to two small publishers, and both ended up not having deep enough pockets to sustain themselves, which ultimately amounted not to quality (they put out good books) but distribution. They weren't in stores and it was the kiss of death.
E
We've actually started writing the next mystery and I have freed up the next few days for that so I'm going to give an uncharacteristically brief answer -- not for lack of time but if I dwell on your questions too much it's going to depress me to the point I won't write!
Small presses are wonderful if you are looking for a hobby that actually pays you a little to play at it. If you love writing and love to write in order to communicate with readers then a good small press can arrange for you to have thousands of readers and give you a reason to write.
Good small presses are very hard to get published by, albeit not as hard as big publishers. They will publish stuff that biggies would find unmarketable and thus useless.
Generally, however, small presses operate in their own world. Small press publication means zilch to big publishers and agents so far as I can tell. If anything, selling two or three thousand copies of your books repeatedly is looked on by big publishers as a detriment.
So if you really think you are destined to make a living writing fiction small presses aren't going to help you in my opinion.
I think Eric's comments are spot-on.
As for agents' interest, well, getting a book published by a small press might attract the attention of an agent, at least if the agent has heard of the small press.
I think Jude is right. Small presses also come and go. There are a few that have very high quality--Poison Pen Press is one of them, although I want to qualify that statement slightly, not in terms of quality, but in terms of taste. PPP's book reflect Barbara Peterson's tastes in books. If you as a reader/bookseller etc aren't on the same vibe with Barbara, then you won't like their books. I like Eric and Mary's books with PPP, and have read quite a number of others published by PPP, but in general, I'm not a fan of their books. Why? It's not quality. It's the type of books and a certain "flavor" that I think their books seem to have. Granted, I haven't read all of them, so I could be very wrong, but over the years I've tried 8 or 9 of their authors and there's a certain quality to the writing that feels similar to me--a vaguely British diction or something, I can't quite put my finger on it--that doesn't typically work for me.
And that's not uncommon in small presses who essentially reflect the tastes of a single editor.
And yes, Erica, one of the biggest problems with small presses is their lack of deep pockets. I spoke with an agent years ago, when I had a contract offer by Write Way Publishing, which like PPP, was just publishing mysteries. One of his comments at that time was that a publisher that focuses solely on one genre, ie., mysteries, was particularly prone to the feast-or-famine nature of publishing cycles, whereas a publisher that publishes mysteries, thrillers, romances, SF, fantasy, and a variety of nonfiction, may do better when mysteries tanks because hopefully SF was strong in that period, etc.
In the case of Write Way, it was probably just poorly managed and a few bad decisions resulted in such strong returns that she ended up declaring bankruptcy which tied up authors' rights for years. I got lucky, I suppose, in that it went belly up before my book was published so they returned the rights to me, but I knew authors who spent years trying to get their rights released because the publisher was doing anything she could to get out from under her own debt.
I only know of a handful of small presses that might actually serve as a starting point for a career.
I wouldn't mind hearing which ones those are.
Jude? GIve it your best shot.
Carrol & Graf? (I don't know, are they a small press?)
Poison Pen Press (maybe)
Speck (maybe)
Oceanside (it's new, so I'm a little skeptical)
Stephen:
I write mysteries, so Poisoned Pen, Bleak House, and Hardcase Crime come to mind.
Also, while they don't fall into the small press category, it might be slightly easier for a first-timer to get a deal at one of the mass market paperback original outfits. Harlequin, Dorchester...at least they still accept unagented submissions. Last time I checked.
Thank you for this post. I love learning this stuff!
I think mine don't even make the grade as a "small" press. I call them "tiny" presses, LOL. There were a couple things I got from my history that you didn't mention.
First, I was paid to learn how to write, kinda like a paid internship. That's a lucky break. BUT, this is best done under a pseudonym, because, um, did I tell you about my first story, a fantasy romance, where I got stuck and SWITCHED HEROES in the middle? The standard of quality, er, varies. (The majority of readers, I've come to believe, are really not that picky. Like you said, it's all about distribution.)
Second, I think it changed my writing to have the reader in the equation from the beginning. I look at things way differently from most unpublished writers. (I'm sorry, if that sounded snotty, I don't mean it that way at all. I'll be the first to admit there are tons of unpublished writers who write circles around me.)
Lastly, I made all my mistakes in a "safe" environment. I've gotten to experiment with genre, experiment with readers, and experiment with the business on a tiny scale. I've learned how I handle the politics, the deadlines, the money, the marketing, etc. It's been an amazing learning experience for me.
Personally, I would do it again in a heartbeat. I won't make the jump from tiny press to small press, though. For all the reasons you listed and because it would, it seems, be a pay cut.
I'm happy with how my tiny presses measure up against small presses, except there's no growth potential. They've been around for 7-10 years, and they base their business on serial publishing and a subscription model. It seems to serve them well, the readers well, and the authors pretty well.
Heck, it serves Harlequin extremely well.
I get the feeling there's going to be a lot of changes in publishing in the next decade. I'm interested, I'm game for change. I just hope it works out better for authors than the current system. I dislike the current model. It doesn't strike me as good for the average author.
Thanks for the answers. The list is a little shorter than I'd like it to be.
Two observations:
The BEA exhibitor list is up on their website (naturally, since it starts this weekend). It's quite a long list of publishers, many of whom I've never heard of. Although such publishers may not be the best places to start a career, at least the fact they have a booth at BEA shows they're probably not fly-by-nights.
Even publishers who say they accept unagented submissions give overwhelming preference to their better endowed bretheren.
Stephen:
The publishers I mentioned were just off the top of my head, but they've all been around for a while and they all have national distribution. That's the biggie, I think, getting the books in stores and in the hands of reviewers and in the running for various awards.
I imagine many of the outfits renting booths at BEA are startups with perfectly honest and good intentions, but if I went the small press route I would much rather choose a publisher with a solid track record and with national distribution. Like Erica said, if your books aren't in stores it's pretty much the kiss of death.
Spy
I agree with you, actually, that having a reader--especially a paid reader--in the equation changes how you write. Definitely.
Much of this post has to do with, Is it possible to go from a small press to a large press? Is a small press a stepping stone to bigger things? My feeling is, ultimately, no. Can it be? Well, yes, possibly. But my impression over the years has been--and it's not just my experience, but others I know--that small presses tend to be their own route and although from time to time someone sells a ton and catches on enough to jump to a bigger house, the majority of small press authors remain small press authors unless they either come up with something new or use a pseudonym--as you mentioned. I wouldn't go so far as to call a small press a dead end, but my feeling is that there's a kind of mythology with small presses that suggests it's a stepping stone to bigger things, when in most cases it isn't. It just is what it is, which is fine.
Stephen,
A lot of new startup small presses go to BEA to try and make contacts with distributors and secondary/subsidiary sales people. It doesn't mean they're stable, it means they're well intentioned, which is fine, but the same rules apply: they may be competent or not, they may be monied or not.
Stephen:
BEA is absolutely no measure of anything. If you have the money for a booth, you can have one pretty much. I have been multiple times and I can tell you many, MANY of the publishers I saw there and met there didn't survive. ZERO measure of anything.
There are many more complicated reasons, too, besides simply "no deep pockets" for publishers failing--namely that if you aren't "picked up" by B&N, that's also a kiss of death. That depending on your genre, getting picked up by them is difficult for the small press--and hell, it's difficult for a large house. B&N dictates your numbers. That the distribution MODEL for all small presses is murder. I.e., it's not bookstore BUYS 100 copies and publisher gets money, it's bookstore "rents" copies, bookstore ships back (very quickly) what doesn't fly off the shelves at PUBLISHER'S expense, bookstores gets CREDIT for the books shipped back, which they can then use to "rent" more copies of a different book and it could be six months IF THAT that publisher sees any money. If ever. Publishers can go broke on this model. But there's MORE. The distributor charges publisher RENT for warehouse space. So it's not friendly distributor is happy to have you aboard after you, small publisher, have paid your dues. No, it's jump through hoops and then, if your're lucky and we agree to be your distributor, you will PAY us for the privilege of being in our warehouse. But that's not all. If your books, small publisher, haven't sold, you will pay thousands in SHIPPING because after a while, distributor doesn't even want your books in the warehouse. OH, and we are a UNION distributor, meaning books can't be moved from our warehouse to the loading docks without the Teamsters even if you decide to send your own truck. YOU pay the Teamsters.
Want to hear more? This is ALL TRUE.
Erica,
That's great. I didn't know all that, which explains, many, many things.
I do know that ten years or so ago the tax code shifted that made it more difficult for publishers to keep books in the warehouse very long--it was designed for things like blenders and electric drills, but affected books--and that's one factor that's essentially shortened the shelf-life of the typical book. After a very short period of time publishers remainder books because they can write off their stock and warehousing.
Want to hear more? This is ALL TRUE.
I want to hear it all. But I want to get drunk first.
Stephen:
True story #2. I was consulting for a publisher at BEA. I had hurt my back, so we had a box of books, and we had a portable set of wheels to cart this ONE box of books so it would be easier on my back. We walked into the signing room. Two HUGE Teamsters blocked our way.
"Nothing with wheels."
We showed them they were basically fold-up luggage wheels (could fit in a handbag).
"No. Teamsters cart it or you can't come in."
To the tune of (ten years ago) $50. To walk forty feet. Max. Carting a box of books. Unless I wanted to haul 'em myself--just no wheels.
The level of insanity runs deep.
E
Erica,
Not the first time I've heard a similar story. I have a friend--he now runs his own business--who worked in media research at General Motors. At one point he said he had a box of junk from his office he wanted to take home--just odds and ends--and he wasn't allowed to carry it out to his car by himself although it didn't weight much. He had to call the union guys to carry it out for him.
Mark, thank you SO MUCH for this post. I haven't seen this level of discussion regarding small presses anywhere else. And it's something I've been struggling to learn more about.
Not long ago on the SinC Yahoo Group, an agent from Folio discussed the issue of sales numbers with smaller presses. She said many times, publishers and bookstores don't take into account that a low number is attached to a small press. They just see the number. This was the first time I'd heard such a thing.
I was previously agented by a big NY agency and my book didn't sell. So I'm left with the decision of approaching smaller publishers, like PPP and MI. I haven't queried them yet and not sure I will.
Your blog is one of my favorites.
Anonymous,
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