Or, How Tania Hershman Achieved Her Dream and Got A Book Deal

1. The girl reads everything. She reads books through every meal. She finishes the entire section in the library for 8 year olds and moves on. One day, she thinks, she will hold a book with her name on it.

2. The girl doesn’t find her English classes very inspiring, but she loves maths. She gets steered by her teachers towards science and away from literature, and ends up studying maths and physics and University. But words are her medium, not bunsen burners. She writes for the University newspaper and then discovers there is such a thing as a science journalist. Ah, she thinks.

3. She studies philosophy of science, then a diploma in journalism, and moves to Israel, where she interviews excited inventors and scientists for American and British magazines for over a decade. But a little voice in her head is saying “You’re reporting on their creativity. Where’s yours? Where’s yours?”

4. The young woman flies to short story workshops in America and learns how a short story might be made. In 2002 she sees in the Arvon Foundation’s brochure a course that makes her heart leap: Writing And Science. There are others who want to do this too? The young woman books a place. The course, in rural Yorkshire, changes everything: they teach her how to let fiction be inspired by science fact. She begins to write.

5. A year later, she comes to England to be with the man she met on the course, and studies for an MA in Creative Writing. “Must you write short stories?” cry her tutors, wanting only novels. “Oh, fine, if you insist, but at least have a theme.” Ah, thinks the young woman, I have one: stories inspired by New Scientist articles. Her tutors grudgingly agree.

6. A call for submissions for new voices for BBC Radio 4 and the young woman’s first science-inspired short story, The White Road, is chosen for the Afternoon Reading. She is surprised, delighted. It is brought beautifully to life. She cries.

7. An agent appears thanks to the radio broadcast. While very lovely she, oddly, never seems to want to discuss the young woman’s stories. When pressed, she admits that whenever she approached an editor, they resorted to the old “Come back when she has a novel”. The young woman thanks her and decides to go it alone.

8. The young woman has developed a wonderful relationship with the independent production company who produced her story for the BBC, and they produce a second story, and commission her to write a third. Her confidence is rising. Someone actually likes what she writes.

9. The young woman goes on another Arvon course with one of her favourite writers. The favourite writer tells her: “Give up your day job. You can do this.” The young woman is astonished, bowled over. It takes her six months, but she does it.

10. At the beginning of 2007, she submits three short stories to Salt, a small press known for poetry and now dipping its toes into the short story waters. She waits. She befriends Salt’s editor on Myspace, hoping to foster a connection. She waits.

11. A message through Myspace! “I thought I recognized your name,” says the editor. The editor loves the three stories, wants “everything else”. The young woman and her partner lay out all the stories on the kitchen table. He puts them in order – a science-inspired “long” story then a very very short flash story, and so on. They send it off. They wait.

12. The young woman, her partner, and great friend V are on a writing retreat in Ireland. The young woman mistakenly pulls the Internet cable out of the one computer. A succession of Irish technical support guys cannot find the problem. Finally, it’s fixed. And there it is: THE email. Salt: “We want to publish your book. May we?”

13. The young woman is in shock. She can’t stop grinning. She can’t write, so she watches DVDs and wanders the Irish countryside. She doesn’t believe it is really true, won’t until she holds her book.

14. The young woman can’t do much writing, apart from very short stories, so she decides to help the short story instead and sets up an online journal, The Short Review, to review only short story collections.  The young woman imagines it will interest her and twenty of her friends. But it grows. And grows….

15. On August 31st 2008, the woman is anxious, agitated. Her book has not reached her in Israel and tomorrow is the day of publication! It feels as though her child is being held prisoner in another country. How can she celebrate?

16. Sept 1st 2008: Publication Day. The woman is calm, elated, ecstatic. She may not have the book in her hands but nevertheless she feels what this day means. She is floating. When the books arrive a few days later, she feels it all over again.

17. She has a launch party. She reads several of her stories to a crowd of friends in a friend’s spacious living room. It feels like jumping off a cliff. Most of them have never read her writing. They ask for more. She reads more.

18. She gets in touch with New Scientist, worried they might not like how she took their articles and used them for fiction. But they do. They publish the title story, The White Road, on their website, where it receives many and varied comments. And then, to the woman’s delight, they include the book in their Best Books of 2008, with a glowing review. The woman wonders if there is anything left to strive for.

19. April 2009. Through a Google alert for her name, the woman discovers that she has been commended by the judges of the 2009 Orange Award for New Writers. She cannot speak. She had no idea she had been put forward. For this. Short stories. Small press. Against all those novels. Her. This unexpected accolade, this vote of confidence from those who had no obligation to even read her book fills her with the feeling that she can now do anything that she might dream of. There are no limits. The world, as they say, is her oyster.

20. August 2009, she and her partner, and their two cats, move to England, where she will be able to talk about short stories to her heart’s content. She meets writers, is asked to do readings, to judge competitions, to write about short stories. This, she thinks, is it.

21. February 2010. The woman is writing. She is happy.

Tania Hershman’s luminous first book, The White Road and Other Stories, was published two years ago by Salt Modern Fiction.  Now based in Bristol, Tania is current Fiction Editor of Southword literary journal and a judge for the Bristol Short Story Prize, the Brit Writers Awards and the Sean O’Faolain short story competition. She has just started as writer-in-residence in Bristol University’s Science Faculty, and hopes to be writing and encouraging others to write science-inspired flash fiction. Tania is founder and editor of The Short Review, an online journal reviewing short story collections and interview authors. She blogs at TaniaWrites.

Salt is offering readers of this blog a 10% discount on the purchase of The White Road and Other Stories. Visit the book’s Salt page and enter the coupon code GM18py7n when checking out.

Related posts:

1. Trios: The White Road and Other Stories, by Tania Hershman: Self-Promotion
2. Trios: The White Road and Other Stories, by Tania Hershman: The Bookseller’s View
3. Trios: The White Road and Other Stories, by Tania Hershman: The Publisher’s View

Self-publishing doesn’t guarantee quality because anyone can do it, regardless of the content or quality of the writing; it need cost nothing more than half an hour of your time spent fiddling about on the internet, downloading your work to a POD provider.

However, a good sales history is bound to impress: and by “good” I mean “good when compared to mainstream publishing’s standards”, not “good by self-publishing’s standards”.

So, if you want to impress an agent or mainstream editor with your self-published title an excellent way to do it is to sell large numbers of copies: one editor I read announced that she would not consider self-published titles which had sold fewer than 10,000 copies, but when you consider the average sales statistics for self-published books you might realise how difficult this is going to be.

You could create such a big buzz around your book that publishing professionals want to read it almost without you asking them to: but if you manage this then perhaps you should work as a publicist, rather than a writer!

Or you could submit your work to an agent in the usual way, wait for a response, and hope that they’re not averse to publishing a second edition of a book.

Related posts:

1. Sales Statistics: iUniverse
2. The Problems With Selling Self Published Books
3. Where Books Are Sold

Related posts:

1. They Had It Coming Indeed: Part II
2. Questions About Self-Publishing
3. They Had It Coming Indeed: Part I

But no: the article was published to coincide with the book’s publication: Ruth Saberton’s book Katy Carter Wants A Hero was published on April 1, in both paperback and Kindle editions. It all seemed to be for real but it left me with a frisson of doubt and sure enough, I was right to be skeptical.

By chance I just landed on Ruth Saberton’s website, where she explains how she really got her book deal. And it’s a much less extraordinary story than the one the Mail reported:

This manuscript attracted the attention of literary agents and I signed with the lovely Eve White

…who subsequently sold the book to Orion. And Ruth Saberton was no newcomer to publishing: she also writes under the pseudonym of Jessica Fox, and is under contract to Headline’s Little Black Dress imprint for five books, the first of which was published in May 2009.

Now, I have no beef against Ruth Saberton (in fact, I rather like the look of her books): but I do find puffery like the Daily Mail article more than a little irritating. It feeds into the myth that one has to be extraordinarily lucky, or have contacts in all the right places, in order to get published; and it patronises us, as readers, by feeding us a nice little happy-ending story in order to promote the book. What it’s done to the state of Richard and Judy’s doorstep, I hate to imagine.

However, there is a good side to this. Not only am I now following Ruth Saberton on Twitter, and am likely to buy a copy of Katy Carter Wants A Hero in the very near future, I’ve just discovered a rather splendid competition on her website which is open to all until the end of September. There’s a chance to win a holiday (or at least part of one) in the glorious Polperro, in a cottage right on the harbour. It looks just gorgeous, and I want to be there now.

Related posts:

1. The Truth About The 6 Year Old Boy With The 23 Book Deal
2. Trios: Deathwatch, by Nicola Morgan: Book Launches
3. Pulped Fiction

Over to Mr Rozansky.

They Had It Coming [continued]

But this is not just about owning the electronic rights to a few older books. Random House, MacMillan, and the rest of the publishing houses in New York and London are now seeing the result of their greedy, draconian habits, of making money off the work of authors.

Beep! Beep! Rhetoric alert! Why is it greedy to want your business to make money? When a publishing house operates at a loss it can’t pay its staff, its print bills, or its sales reps. It closes down, and then it can’t publish any more books, and no one makes anything at all. How is trying to run a profitable business having “greedy, draconian habits” or unfairly “making money off the work of authors”?  When writers sign their publishing contracts they know exactly what to expect, so how is this unfair? And has it escaped your notice that when publishers sell books, the writers of those books earn royalties from those sales?

Because they have squeezed authors harder and harder, authors have had to change to self-publishing business models, and they are doing so rather successfully.

Some mainstream authors have turned to self-publishing, but not many; and very few have been successful. We’ve all heard of Joe Konrath’s recent successes on the Kindle but he wouldn’t have been able to make so many sales had he not already had a large fan-base—which was initially developed by his big-name publisher, which paid him a lovely big advance for what I think was a six-book series.  And remember that almost all of those books he’s now selling have been edited by professional editors, which will have improved them.  I wonder how successful he’d be if he didn’t already have his brand so well-established.

Mr Konrath has now moved to an exclusively self-published profile as his latest book has, I believe, been rejected by his publisher.  I’ve heard a few reports (which I haven’t yet substantiated: I apologise wholeheartedly if this is not the case) that his Kindle edition sales are not as high as he’s claimed, and that his resulting income is lower than he’s suggested: I sincerely hope these reports are wrong. I wish him well, and hope he sells a whole heap of books: but meanwhile, I am watching his progress closely.

Moving on from Mr Konrath, the authors I know who have moved from mainstream publishing to self-publishing have done so because they couldn’t get another mainstream contract, and they felt they’d rather self-publish than not publish at all. Yes, you get more money per copy sold from a self-published book: but you also pay out a lot more money in order to sell and promote them effectively; and good sales figures for self-published books are far lower than poor sales figures for mainstream-published books.  I’d rather have a 10% royalty of sales of 10,000 copies than a 70% royalty of sales of just 200.

Publishers are finding that the authors have become their biggest competitors, and to their horror, they are finding that the authors control the industry. Content is king, and only authors provide the content.

The publishers’ biggest competitors are not daring self-published authors: they are the other publishers. Most self-published writers publish too few titles each and sell too few copies of each of those books to divert any significant amount of income away from the big boys. Really: most of the big publishers are barely aware of the self-publishing movement and that’s not because they’re dinosaurs: it’s because the amount of income they lose to self-publishers is miniscule.

The publishers should have seen this coming. At every writers conference I have been to in the last thirty years, someone in the cheap seats at the back of the room asks “So, why do authors need publishers, then?”

I’ll tell you why writers need publishers. Publishers edit, copy edit and proof-read writers’ books; they typeset and design the book inside and out; they market and promote their books (with varying degrees of success and attention, but they do it despite what some people claim); they employ sales people to tout the books to all sorts of retailers, both on and offline, in order to get them in front of their potential readers; they collect all the payments for all those sales and ensure that they’re correct; and then they pass on royalties to the writers, as per their contract.  Writers can do all this themselves, of course: but if their time is taken up with publishing, marketing and accounting, when are they going to have time to write?

Of all the self-published books I’ve read for my little review site, not a single one has been edited, designed, printed and bound to the standard of even the cheapest mainstream edition.  Some of the books get most of the various aspects of publishing right, but not one has managed it all. Quality shows and while the main part of a book is, of course, its text, if the readers don’t perceive it as a quality product they are far less likely to buy it; and their perception of that book begins the instant they see it on bookshop shelves, before they’ve even read a single word.

Publishers, editors and agents have tried in vain to answer this question, usually with desperation and trepidation in their voices. I know, because I have asked this question as a writer, and tried to answer it as a publisher. The only answer I can give is that authors do not need us publishers. Authors absolutely do not need us in any way!

I disagree that publishers, editors and agents have “tried in vain to answer this question”. I answered it in my point above, and I’ve seen publishers, editors and agents do the same on their blogs, at conventions, and when they respond to submissions. You’re presenting opinion as fact, hoping that layering it with another dollop of rhetoric will hide that.

I’ve looked at Flying Pen Press’s website and with all due respect, I’m very uncomfortable with your business model. You seem determined to publish writers without shouldering any of the responsibility or risk; and in so doing you’re pretty much guaranteeing that the best editors, designers etc. won’t work for you. The details are discussed here at Absolute Write.

Oh, there was a time when publishers controlled the means of prepress production. Setting type was a difficult and expensive process. As presses became gargantuan monsters, it became even more of difficult for authors to reach large numbers of readers without a publisher.

I used to set type when I was at art college. It’s not that difficult, just time-consuming; and it’s expensive only because it is so time-consuming. But I don’t see why the introduction of bigger and better printing-presses made it more difficult for writers who were determined to self-publish to reach their readers: there were still small printing-presses around, and there are other ways of getting books reproduced. This paragraph is at best padding and at worst, a bit of a red herring.

Publishers also had control of the distribution of books. Readers could only buy books at bookstores and news racks, and only publishers had the means to reach those venues.

If you want to be really persnickety about it (and you know I do!), publishers don’t have control of book distribution: book distributors do. They have always been reluctant to work with self-publishers because of the lack of sales that self-published books are likely to make, which eats into the distributors’ profitability. Remember, book distributors are businesses just like publishers are. Self-publishers who can demonstrate a reasonable number of titles in print, and a decent level of sales for each of those titles, can usually find a distributor to take their books on if they’re willing to support their titles with a solid marketing plan and put a decent budget behind it: the point is that most self-publishers can’t do this, and so they can’t get proper distribution.

Even without proper distribution, self-publishers can still sell their books into bookshops: the trouble is that they have to do all the legwork themselves—which means schlepping around all the bookshops they can find, hoping to sell their books in. No wonder, then, that most self-published titles sell so few books.

The third gripping installment of this series will appear on 10 September.

Related posts:

1. Income: Self Publishing vs Mainstream Publication
2. They Had It Coming Indeed: Part I
3. The Writing Business: Part III

Make the most of the first two weeks because once we get to 19 September, it’s all going to go horribly wrong. I’m sure that Sue will do her best to keep order but what with me AND the irrepressible Carole Blake in the studio with her, she’s going to have her work cut out for her. Especially as she’s promised us a glass or two of wine to help stop us coughing live on air.

Even if you’re out of reach of BBC Radio Oxford’s signal you should be able to listen along on the internet; sadly there won’t be a podcast of the shows, but if the BBC will agree I’m hoping to be able to host them here. My fingers are tightly crossed.

Related posts:

1. The Write Lines
2. Write Or Die
3. Why Write?

Because of the length of Mr Rozansky’s original article, my response is lengthy too: so I’m going to split it up into five segments, and take a few days to respond to it in full. If you’d like to read ahead, you’ll find his original article on Gather.com here.  And if you’d like to learn a little background on his publishing venture, Flying Pen Press, it’s discussed here at Absolute Write. Take particular notice of HapiSofi’s comments in that thread: she’s a senior editor at a major publisher, she’s worked in publishing for a long time, and really knows her stuff.

I realise that this is going to make for dull and lengthy reading, but I also think that this is a good opportunity to show how people on the periphery of publishing can write persuasive articles which are high on rhetoric and opinion, but very low on fact; and in so doing direct unwitting writers towards self- or vanity-publishing, and mislead them horribly about how good publishing really works.

They Had It Coming

July 24, 2010 01:08 AM EDT

[Remember that date. 24 July. You’ll need it in a paragraph or so.]

Publishers now reaping the grief they sowed.

The Wylie Agency sells exclusive rights to Kindle while major publishers gasp in terror.

Pah. Rhetoric. The writer provides no evidence to back up these scare-tactic claims, probably because there is none; and while I understand the need for an attention-grabbing headline the way to do it properly is to write a headline which is both attention-grabbing AND factually correct, otherwise you weaken the story right from the start (and yes, I’ve written quite a few articles for the national press and know what a difference a strong opening makes).

I don’t think that publishers have caused a huge amount of grief; nor are they terrified by The Wylie Agency’s recent stance on e-book rights, although I can see how they might be horrified by it. They’re watching the situation closely, I’ll bet: but then the good publishers have always watched the e-book market very carefully, along with all the other markets. It’s what they do.

I’ll concede that Wylie’s decision does take his agency forward in a new direction: but it’s not one which I’m convinced by, for reasons which are summarised very nicely by this statement from The Authors’ Guild.

by David A. Rozansky, Publisher, Flying Pen Press

Readers, Writers & Royalties columnist

July 23, 2010

Copyright 2010 David A. Rozansky

There’s an awful lot of gubbins here, isn’t there? I’d prefer to see all of this apart from the date and the writer’s credit put at the end so it doesn’t detract from the article. And that date I asked you to remember earlier was 24 July, right? Yet here we have the date 23 July. So was this article published on July 23 or July 24? The lack of clarity doesn’t fill me with confidence about this writer or this publisher.

The Wylie Agency is a very prestigious literary agency. They have many clients from way back, before the computer had made electronic rights to books an issue.

I’ll not argue with that.

Kindle is Amazon’s ebook reader. It has been losing ground to the Apple iPad and the Barnes & Noble Nook. But Amazon has been here before, and their response is to acquire exclusive titles for the Kindle.

As usual, Amazon is finding all sorts of ways to dominate its market—much like any other successful big business does. It’s why it is successful. Amazon isn’t only attempting to grab lots of exclusives for its device, though: it’s also developed an app for the iPad which allows it to provide books for that device too, and you can also read Kindle books on your home computer. Amazon isn’t alone in this: Apple is trying to sign exclusive deals for its platform, as are other competing  companies. Again, it’s how business is done.

It was a natural marriage. Wylie had some of the best authors that ever lived in its portfolio, whose electronic rights were not being used, and Amazon was willing to pay for exclusive access to those rights.

So Wylie signed the contract, and Amazon began distributing Kindle versions of this valuable store of literary treasure.

I suspect that most writers will have electronic rights they’ve not yet exploited: but the response of most good agents, I’d have thought, would be to try to maximise sales from those rights, and therefore maximise readership and income for their client-writers, by selling them across all formats, rather than restricting them to the Kindle.

Major publishers, particularly Random House and MacMillan, roared in protest. No way that Amazon could sieze [sic] exclusive ground where once only publishers could tread. A bookseller, even one as large as Amazon, had no right sewing up such rights.

Those big publishers didn’t protest because they thought Amazon was getting too big for its boots, but because they felt they held some of the rights which Wylie had sold to Amazon.

Random House even went so far as to try and claim it held those electronic rights, even though the old contracts said nothing about the not-yet-invented rights. It’s a bluff; New York Times Co. v. Tasini, 533 U.S. 483 (2001), put that bugaboo to bed a decade ago—the electronic rights belong exclusively to the author when a publishing contract has no specific claim on those rights.

Hmm. So much depends on when the contract was signed: as I understand it, contracts dating from before e-books were even thought of can’t be assumed to include such rights, whereas contracts signed much more recently, which specify “all rights”, are assumed to include them. I think that the troublesome part comes in defining when that break-point is. I could be wrong here, though, and would welcome clarification if anyone who knows what they’re talking about cares to step in.

If a contract specifies “print rights only” then it’s clear it won’t include e-books; if a contract specifies “all rights” then that’s exactly what I’d expect it to include: everything. Even if the contract didn’t specifically mention electronic rights. Because if the publisher has licensed “all rights” you can’t step in a few months or years later and say, “ah—but when I sold you ‘all rights’ I really meant ‘all rights except for electronic rights’, I just didn’t say so at the time.”  Now, most contracts aren’t as polarised as this: they’ll specify certain rights, in certain territories, and those rights which aren’t specified will not be included. The author will retain them, and will be able to license them elsewhere if desired.  But it doesn’t look as if that’s what’s happened here.

Tune in again on Sunday for another action-packed installment of Jane Gets Obsessive About A Random Internet Article! Gasp in horror as she does her Pedantic With Knobs On act without the aid of a safety net! Will she survive? Who knows!

Related posts:

1. Wylie’s Odyssey
2. They Had It Coming Indeed: Part II
3. Some Notes About Rights

The sale of a book to a publisher in its home territory is only the first step in that book’s earning potential.  Books can sell to other territories; they can also (in theory, although this rarely happens now) sell hardback and paperback rights to different publishers; then there are further subsidiary rights which can be sold, such as large print, audio-book, e-book, and serial rights, with each of these subsidiary rights available in every language the book is translated into. And then there are potential TV and film rights to consider which can be quite lucrative if they ever come to fruition—which they rarely do.

It’s also possible that there will be escalator clauses built into the contracts too, so that as book sales increase, so do the royalties that the writers could earn.  This can dramatically increase predicted income but escalator clauses can be horribly ambitious, and so book sales don’t always reach the required targets—and yet it will almost certainly be included in the amounts reported by the press.

When you see huge book deals announced in the press, it’s likely that all of these potential sales and royalties have been included in the calculation of the final figure given, inflating it beyond most of the realms of probability.

If any of these foreign or subsidiary sales fail to materialise, or are sold at a lower value than expected, then the real figure earned will be less than the one reported; and if the publisher is the one to make those foreign or subsidiary sales rather than the writer’s agent, then it will almost certainly retain 50% of all advances paid on those rights, so reducing the writer’s income further. Once you’ve taken away the agent’s fees the numbers are reduced again by fifteen or twenty per cent; add to that the reserve against returns and not only are writers’ shares likely to be far less than the amounts reported, the time it takes for writers to see all their earnings from such deals can be extended by a couple of years.

Related posts:

1. Advances
2. Assigning Copyright
3. The Writing Business: Part I

And read this article from Paul Carr at TechCrunch, in which he provides some pretty safe reasoning which he backs up with facts, figures and citations. It’s well worth a read. Although some of the comments which follow contain assumptions and statements which are more than a little dubious.

Related posts:

1. When Mainstream Publishers Link With Self-Publishing Services
2. The Real Value Of Mainstream Publishing
3. Moving From Self-Publishing To Mainstream

A few days ago I encountered a self-published writer on Twitter who had some rather strange views about how self-publishing is regarded. He suggested it was considered almost criminal by the mainstream press; and that perhaps this view resulted from the biased opinions of a few literary reviewers and book sellers.

When I responded that most self-published books were terrible; that book sellers couldn’t afford to give shelf-space to bad books, otherwise they’d soon go out of business; and that most reviewers are only interested in reading good books, he suggested that I hadn’t read any self-published books; that I wasn’t thinking for myself; and that I was just adopting mainstream publishing’s dominant attitude.  And so I sent him a link to my other blog, where I’ve been reviewing  self-published books for nearly two years.

To which he responded with this:

You’re anti self and ‘vanity’ publishing and your avatar is… LINK PROVIDED

Although his comment initially made me laugh, the more I’ve thought about it the more I realise that it was profoundly sad, because it involves so many fallacies and misjudgements.

By putting those quote marks around the word “vanity” he implied that vanity publishing isn’t exploitative and ugly, and that it’s hardly any different to self-publishing–both of which viewpoints are untrue.

By associating that link to my avatar he made an ad hominem attack on me, which is such a weak retort that it’s embarrassing.

He wrongly assumed that I’m anti self-publishing because I’m not prepared to give bad books good reviews. Perhaps if the top review on my blog had been one of these positive reviews, instead of this rather negative one, he might have felt differently: but it seems from his response that he didn’t look any further than the information which was immediately available.

It’s not my intention here to make a laughing stock out of this particular self-published writer, so please don’t attack or insult him (and just to make that clear, if any comments are posted here which are rude about him I will edit or delete them as soon as I see them): he’s trying his best, and I don’t think he meant me any harm.  He’s just defending his territory the best way he knows how and he really didn’t upset me: I’ve had far worse things thrown at me over the years.

What did concern me, though, was the lack of clear critical thinking that he displayed.  He assumed that the bad reviews I’ve given on my blog indicate only that I’m anti-self-publishing: he didn’t stop to consider that those bad reviews might have something to do with the quality of the books I’ve been sent for review.  And he seemed determined to blame and find fault with me instead of debating with me when I said things that he didn’t agree with.

Why does this matter? Because he is not alone. Every day I see a torrent of misinformation; of prejudice and opinion masquerading as fact. It comes from people who set themselves up as editors and publishers and literary agents without realising they are simply not qualified for the job; it comes from vanity presses who seek to exploit the unwary and the ill-informed; and it comes from writers who accept all they read without questioning it, and prefer the easier options to the often-uncomfortable truth.

Please: if you’re a writer, don’t let your hard work become the victim of such misinformation. Research your subject, question your sources, and make sure you really know what you’re doing before you commit to a publishing contract. It’s just basic common sense.

Related posts:

1. Email Promotions
2. Vanity Publishing vs Self-Publishing