Publishers Cleared-The-House
You know what’s ridiculous?
The state of the publishing world.
My mom has written several books and (in my unbiased opinion) they are really good. Seriously though, these books are genuinely fun, entertaining, and gripping. Most of them are for kids and the age range is quite wide.
The most concrete one, though, is The Door In The Sky. This is a great YA fantasy that has been enjoyed by everyone who’s read it. I’m not making this up - not only do me and my brother and all of our friends love it, but when my brother was younger his class read it and devoured it, and one insisted that a relative’s class in New York read it and they all loved it too.
My mom has sent The Door In The Sky out to publishers and agents many, many times over the last ten years or so. And every time she gets very polite rejection letters that display a) clearly it was not read by any humans, and b) the industry is truly idiotic for “not wanting to publish something too much like Harry Potter at this time” (this is ridiculous on so very many levels, not the least of which is that the only things this book has in common with Harry Potter are that it is written well and is a YA fantasy).
Finally, she decided to self-publish recently. Everyone’s on board and it’s quite exciting. We went through about a hundred edits, before and after typesetting, and then things came to a screeching halt.
The way the book was typeset, my mom would have had to price a paperback YA book at about $17 to not lose money.
Why, you ask? Well, the publishing company she’s self-publishing with takes a set fee plus a per-page fee. And big retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble take a giant percentage chunk.
Which leaves the author, who did all the work and actually wrote the book, a very small dollar amount per book.
So we had to re-typeset and re-edit the whole thing. This put us back several weeks.
This is outrageous. This book is good. Really good. In my view, the person who made it really good should get a fair share of the profits. I guess I’m old-fashioned like that.
Now the book is priced at $12.95, which is much more reasonable. But my mom will make a grand total of $1.13 per physical book.
Anyone else annoyed by this? Obviously the point here isn’t to become filthy stinking rich, but credit where credit is due, I say.
(If you’re interested in the book, let me know! Perhaps I can arrange for a free e-copy for you in exchange for a review and some fan-blogging… No guarantees, mind you, but it’s a possibility.)
