Comments on: Well, The Royalties Are Reasonable

By: Saundra Mitchell

Saundra Mitchell — Tue, 03 May 2005 13:17:12 +0000

I am a proud owner of a copy of Atlanta Nights, and I have to say it’s an *astonishing* piece of literature. Hee hee hee!

By: Susan Gable

Susan Gable — Mon, 02 May 2005 23:05:36 +0000

LOL – You just gotta LOVE good ole Travis and Atlanta Nights. Why, that there’s some fine writin’. LOL. See, PA hadn’t reached their quota for the day when that literary masterpiece rolled in, so of course they accepted it. I know eventually I’m going to break down and buy my very own copy – the proceeds go to a good cause, and it’s just one of those How Not To books every writer should own. (g)

By: Caro

Caro — Mon, 02 May 2005 22:31:47 +0000

Suan wrote:

“Hey, PublishAmerica doesnâ€™t accept every ms – only the ones they can manage to produce on a daily basis and cost-effectively for them.”

Or unless your name is Travis Tea and the manuscript is called “Atlanta Nights”…

By: Brenda Coulter

Brenda Coulter — Mon, 02 May 2005 14:33:44 +0000

I imagine it will be a self-limiting program. They’ll never attract quality authors with a plan like that, so they’re doomed to produce inferior products that won’t find a good market.

I’m going to chuckle once and move on.

By: Cantara Christopher

Cantara Christopher — Mon, 02 May 2005 13:48:58 +0000

Aren’t they concerned that this will bring down the prestige of the Macmillan imprint in general?

By: Susan Gable

Susan Gable — Mon, 02 May 2005 13:32:53 +0000

Hey, PublishAmerica doesn’t accept every ms – only the ones they can manage to produce on a daily basis and cost-effectively for them. (g) For example, they no longer accept full-color children’s books – costs too much. And they can only run spell-check so fast, so they seem to have a cut-off of how many ms they can accept. (Please, for anyone out there considering PA, do your homework! Check out http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?p=181985#post181985 and ask many questions before you sign. If you choose to sign, fully aware of what PA truly will and will not do for you, great, more power to you. Best of luck with the book. But you have to do your homework first! So says the former teacher!)

This MacMillan thing seems to me like a way to pad the corporate coffers with the paid editing, or with kickbacks or something from the editors they will recommend to the author. Whatever it is, it stinks to high heaven.

Oh, and those 20% royalties? What do you think the print-run might be on a book like this, one that the publisher has no money invested in? I’m thinking there won’t be much of a print-run. 20% of 100 ($20) is still less than 5% of 1000 ($50). (Numbers simplfied to make our lives easier. LOL! Dammit, Jim, I’m a writer, not a mathematician!)

I’m also wondering how eager the bookstore buyers (the folks who do the buying for the chains) are going to be to offer these types of books shelf-space. Will they turn their noses up at them? I guess that all depends on how well they think they’ll sell.

By: Caro

Caro — Sun, 01 May 2005 23:17:44 +0000

Huh. So, in other words, they’re opening their own branch of vanity publishing. This does not make me feel particularly warm and fuzzy inside.

By: Saundra Mitchell

Saundra Mitchell — Sun, 01 May 2005 23:12:53 +0000

Is it just me or does this sound exactly like the way PublishAmerica does business, short of the fact that they don’t accept *every* manuscript?

By: Karen

Karen — Sun, 01 May 2005 16:48:17 +0000

So some poor author, on top of his or her zero advance (zero!), may be required to hire an outside editor, at a cost of, say, hundreds or perhaps thousands of dollars, and then, for whatever reason, if the book sells almost nothing, the author will be insanely in the red. Of course, the publisher will have lost money too, but percentage-wise, it hardly seems fair. It’s possible a given book will catch on and sell beautifully, and then the 20% will be a boon, but history indicates that the odds are against that.