NEVER Pay A Publisher

[Wandering Author]

I hope we all know this one, but since when I checked my G-Mail inbox this morning, the ad at the top offered “We will publish your book… starting at $399” I felt the need to repeat this point for anyone new who hasn’t figured it out yet.

Yes, if you want to independently publish your book, you may find yourself paying for services to get that book ready. As long as you understand what those services are, and why you need to pay for them, there’s nothing wrong with that. Publishers pay artists to produce cover art, and they pay the salaries of those who edit manuscripts, and so on: since you are making yourself the publisher, then you will have to pay for the services you can’t – or don’t want to – provide yourself.

But you never pay a “publisher” to publish your book. Ever. If a traditional publisher is not paying you – or, at the very least, offering you royalties once the book is out, without asking for any type of fee at all from you – then you are the publisher. A business which offers services to independent publishers may be legitimate – although, like every other type of business on the planet, you should learn something about them before trusting them – but any business which claims to be a “publisher” but asks for any money from you, is not worth dealing with. Their lawyers have found loopholes which permit them to operate without being shut down, but that does not mean any self-respecting writer would ever want to deal with them. This also applies to having your work “accepted” for inclusion in any publication. If you are asked to pay because your work was “accepted” by a magazine, an anthology, or anything of the sort, something is wrong. As long as you were told upfront this would be the case, there is nothing wrong with donating your work (as, for example, to the Forward Motion anthology) but the moment you hear how much they want to “publish” your work, “but we need a fee of so many dollars to cover blah, blah, blah” then something is very, very wrong. If you believe in your work enough to invest in it yourself, that’s fine – publish it yourself.

If you are paying someone else, that means you are the publisher. As such, you need to be very clear on that reality and think about the services you need, then pay for those – and only those – services from reputable people who aren’t pretending to be something they’re not.

[MrGrey]

Wow, I didn’t even know people did that. That’s messed up in all kinds of ways!

Unfortunately, I think the reason publishers get away with this is that they know how important being published is to writers. While being published is definitely a step-up in a writing career, so is having a backbone and not acting like a doormat. If someone thinks it’s okay to impose this crap on you because you’re a new author/it’s just what needs to be done/it’s how business is done these days, you’ll be doing yourself a bigger favour walking away than accepting it.

You put a lot of love and attention into your work — make sure it goes to a home worthy of that.

[JuneDrexler]

Sadly, if this is the ‘publisher’ I think it is, they are charging $399 to do what you can do for free — ie. put your book up on Amazon (& etc) as an ebook. This is not for editing services, cover services, copyediting, etc. All those services cost more. For the base price they only format your book for e-publication — a service you can get for free on Smashwords, Draft2Digital, or can do yourself. (Smashwords and D2D do take a percentage of your profits on books sold through their service, so it’s not totally and completely free, but they don’t make money unless you do, which is a fair deal imo)

This particular rip off is all over the place. It’s sad, but many many people will fall for this scam. Don’t be one of them.

–June

[Wandering Author]

It probably is the one you’re thinking of. At least it sounds like it – I deliberately omitted a name because there are so many of these “publishers” out there I was afraid naming only one might mislead the reader into a false sense of security if they stumbled across another one.

I just want to froth at the mouth every time I see one of these. So many people get reeled in (although I never quite went through with it, when I was younger I was tempted once or twice; some crumb of sense always stopped me at the last minute) by the bait that a “real publisher” :sick: is willing to “publish” them. The people who get rich doing this are parasites. They’re just the successors of the old vanity “publishers”, and even in those days, if you really wanted to see your book in print, there were better, more honest ways of having that done.

(I actually remember going to a certain salvage / discount store and seeing, over and over, stacks of “remaindered” books someone had paid for that were products of the vanity presses. I think they wanted a dime apiece for them – and the way they were edited and produced, if the poor writer had paid half that to have them produced, they were robbed. It used to really infuriate me.)

[nicolane]

I am amazed at how many people fall for this. My heart nearly broke recently when someone on an email list I am on was all excited that a publisher was interested in his book – but he didn’t have the $400 needed to get it published.

[J.A. Marlow]

Ouch. That always breaks my heart, too, when I hear that sort of thing. At which point I get out the link to Predators and Editors and share it.

J.A. Marlow
The String Weavers, Salmon Run, Redpoint One series.

Writer alter-ego of Dreamers Cove

[Author]

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