October 14, 2005
I want to thank the folks who responded to yesterday's post titled Self-Defense. I've been meaning to write a thorough post about my experiences with print-on-demand or self-publishing or vanity publishing as it's sometimes called, and now seems like a good time. Apologies for the lengthy post.

Somewhere around 1999 or 2000 I was offered a book contract for a mystery novel called Blood Secrets. The publisher was Write Way, a small press out of Colorado run by a woman by the name of Dorie O'Brien (I believe that's the right spelling). They put out mostly hardcovers, some trade paperback. They were growing, they had terrific quality cover art and had made some subsidiary rights deals with I believe it was Worldwide, a part of the Harlequin company that did mass market reprints of mysteries. I believe WW also had at least nibbles for film rights and one or two authors who had foreign sales. Dorie liked Blood Secrets, what I hoped to be the first novel in a series featuring Dr. Theo MacGreggor, a college professor and consulting forensic toxicologist. The WW list was crowded and Dorie couldn't offer a pub date earlier than 4 years away, which was a very long time. Secrets had been shopped around NY by my then-agent Ben Camardi, without success so I figured, what the hell. A few months later WW moved the pub date up to about 19 or 20 months away.

I decided to get a website and that's a whole story in itself, but in an effort to create some pre-pub buzz about the book, I decided to write a 12-chapter novella featuring MacGreggor and serialize it on the website, one chapter a month leading up to Secrets' publication. That novella was Name Your Poison, a prequel to Secrets. I learned a bit about timing and publicity. Stephen King, right around the same time, was launching "Riding the Bullet," as an online novella, and the press was paying attention. You have to remember, the dot.com bubble was pretty close to its peak at that point. I got press locally, the novella even got some reviews and I had some kind of readership building on my website.

Then, around month 6, Write Way went bankrupt. My overall experienced with Dorie and WW were okay. I talked to a number of their writers and they were all over the board from despising Dorie to loving her. I found her to be prickly, especially if you tried to negotiate ANYTHING, especially contracts. The bankruptcy, I hear, had to do with optimism and too high a returns for the books. There was probably some fiscal screw-ups, too, but that's all heresy and I don't know the real story.By this time I had already had a contract with her for the 2nd MacGreggor novel, Lethal Doses. Luckily for me, WW had nothing to lose by just releasing me from my contracts, so that's what they did. Other authors weren't so lucky and the rights were tied up for quite some time while bankruptcy proceedings continued.

Suddenly I had no novels coming out and a novella in mid-publication. There are precious few markets for novellas. Right around that time, Mystery Writers of America had a 6-month deal going with iUniverse, the print-on-demand publisher. If you were an active member of MWA, you could have your book published for free. Well, any port in a storm. I wrote another novella called Catfish Guru, which followed Name Your Poison but preceded Blood Secrets and published the book under the title "Catfish Guru," by iUniverse. I got reviews, sold a few hundred copies and learned a lot about bookstores and selling books.

My overall experience with iUniverse was okay, keeping in mind that it didn't cost me anything. Their cover art was inspired. They took my art idea and ran with it. Check it out on my website. It's a nice book. It has a nice feel, nice size, nice type font.

The biggest problems with Catfish Guru and iUniverse in general are price, discounts and returns.

1. Price. Guru was priced by iUniverse at $17.95. That's a little steep, although I didn't get many complaints. I would have been happier with about $13.95 or so, no more than $15.
2. Discounts. Although I received a discount if I bought copies in bulk, the bookstore discount wasn't quite high enough to meet industry standards. I don't know if that's changed. It was, if I can use this business jargon, a disincentive for bookstores to order the book, even if they were open-minded about stocking a book by an author they've never heard of that is self-published.
3. Returns. This is the stake through the heart for iUniverse and print-on-demand, as far as I'm concerned. If you don't know, bookstores order books, then if they don't sell in some period of time, they return the hardcovers to the publisher and get most of their money back; in the case of paperbacks, they don't even ship the books back, they ship the covers back and supposedly pulp the books, although if you've ever seen paperbacks with their covers torn off for sale in used bookstores, you now know where they came from. iUniverse doesn't have a returns policy. Most POD publishers don't. I've always wanted to use anathema in a sentence and here's my chance--no returns policy is anathema to bookstores. They HAVE to sell the damned books or they lose all their money. And that's a gamble most bookstores weren't willing to make.

So that's my story in a nutshell, minus many of the details. Just so people know, there were many fine, fine writers associated with Write Way at one time or another, some who went on to publish with larger NY publishers or other indies, some who just fell off the face of the earth. Keith Snyder, Peter Abresch, LL Thrasher, Aileen Schumacher, the list goes on.

Would I go through iUniverse again? Well, maybe. Under 2 circumstances that I can imagine.

1. I just want those manuscripts in book form on my shelf. There are other Theo MacGreggor novels that I wrote and I'm fond of the character and I think they're pretty good. I think I've moved on creatively, but still, it might be nice to have those between 2 covers forn myself or for my kids if nothing else.
2. Nonfiction niche publishing. From time to time I'm contacted by somebody who wants me to ghostwrite or collaborate on a nonfiction book. Depending on the type of project, POD or self-publishing may be the way to go. These people very often do a lot of public speaking and seminars on their area of expertise, whether it's practice management or personal finance, and they want the cachet of being an author on the subject and they want something to sell after their seminars and talks. If they go through traditional publishers, by the time we write a proposal, market it, get a contract, write the book and work our way through the publishing process, 2 years or more may have gone by. It makes more sense sometimes to write the book and get going with it unless they really envision a wider audience than the ones they create through their talks or seminars. It's an option anyway.

Well, I think I'm done talking about self-publishing. This was my experience, for better or for worse, and I'm reasonably glad I did it, but I wish I hadn't had to. I'm much happier working with other publishers who want to publish my work even though you give up a lot of control when you do. Still, I don't feel any defensiveness about saying, "I'm a novelist," when other people are doing the publishing. I always felt a bit uneasy saying that when working through iUniverse. Again, that may just be my problem, not anybody elses.

I do keep in mind when people really slam self-publishing, that some pretty amazing writers over the years were self-published--Mark Twain, Ben Franklin... There are fine writers out there self-publishing. Sometimes we applaud people who stick to their "artistic integrity" and sometimes we boo them. Sometimes that's what's going on with self-publishing. Sometimes it isn't. Sometimes it's authors who had decent readerships, got dropped by their publishers because they weren't growing their audience, so they decide to self-publish so they don't lose the audience they have. Sometimes they're just impatient. Sometimes they just want to prove to the world that, yes, I wrote a book. Ultimately, no matter who publishes it, the work has to stand on its own in terms of quality. Some of us just want to write. We don't want to become publishers or booksellers or, god forbid, the marketing department of our own publication.

Best,
Mark Terry