What! No advance? No Book Tour?

In our ‘status’ on facebook not so long ago I posted “Even if we do publish your goddamn book (and it’s successful) you will not become wealthy and we will probably not even cover our printing costs but we will have put your voice out there and the world will be better for it.” This post received something like twenty-seven ‘Likes’ as well as a comment from one of our ‘friends’ essentially questioning why she should go with a publisher who couldn’t offer her an advance or pay for a book tour? Well, she suggested indignantly, she may as well self-publish rather than go with a small publishing house because after all she already had the education, had some writing credits and something like thirty years of writing experience behind her! I commented back that a writing career is no different than other careers, by that I meant that you have to start somewhere and a small publishing house or e-zine or lit magazine can be that ‘somewhere’ for a writer. Writing credits look good on a bio when submitting your work for publication and they’re no different than submitting your resume to any employer, this documents your experience and possibly your commercial worth to a publishing house deciding first if they love your work but then also whether you work has any sort of following. Of course our ‘friend’ did not like this response and proceeded again to comment about how she felt she deserved XYZ…yadda, yadda. In the end we exercised restraint in suggesting that given all of her experience AND writing credits perhaps she could self publish, although we did not recommend that route, or find herself an agent who could present her work to the big publishing houses and that they were the only ones who could afford advances and book tours.

All this to say that small publishing houses absolutely are in it for the love of the craft and not for the money, duh! Oh the untold and unpaid hours of sifting through shite submissions not to mention editing once we’ve finally accepted a manuscript! After all of that there are covers to create and original art is not cheap (nor should it be) but small publishing houses if they’re smart develop relationships with emerging artists in order to make it affordable, they also learn how to put together their own covers forgoing the need to hire that bit out (which is also expensive). Now then let’s talk about printing costs and the fact that the unit price to print a book is only reduced by the numbers printed and no small publisher can afford print runs of 500+ books without knowing for sure if they can sell them let alone have the upfront funds available to order thousands. Forget about promotional dollars, there aren’t any, instead small houses spend an inordinate amount of time on-line promoting their authors (especially unknown authors) on social sites, writing sites, review sites etc.

When all is said and done small publishing houses take risks, absorb costs and publish works the big guys would not even consider, but considering the considerations and the fact that some truly amazing literature would never see or have seen the light of day if we didn’t, thank goodness we do although; “Even if we do publish your goddamn book (and it’s successful) you will not become wealthy and we will probably not even cover our printing costs but we will have put your voice out there and the world will be better for it.”

~cio