What Startup Publishers Don’t Want You to Know Before Signing on the Dotted Line!

Here’s the bottom line: your book is an investment. It’s a culmination of your hard work and emotional capital expressed in words. It’s not a $50 dinner that you can shrug off if the experience is bad.

It’s nice that you want to give a new business a chance, but you’re leaving some things out of the equation:

1. Just dealing with Amazon is a constant nightmare. Our publishing company is fighting with them all the time because of their stupid mistakes. Know why we can fight with them, and win? Why a real human responds to us every time? Because we’re big. We have have published more than 17K print and electronic books in the past 27 years. Someone who has just gotten into the game will be lucky to hear from a human being when they complain. Heck, they’ll be lucky to get a real answer to their question from a bot at Amazon.
2. You aren’t just dealing with Amazon. There’s going to be a printer, distributors, retailers (print and ebook sellers), the IRS, I.T. people, possibly editors, marketers, cover designers, illustrators, etc. It’s a juggling act. Not many people have the wherewithal to do it. Most new publishers fail. (Some people think they can just slap up a website and succeed. It doesn’t work that with with book publishing! It’s takes a LOT of work, capital investment, endless training (the software keeps changing), and tons of time! Of course, the scam publishers just take your money and run.
3. Royalties – guess who pays them to the author? That would be your publisher. Even if you sign on with an honest new company, if they don’t stay afloat, how will you get your royalties? Countless publishers have gone out of business over the years. When that happens, almost all of them owe their authors money…and those authors never get paid.
4. Your book will be bound to your publisher. If they go belly up, you will need to get your production files back somehow. In most cases, those publishers who go belly-up leave in the dead of night. They stop answering emails and phone calls, and they won’t send their authors the production files. If you decide to have your book republished, you’ll need to change your ISBN’s. And, in many cases, authors need to have their covers and interior files redesigned.
5. Ninety-nine percent of all publishing websites we are finding online (that authors are reporting to us) currently are bona-fide scams.

Publishing your book is not a game, and “charity” should not play a part in the process. Book publishing is definitely something you don’t want to gamble hundreds to thousand of dollars on! You want someone who knows what they are doing – not someone who needs a chance to prove themselves. And, again, most of the new publishing websites online now are scams. Thousands of them!

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