what do you thing about Raider Publishing International which I found advertised on this forum? Is it really so that other publishers give you approximately 10% of the profit? Is 50% a good deal? I am planning on publishing my book in the future and hope to find a good publisher before my book is finished.
It appears from quickly looking at their website that they are what is generally called a subsidy or vanity press. They are not what many call a 'traditional publisher.' Publishers usually pay the writer anywhere from 7-15% of the cover price for each book sold, a % based on profit from the book. Some do have net profit contracts, but then the % the author earns is at least 2x or 3x the cover price %--and with that what is included as 'expenses' counting against net profit should be clearly spelled out. Raider Publishing International states that they are a publishing service, and that you can purchase services such their advertising service for around $600 to $700 dollars. That would be after you pay anywhere from $850 US to $3500 to be published by them. They'll sell you an ebook package for $400 dollars. If you did the minimum with the contract, got an ebook through them and their 'guaranteed shelf space' option, it'd cost over $1800 US. Raider Publishing International Service Fee Schedule Page The majority of vanity press books sell less than 50 copies, and most of those go to family and friends--no personal experience, this is what I've read). It'd take 350 copies sold before the author would break even (depending on book prices and versions sold). (fast math off the top of my head, so if I'm off slightly...oh well). I did note that the section on their guaranteed shelf placement was brief (moreso than any other service option) and quite vague. They do not offer editing, even as a part of their fee structure. With most authors, even seasoned pros, this is a must. That would be more out of pocket if you had to hire one--and good ones are not cheap. A positive thing I can say, is that their book prices are not way out of line and generally competitive (based on what I scanned on Amazon.com). Another is that they don't hide their service fees, trying to suggest they're not going to charge an author anything. In the end, their business model appears to be to make money off of their authors, not through sales and royalties. A publisher, as most writers define them, makes their money off of sales of books (not the author's check book). Finish your novel, then go through the query/submission process. There are many legit agents and many large through small publishers out there--ones you won't have to pay to get your work in print. Just my two cents. Terry
If it is part of the google ad feed, please note that we do not actively endorse any of those advertisers. The feed merely helps pay the costs of maintaining the site, and the individual advertisers are not under our control. Raider Publishing is listed in Preditors&Editors as a vanity publisher. P&E should be your first stop if you are considering a publisher or agent.
Another thing to note is that publishers get piles of emails and letters from writers who want to be publised. They have to sift through a lot of garbage in order to find manuscripts that are publishable. The last thing they are going to do is advertise. The ones that do advertise are most likely looking to get money out of you. A good publisher will not ask for money. The same applies to agents. Publishers and agents get their money from the sales of the book, not from the author. After all, why do a good job in publishing a book when the author has already covered all the costs?
good point... if they advertise, you can count on them being a vanity press/not an entirely legit agent or publisher...
Thanks for the advice. Next time I am going to avoid fixed prices instead of commissions, you know what I mean.
no, i don't, really... publishers don't pay commissions... they pay royalties... and sometimes, an advance [which is paid against the royalties]... agents are paid a commission, which is usually 15% of whatever you make on the book...
I'm not sure if you're just trying to prove a point or what, but how are you not making the connection and understanding what sereda is trying to say?
no, i'm not trying to prove any point... it's not at all clear what the poster is saying 'sounds like the same thing'... what i posted was info on two completely different things, so i don't see how he could be referring to that... and i'm asking what he is referring to... i'm not sure if you're just trying to be rude or what, but how are you not connecting and understanding what i'm asking?
Take a break and calm down. Fire only starts if you keep feeding it For the OP, a good rule is to be VERY wary of any company that wants money upfront to publish. If you do want to self publish, I would highly advise a print-on-demand model (such as Create Space), that only prints when you actually sell a book. Marketing is something of a dark area in the business world. You can pay a literal fortune for smoke and mirrors. Unlike the actual production of a physical (or digital) product, marketers don't have to provide a finished product. In all honesty, if you're going to self publish, you're better off self marketing too. It isn't that expensive, and can be very simple via Google adsense, facebook ads, and a free website though a template based host like wordpress. Using these, you can have a pretty decent advertising plan for less than $100 a month and less than 2 hours of work.
@cereda: I know how you feel -- when I first started learning about the publishing business, it felt like every verb I ran across was one I'd hardly ever encounter in daily life. To commission something is to hire someone to do a specific task. Usually it involves creating something in particular. For example, if I have an old-time wind-up watch and a particular gear gets bent while I'm cleaning it, I may commission a gear from a local metalworker. They would make the part, and I'd pay them for their time and effort. In publishing, cover art is sometimes commissioned -- meaning the publisher has a good idea of the cover they want, and they hire one (or several) artists to do a cover. (If they hire several, all artists get paid; the idea is that the publisher wants to be able to choose from several pictures in order to get the best one.) Also, sometimes ghost writers are chosen to fix a celebrity's book before it gets published, and I've occasionally heard that processed called a commission as well. (I think this last example may be a misuse of the word, but if other people are doing it...) Royalties are the money that goes to the creator of a work. This is because copyright is different from just plain ownership. If I make a basket, and sell it, I've lost the basket. If I write a story, it's mine unless I go through some weird hoops to get rid of it. This is because a story is something more than just inked letters on a piece of paper -- anyone can scrawl the alphabet over and over and over until a paper is full. The significance of a story is in the pattern, and so a writer is considered to own the pattern itself. Which means that I can print out a hundred copies of a story and give them away, and it's still legally my story. Each person has a copy of my story, and they own the copy, but they cannot re-write it and try to sell it as their work. Publishers are aware of this. They can't take an author's book and put it out without attribution; they can't claim that the story itself belongs to them. But at the same time, they have to spend money in order to print the books, and design a cover, and ship it to stores, and advertise, and so on. This is where royalties come in. The publisher and the writer agree that the publisher should be the one to design and print the author's book. The publisher has to charge enough for each book so that they can pay their staff and pay the printer and cover artists. They also charge a little bit more, so that they can pay the author for having written that particular story. So if a hardcover costs $29.50, 10% might go to the author, 30% might go to the bookstore selling it, and 60% might go to the publishing company that printed the book. Now, it would take a lot of time each week for every publisher to send a check to each author they're working with, so instead the publisher is likely to tally up what they owe the author each month or each quarter. (Quarters are more common.) So every three months, the author will get a royalty statement from the publisher. This statement tells the author how many books sold, and after a previously-agreed-upon number has been surpassed, the author gets her percentage from every book. An advance is an up-front payment given to an author by a publisher. It isn't free money; it's based on some prediction of how well the book will sell in stores, and is there because it takes a long time (18 months or so) to prepare the book before it can be sold. In the meantime, publishers really don't want the author to starve or be foreclosed upon, so they give the author an advance and the author theoretically uses that to pay the bills or whatever. Many books are considered to have "not earned out their advance," meaning their book didn't sell well enough to start earning royalties. For example, if I'm an emerging mystery writer, I might get a $2000 advance. If the publisher prices my books at $19.99 each and gives me 10% of the price of each book, then I have to sell 1000 copies of the book in order to "earn out" my advance and start receiving royalties. If I only sell 400 copies, I will not have "earned out" and I won't get royalty money. (I still get to keep the advance, though.) If it helps to think of an advance as a short-term loan you don't have to pay back, that's fine. It's a bit of an odd system, but it seems to work. You can see now why bestselling writers earn a lot of money, right? The publisher who prints a book by Stephen King or John Grisham knows they're likely to sell a million copies. So they offer a big advance, maybe $250,000 or more, knowing that the author is almost certainly going to "earn out" and ultimately make the company a huge profit. For this reason, publishers are actually more comfortable with large advances to known bestselling authors than they are with small advances to new-name authors. The new-name author might only sell a few hundred copies, and the publisher could find themselves in the red financially. (For that book, not in total for all the books they've printed that year.) But publishers have to take that risk because so many readers' tastes are different, and they never know when an author is going to have unexpected great sales. Furthermore, publishers must get new and interesting authors, because the well-known authors won't last forever. They'll retire or die or -- gasp! shock! -- finish the series they've been working on and stop for a while. (J.K. Rowling is said to be doing some writing, for example, but it might be years before she publishes anything else. She created a huge world, and now that it's over, she's taking a well-deserved rest.) Obviously this is an overview, and I'm generalizing (and omitting complications). But this is more or less how those terms are used in the world of print publishing.
a 'commission' [the noun version of the word, as opposed to the verb explained above] is the 15% [or whatever] that an agent gets paid 'off the top' from what the writer gets paid for a book that the agent represented and acquired a publisher for... it's a percentage payment that is taken out of whatever money the item being sold brings in... so car salespersons make a commission, door-to-door salespeople make a commission, real estate and literary agents make a commission, all in lieu of salary, or a flat fee...
