Adventures of a Self-Publisher

I will be blogging about my experiences starting a publishing company to publish the novels I've written (and perhaps other authors in the future). In this, the first installment, I'll be writing about what finally led me to this step.
After years of struggling I finally achieved that which I sought so long, to have a real publisher, not one you pay but who pays you, offer me a contract to publish my novel, The Seventh Deception. I signed the contract and a few months later the book became available for purchase on Amazon, both as a print book and an ebook. A dream achieved? Not quite, although it seemed so at the time.
A lot of writers out there might be thinking that I am nothing but an ingrate. Having a legitimate, well respected small press publish your manuscript—certainly that's achieving a dream. I should be thanking the publisher every day, not bad-mouthing them.
Well, I have no intention of bad-mouthing my publisher. They have fulfilled their terms of the contract and have produced a respectable product. They have a good reputation in the industry and according to a recent edition of Writer's Market, are selective, receiving a thousand queries in a year and publishing only three. After six years of getting nothing but rejections and thinking my writing must really be lousy, you can bet that made me feel good. I felt even better when other contract offers starting coming in from other small independent publishers. In all, I had about six or seven contract offers to publish my novel about the Nazi atomic bomb project. Yes, I ignored the admonition that quite a few publishers stipulate, no simultaneous submissions. Mostly I think they post that restriction with a wink and a nod knowing that it's not practical, although one publisher did withdraw their contract offer when they learned I'd submitted my manuscript to others.
I'd never received any encouragement at all from publishers before, so this was a surprise, a most pleasant one. In a future issue of the blog, I'll tell about the change I made in order to have this happen, how it all came about, but that's off the subject for this post. If I forget, remind me.
I ended up going with the very first contract offer I'd received. Why? Because they were the only one that I'd been unable to find anything negative about, and they had a lot of their books on Amazon, some with real reviews from legitimate sources. In short, they seemed like the real deal. I thought I was lucky to get them, and I probably was.
Saying all that about my publisher and saying they've lived up to the terms of the contract, than why did I decide to found my own publishing company? The answer is the contract, or actually, the terms of the contract.
A lot of the contract items are pretty standard and no surprise, clauses that say I'm on my own when it comes to any claims of libel or infringement and how I'm expected to help promote the book at my own expense. So if I travel to a book signing, I have to pay for that. But the two that really started me thinking about what a raw deal I got are how much I receive from the net receipts, not cover price or gross receipts, the publisher's net, and how long the publisher owns my book. I'll be paid 10% of the net receipts, and the publisher owns the book for, “the lifetime of the copyright.”
What this means is that the publisher gets 90% of any profit for the lifetime of the copyright. Do you know how long a copyright is in the United States? For a book published after 1977, the copyright is the lifetime of the author plus 70 years.
That means the publisher legally owns my book for as long as I live plus probably as long as our three sons live. But who knows? Our oldest son is an attorney. Maybe someday he might get interested in finding a way to break the contract.
I had to do a lot of research to write this book about the Nazi atomic bomb, a lot of reading, a lot of digging. Then there was the plotting, development of characters, the writing and the numerous rewrites, plus editing, writing long synopses, medium-length synopses, short synopses, query letters, outlines, blurbs, on and on. About three years of work all together, but I only get 10% while the publisher gets 90%. Doesn't sound fair, does it? Or at least that's what a tiny little nagging voice kept telling me.
However, the more rational part of my brain kept saying that it might not seem fair, but actually is because the publisher makes the work available to the reading public and that takes a tremendous amount of work and effort.
Where did that idea come from? Through the many years of rejection, I'd built up a pretty good library of books on writing fiction, editing fiction, writing queries, writing synopses, how to get an agent, giving editors and agents what they want and how to eventually get published. The main message from all these books was to keep writing, never give up, keep reading, keep trying to improve, keep at it. And all of them agreed that yes, the publisher takes the biggest cut, but without doubt, they earn it. They agreed that the same is true of literary agents.
That was my mindset eight months ago. Now I know that I can do in just a few hours all that my publisher had to do in order to publish my book.
More about that in next week's installment.
G Dedrick Robinson; http://www.amazon.com/Seventh-Deception-G-Dedrick-Robinson/dp/160977020X/