Quite often \u2013 a couple of times a month \u2013 I\u2019ll get an email from someone asking me about \u2018hybrid\u2019 publishers. Are they good? Are they bad? What\u2019s the difference between them and a vanity publisher? Should I invest my cash? And how much to invest? And what can I expect to back in terms of sales and royalties?<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve put off writing an answer because the area is complex and just doesn\u2019t lend itself to easy guidelines. So let me say upfront, this email will not provide you with any certainties. In every case, you need to do your own research and figure out what\u2019s right for your situation. I don\u2019t know what\u2019s right for you.<\/p>\n
That said, let\u2019s start off easy, with some definitions:<\/p>\n
Traditional publishing<\/strong><\/p>\n Trad publishing comes big or small. You can access it with or without an agent. Pretty much every book you find in a regular bookshop comes via a traditional publisher of some description, though of course the same books are available online as well.<\/p>\n The one thing that really defines traditional publisher is that the author pays nothing and will expect to receive some money. With bigger publishers, you\u2019ll get an advance plus (if book sales are sufficient to pay out the advance) royalties as well. With smaller publishers, advances may be small or even zero, but you\u2019ll still get royalties on sale. And you, the author, never pay anything. I mean that literally. I\u2019ve been an author for more than twenty years and I have never once paid a publisher any money for anything. I\u2019ve never paid my agent. I\u2019ve never even paid for a lunch. The flow of money is always from them to you. That\u2019s trad publishing.<\/p>\n Self-Publishing<\/strong><\/p>\n Self-publishing, in its truest sense, means that you take responsibility for writing, editing, designing, producing, distributing and marketing your book.<\/p>\n That doesn\u2019t mean you have to do all those things personally. It\u2019s not just fine but positively sensible to outsource certain tasks to experts. Jericho Writers offers great editing and copy editing services. Cover designers can create great covers for you. And Amazon and other online retailers offer the world\u2019s most extraordinary distribution platform. A solo self-publisher today can access \u2013 easily \u2013 more readers than I ever could with my first book, which was a super-lead title sold by a major Big 5 publisher, with a ton of marketing spend behind it. (And yes, there\u2019s a difference between the ability to access readers and selling books – but you need the first to achieve the second.)<\/p>\n In financial terms, self-publishing can be defined as this: You own your work. No one else has a claim on your royalties. You have complete authority for every aspect of the book (text, design, blurb, pricing, etc). The costs and the revenues all flow through to you.<\/p>\n (And, OK, to be really precise about this, some online distribution services such as Draft2Digital take a percentage of sales for their distribution efforts, but you can choose to operate direct at any point. Arrangements like that are a convenience, nothing else.)<\/p>\n Book production<\/strong><\/p>\n Where it starts to get tricky is that some firms offer to bundle the whole book production process together for you. Lulu, for example, says: \u201cWhether you need 1 copy or 1,000 copies, you can create and print bookstore quality books online with Lulu.\u201d<\/p>\n Originally, in fact, Lulu was mostly there to help you simply produce a nice-looking book. My sister, for example, took some of the best photos from my father\u2019s memorial service and put together a beautifully produced photobook to commemorate the day. Kate didn\u2019t think she was publishing anything, and the purpose was never to make sales. Lulu just offered a slick online tool to get a great-looking book. The book was never on sale, nor did we want it to be.<\/p>\n A pure book production company will charge a set amount for delivering a certain mumber of books. The amount will vary with book length, format, number of illustrations and so on, but in the end, it\u2019s not all that different from ordering canned fish. You specify what you want. You agree a price. You take delivery. What happens next is up to you. Services that do an honest job and charge nothing in terms of ongoing royalties include Scribe Media and AuthorImprints.<\/p>\n Inevitably, however, plenty of people who use these services also have an ambition to make sales, so many such companies don\u2019t just offer a \u2018print and deliver\u2019 service, they offer a \u2018publishing\u2019 service too. In most cases, that means your book will be uploaded to Amazon and the other online retailers and made available for sale, most likely as both print and ebook.<\/p>\n When something that is basically a production service starts to get branded as a publishing service, things get murky. (And, just to be clear, I think Lulu is fine. I\u2019ll have some nasty things to say about some companies, but Lulu isn\u2019t one of them.)<\/p>\n Vanity publishing<\/strong><\/p>\n Vanity publishing is best understood by its ethics \u2013 or lack of them.<\/p>\n The classic vanity publisher is one that purports to operate like a traditional publisher but is nothing of the sort. There\u2019s one toxic British vanity publisher which invites writers to submit work, just as though this were a trad publisher looking for manuscripts. But when it comes to it, you\u2019ll be told, \u2018Hey, congrats, we loved your book. But you know what? This is a really tough market and our editorial board didn\u2019t quite have the confidence to take this on in the regular way. But we\u2019d love to handle this via our partnership process and \u2026\u2019<\/p>\n Inevitably, the nature of the \u2018partnership\u2019 is that you end up paying a lot of money for the firm to produce, distribute and market the book, with sales royalties split between the two of you. (It\u2019s that royalty split which allows them to claim a partnership exists.) The trouble this causes is many-fold:<\/p>\n The ultimate problem here is simply the dishonesty. Vanity publishers aim to sell their (typically shoddy) service, while persuading writer that what they\u2019re getting is very largely the same as they\u2019d get from a trad publisher.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve seen some absolutely loathsome behaviour from vanity publishers over the years \u2013 and the list of culprits is sadly long.<\/p>\n Ethical hybrid publishers<\/strong><\/p>\n Which brings us to the central question in all of this:<\/p>\n Is there such a thing as a full-service, ethical<\/em><\/u>, hybrid publisher?<\/p>\n To be specific, we\u2019re looking for a publisher, where:<\/p>\n The answer is yes, such services do exist.<\/p>\n Names that are usually mentioned positively in this context are She Writes Press, Girl Friday, Greenleaf and (in the UK) Matador. Please note, I\u2019m reporting here on the general industry consensus. I haven\u2019t recently vetted those companies and can\u2019t guarantee that what they offer YOU will be right for your needs.<\/p>\n But before you rush to send your book to these outfits, you need to note:<\/p>\n When to consider an ethical hybrid publisher<\/p>\n By now, you\u2019ll understand why I \u2013 and most people like me \u2013 are deeply dubious of any hybrid publisher. Wherever possible, my strong preference is to steer authors towards proper trad publishing or proper self-publishing. Both of those routes are great. They offer different things and pose different challenges, but the basic pathways are sound as a pound.<\/p>\n Equally, if you just want a nicely produced photobook, then go to a Lulu or similar and bodge one together. It\u2019s simple and fun.<\/p>\n But that still leaves a whole heap of authors whose books aren\u2019t salesy enough for a trad publisher and whose talents or ambitions don\u2019t run to self-publishing. What then?<\/p>\n Well, I think there is a role for ethical hybrid outfits. I remember one client of ours who had spent almost fifty years as a nurse in her home community of Leicester. She wrote a memoir about that experience, which was true, touching, nostalgic, wonderful \u2013 the record of a good life, well spent. But there was nothing especially remarkable in the story. A big commercial publisher couldn\u2019t possibly have seen a way to strong five-figure sales, or even four-figure sales. The trad route essentially doesn\u2019t exist for books like that.<\/p>\n At the same time, the writer was elderly and clearly not about to start wrestling with all the tech and interfaces involved in self-publishing. So, with our encouragement, she hooked up with Matador, a reputable, full-service, hybrid. I know the lead publisher there and know him to be a decent man. Critically \u2013 this is just essential \u2013 he\u2019s honest with his clients. He tells them what to expect. He tells them that they\u2019ll probably lose money. The process feels like explanation, not selling. As I understand it, She Writes Press for example takes the same, full disclosure approach.<\/p>\n Personally, I think writing a memoir is an utterly brilliant thing to do \u2013 and who cares if the resultant work isn\u2019t one that a trad publisher wants to handle?<\/p>\n If you write a memoir, then please, get it printed. Get enough copies that you and your loved ones can all have one. Get the things handed out like teacakes at your funeral. If you want to do that by handling the tech yourself, then fine. If not, pay someone. Either way, it\u2019s a wonderful thing to do.<\/p>\n As it happens, my Leicester nurse had a ton of contacts in her area and proved to be a capable saleswoman. She sold upwards of 500 copies and earned back what she\u2019d spent. But if she\u2019d sold nothing, but given away 500, that would still have been a great outcome. What matters was the book, not the revenue.<\/p>\n There are other examples where it might make sense for you to just pay someone to handle things. Let\u2019s say you run some kind of consultancy business. You think that authoring a book would prove your qualifications and be a great thing to hand out to potential clients. In that case, you\u2019re intending to monetise the book in a way that lies outside of book sales and you just need to deal with book production and swiftly and cost effectively as you can.\u00a0<\/p>\n Snakes and angels: how to tell the difference<\/strong><\/p>\n As I warned you early on, it\u2019s hard to give easy conclusions here, but here are some:<\/p>\n That\u2019s it from me. And lordy me, this email\u2019s a whopper, but the topic\u2019s important \u2013 and difficult.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Quite often \u2013 a couple of times a month \u2013 I\u2019ll get an email from someone asking me about \u2018hybrid\u2019 publishers. Are they good? Are they bad? What\u2019s the difference between them and a vanity publisher? Should I invest my cash? And how much to invest? And what can I expect to back in terms<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29292],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-harrys-friday-email"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n
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