A Writer's Life

Never Sing Never Say Never Again

The Rap Sheet clued me into the recently "rediscovered," rejected theme for the 1983 Bond movie NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN sung by Phyllis Hymann and composed by Stephen Forsyth. To be honest, I don't think it's any better than the bland Lani Hall/Michel Legrand tune (performed in the video below) that the producers ended up using... but you can decide for yourself.

Writer Beware

Victoria Strauss has an excellent post up today on her Writer Beware blog with great advice for aspiring writers about what to look for before signing with a small press. It's a must-read for those considering signing with a POD press.

J.T Ellison also offers up some good advice today on How To Avoid Scams over on the Murderati blog:

The biggest problem new writers are faced with is desire. You've worked so damn hard, have slaved away writing your book, and you WANT to get it out to the reading public. We understand. We were there once too. But DO YOUR HOMEWORK! There are several easy steps you can take to ascertain whether the offer you've been approached with is legitimate. Because that's the problem with scams. The veneer of legitimacy can be shiny and obscuring.

They Never Learn

The Martinsville Reporter-Times reports that the FBI and the U.S. Postmaster have launched a joint investigation into the business practices of Airleaf Publishing/Bookman Publishing, a notorious vanity press scam that went bankrupt last year. Let's hope this is just the beginning of a national crackdown on the deceptive practices of the vanity press industry.

But its hard to feel any sympathy for the Airleaf victims. Any reasonably intelligent person could have seen that Airleaf (and its previous incarnation Bookman Publishing) was a sham.  Even if the aspiring authors were too blind with desperation and naivete to see the scam for themselves, a simple Google search would have turned up plenty of resources (including my blog and others) that talked about the company's many deceptive practices and false promises.

They made a dumb, costly, and humiliating mistake.

So you'd think that now the Airleaf victims would know better than to ever get involved with a POD vanity press again.

Well, you'd be wrong.

Incredibly, many of them are once again writing checks to vanity presses, including Bonnie Kaye, who founded the Airleaf victims blog and whose relentless efforts are largely responsible for Airleaf's fall and the subsequent federal investigation.

She's now a customer of CCB Publishing, a print-on-demand vanity press that she calls her "new publisher."  CCB's former Airleaf clients include John Krismer, who has written a book that reveals this:

Few realize a New World Order plans to replace our constitution with a Single World Government, nor that our Federal Reserve Bank is privately owned and is not subject to oversight by Congress or the President.

[...]George H. W. Bush, the undisputed “Overlord” of the Shrub Dynasty, in his State of the Union Message in 1991 said: “What is at stake is more than one small country, it is a big idea – a new world order.” Did We the People ever agree to this treasonous act of turning over our nation’s sovereignty to a Single World Government?

Uh-huh. This is the kind of unpublishable swill that the vanity press industry thrives on. Is it any wonder he has written a check to another POD printer?

I applaud Kaye for going after Airleaf and bringing the company down...but she's still foolishly writing checks to a POD vanity press and deluding herself into thinking that she's "published." By doing so, and praising the company to other Airleaf customers, she's perpetuating the myths that the vanity press industry thrives on. How sad.

But that's not the worst of it.

Some other former Airleaf clients have become customers of Jones Harvest, a vanity press that is run by former Airleaf employees!  Those  particular Airleaf customers aren't victims at all. They are brain-dead morons.

An End Run Around Public Domain

Richard Wheeler reports that some literary heirs have found a way to undermine public domain -- they trademark the name of the author, as Zane Grey's estate has done with his name.

What the trademark accomplishes is to make it impossible for anyone to publish a Grey novel that has fallen into the public domain unless the publisher licenses the name of the author from the heirs. Oh, you can print the public domain material, all right; just don’t put the author’s name on it.

I wonder if this has ever been tested in court? If not, it probably will be soon.

Don't Expect the "Truth" about Self-Publishing from Someone Who Runs a Vanity Press

Earlier this month, I told you about a scam called "Beneaththecover.com," which purports to offer authors inside news and expert advice about the publishing industry when, in fact, it's just a front for a bunch of vanity press and book promotion hucksters selling their wares.  This point was driven home the other day when one of their so-called "experts," vanity press publisher Yvonne DiVita, offered this outrageous lie in a post she had the chutzpah to title "POD Myths Dispelled - Get The Scoop Here":

In today’s emerging digital world, if you truly want to attract that big name publisher, use a professional POD firm to self-publish because the big name publishers are watching.

The best way to attract a publisher is to write a good book, not blow thousands of dollars having it printed in POD form by a vanity press. If anything, printing your book in POD is more likely to prevent a publisher from taking you or the book seriously.

DiVita is one of a pack of POD vanity press hucksters who prey on the gullibility, desperation, and ignorance of aspiring authors. She argues that vanity presses aren't merely printers but real publishers because they pay more attention to their authors than real publishers do.  What she neglects to mention is that vanity presses like hers make the vast majority of their money off their authors, not from booksales, and that all that attention they slather on their clients (not authors, ladies and gentlemen, clients)  is to convince them to spend even more on their worthless services.  She writes:

IF authors don’t sell enough books with their publisher, POD or otherwise, the author isn’t trying hard enough. I’ve worked with traditional publishers, and they require an extensive marketing plan from authors before they will consider publication. And research shows that books published by traditional publishers sell around 150-300, on average.

That's right, blame the author for the fact that their POD vanity press books aren't sold in stores and are unlikely to sell to anyone but the client... and then back it up with pointless "facts."

I've had over two dozen books published by real publishers. No editor has ever asked me for an "extensive marketing plan" before considering my books.I've also asked a few published friends...and they have never been asked for marketing plans, either. But they are novelists, and perhaps they would be asked for one if they wrote non-fiction. So let's give DiVita the benefit of the doubt and say publishers want marketing plans along with non-fiction book proposals. To which I say... So what?  How is that a persuasive argument for going to vanity-press instead of a real publisher? You'll need a marketing plan either way. The key difference is that a real publisher will pay you and a vanity press will ask for your credit card number.

I've scoured the web and I can't find any "research" that backs up her outrageous claim that most books published by genuine publishers sell only 150-300 copies.

The closet statistic I could find to her numbers was a 2004 Bookscan study that tracked sales of 1.2 million books sold that year. According to their figures, the average book of any kind published in 2004 sold 500 copies. The study noted that only 25,000 titles sold more than 5,000 copies each, 500 sold more than 100,000 copies and only ten sold more than a million copies. But the figures are controversial, because the sales were not broken down by genre, like fiction or non-fiction, nor did they differentiate between titles from large publishers or small ones, traditional publishers or vanity presses.

But lets pretend her figures are right. How is that an argument for going to a vanity press? Authors published by real publishers whose books only sold 500 copies in 2004 were still paid to be published.  They earned money, though not as much as they'd hoped.

By comparison, most vanity press authors will lose money because they paid to be published. But don't take my word for it, let's look at the 2004 sales figures from iUniverse, the biggest name in self-publishing:

18,108: Total number of titles published

792,814: Number of copies printed

14: Number of titles sold through B&N's bricks-and-mortar stores (nationally)

83: Number of titles that sold at least 500 copies

Out of 18,000 titles and nearly 800,000 copies printed, only 83 authors sold more than 500 copies. Good God. Think of all the money that authors lost ...and how much iUniverse made. That's the business that DiVita is in...and it's a profitable one. For the printer, not the author. 

So what is the truth about POD self-publishing companies? It's obvious. Vanity presses are in the "author services business", not the publishing business which, in a rare bit of candor, even DiVita concedes on her vanity press website:

Windsor Media Enterprises specializes in author services. We  offer idea development, manuscript critiquing, editing, proofreading, formatting and cover design, for new and existing authors.

And for that, they charge you a price and that's how they make their money. That is their business. And if your book,  by some miracle, manages to sell a few copies, they make a little more. 

A vanity press will tell you any lie they can to convince you that they are real publishers (when they are merely selling editing and printing services), that self-publishing is the route most successful authors take (it's not), and that you have as much of a chance to sell books with them as you do going with a traditional publisher (you don't).

Is Yvonne DiVita really someone qualified to give writers sound advice? Or is she someone with a clear conflict-of-interest hoping to coerce naive authors into buying her product? The answer is obvious, and it came right from the founders of Beneaththecover.com  when they tried to solicit my brother Tod into being one of their experts:

Beneath the Cover is a cooperative venture for building marketing platforms of everyone involved.

That's what should be written on the masthead of their home page, not "Where book industry professionals who know almost everything go to discuss news, insights, and evolving industry issues." And it should be stated in big print on each and every piece of "advice" that they give.

Raiders of the Lost Movie Posters

Posterwire, one of my favorite blogs, led me to this excellent site dedicated to the amazing work of Richard Amsel, the artist behind the original INDIANA JONES posters, as well as memorable one-sheets for HELLO DOLLY, THE STING, THE SHOOTIST, MAD MAX: BEYOND THUNDERDOME and many other movies. 

A Partnership that's Plum Over

The Smart Bitches are reporting what I already knew -- the collaboration between my friends Janet Evanovich and Steve Cannell didn't work out. The way I heard it from Steve, their writing styles just didn't mesh but things ended amicably between them. I'm not surprised they have remained friends despite whatever creative tussles they may have had -- they are two of the nicest,  and most talented, people I know.

Welcome to My Life

Tess Gerritsen perfectly captures my life in her blog today:

Night before last, I woke up in a sweat.  I couldn’t get back to sleep because I was having an anxiety attack about my next book.  Oh, it’s nothing new — I have these from time to time, and sometimes I’ll lie awake for hours, mulling over what’s wrong with my plot, whether I’ll be able to fix it, whether I’ll meet my deadline.  When I finally do fall asleep, that anxiety follows me in the form of dreams.  Mine usually involve showing up at school for a test and suddenly realizing: I FORGOT TO ATTEND ANY CLASSES!  But I know what those dreams are really all about: how the writing is going.

No matter where I am or what else I may be doing, this job is never far from my mind.

[...]I can be sitting on a beach on vacation, yet I’ll never really relax because I know that there’s a half-written novel waiting on my desk and I have only a few months to finish it.  I can’t remember the last time I really, truly let go of the job.

She's writing about herself, but she could just as easily be writing about me. I can't remember the last time I didn't feel the pressure of a book or script deadline or spent my "free time" thinking about a story I was working on or a plot I was supposed to come up with.  When I wake up at 3:30 am with jet-lag, the thoughts that keep me from getting back to sleep always involve a plot point or anxiety about meeting a deadline. I'm not complaining, far from it. It's just nice to know that I'm not alone.

Who Says There's Anything Wrong with a Network Affiliate Owning a City's Only Newspaper?

I liked Ken Levine's observation about the Los Angeles Times' coverage of the WGA Strike:

Good news! The LA TIMES has begun its Oscar coverage with a weekly special section called THE ENVELOPE. Meanwhile, strike coverage has been relegated to the Business Section. I somehow can’t see THE DETROIT FREE-PRESS not running stories about an auto strike on page one. But then again GM doesn’t own the DETROIT FREE-PRESS.

The Times is owned by Tribune, which also owns KTLA, one of the major affiliates of CW, one of the TV networks hit by the strike.

Seinfeld Makes Larry King Look Like a Schmuck

The TV Series Finale blog linked to this video clip from a recent Larry King interview with Jerry Seinfeld that hilariously illustrates just how out-of-touch the host is with American popular culture.