Never Pay to Write

 Gabino Iglesias is becoming my spirit animal. His substack posts consistently teach me something, or confirm something I already knew. Gabino has worked his way up from self-publishing to bestseller status and is a regular reviewer for the New York Times and NPR, so his cred is solid. He’s been on a roll of late with advice to fledgling writers.IO already knew most of what he wrote, but Gabino’s unique perspective makes it that much more effective. ‘

 

Among his recent pieces was one titled, “Don’t Pay to Write.” I’m going to quote from it here, adding my own perspective to what he says, but it’s relatively short and always on point, so I strongly encourage you to read the original. You won’t be sorry.

 

The theme of the article is that writing is work, and people get paid for their work. (“When you get your car fixed, the mechanic doesn’t pay you. You know why? Because they are the ones with the knowledge and the ones putting in the time and work to fix your car.”) I have long believed writers are their – our – own worst enemies, feeding a race to the bottom through a willingness to do anything to get their words on a page or a web site. As a general rule, don’t let anyone publish your stuff unless you get paid. Quoting Gabino: “Exposure isn’t that great, it’s something you die from.”

 

Here's Gabino’s checklist to make sure you don’t get taken, with my comments. (I only lifted the first sentence or two from his post. Again, you should read the whole thing. If you don’t think it was worth your time, I’ll send you a full refund, no questions asked.)

 

1.    Always read submission guidelines carefully.* I see this one as doubly important:

a.    To make sure you don’t overlook some dumb thing that gives them an excuse to reject you. Editors are looking for new voices, but they may get 500 submissions for ten slots, and at least fifty will be good enough to include. They’re looking for ways to cull the herd whether they’ll admit it or not.

b.    To make sure they’re worth messing with. If their guidelines, which they expect you to follow to the letter, are vague, poorly worded, or have multiple typos, they don’t really know what they’re doing.

2.    Do your research. As Butch Cassidy famously said, “Who are those guys?” Check them out on the web. Do you know anyone who has worked with them? When in doubt, check Victoria Strauss’s “Writer Beware” resources, or Preditors and Editors. (New P&E website under construction.)

3.    NEVER pay to get published. Ever. Under any circumstances. Two things come to mind:

a.    What does it say about the value you place on the result of your labor and talent that you don’t even think you can give it away? Which you also should never do. (More on that later.)

b.    What impression does that create? How much can they value your work if they weren’t willing to pay you for it?

4.    Vanity presses are predators. Full stop. It doesn’t matter what they promise you or what kind of contract they offer. They are preying on the members of the herd who don’t know any better.

 

You might be willing to write something for free. You have to be the judge of which of these exceptions apply to you, but I have done two of the following for free:

1.    Charity. I wrote a story to Unloaded 2, an anthology that sent all its profits to a gun control organization. I also contributed a story for Down to the River, which sent its proceed to American Rivers, an organization that works to protect our rivers. I was flattered to have been asked to take part in each of these endeavors and proud to have played some small part in noble causes.

2.    Loyalty. I wrote a story for The Shamus Sampler Part 2 because the editor had extended himself on my behalf in the past.

3.    Making a statement. I haven’t done this one yet, in part because I tend to put my statements here, so I have an outlet. If opportunity presents and I have something I feel strongly about, I’ll line up.

 

Writing is an occupation. It may not be your full-time job – if all you write is fiction it almost certainly is not – but it’s a job. Treat it with the respect you show your day job. If you don’t respect your work enough to demand consideration for it, why should anyone else?

 

(* - This applies to contracts, too. Read every word. I sold what I think is the best story I ever wrote without realizing I was selling the rights essentially in perpetuity. I’ve found ways around this for promotional purposes, but I would have loved to find a good outlet for reprints.)

 

"No One Buys Books"

 (Sincere thanks to Gabino Iglesias for bringing this to my attention. The summer will include several posts similar to this, all thanks to his insights and willingness to share them. If you’re not following his Substack, you really ought to.)

 

It has become almost a mantra for me on Facebook. A friend posts an item about a publisher and I reply, “Every time I hear something else about the publishing industry, the less I want to be a part of it.” Sometimes I go on at greater length, depending on the initial post.

 

I have reasons for this distaste, but the core has been eloquently summarized  by Elle Griffin in her article for The Elysian, “No one buys books.” It’s long but well worth your time if you’re a writer or aspiring write, as all professions should be viewed in the hard, cold light of day.

 

The purpose of Ms. Griffin’s article is to describe what was made public by industry insiders at the anti-trust trial resulting from Penguin Random House’s attempt to purchase Simom and Schuster for $2.2 billion. Keep that figure in mind, as much of the testimony revolves around the idea there’s no money to be made in publishing.

 

I should probably leave well enough alone, as I cannot do justice to Ms. Griffin’s piece in the space I have here, nor can I match her ability to distill the evidence from a long trial into an article. She took a year to read the book that broke down the trial; I’m not going to do that. (You can read the book if you want the gruesome details.)

 

What I’ll do here is describe the sense of what a writer with a borderline career thinks about all of this. Consider or ignore my comments as you see fit. As always, please feel free to comment either here or on social media.

 

I’ll list the headings from Ms. Griffin’s piece, with my thoughts inserted, along with a few salient quotes.

 

Bestsellers are rare.

Q. Do you know approximately how many authors there are across the industry with 500,000 units or more during this four-year period?

A. My understanding is that it was about 50.

Q. 50 authors across the publishing industry who during this four-year period sold more than 500,000 units in a single year?

A. Yes.

— Madeline Mcintosh, CEO, Penguin Random House US

 

I think we all figured something like this, but god damn. Fifty over four years?

 

Big advances go to celebrities.

Top-selling authors were defined as those receiving advances (i.e., guaranteed money) in excess of $250,000. Far fewer than 1 percent of authors receive advances over that mark; Publishers Marketplace, which tracks these things, recorded 233 such deals in all of 2022.

— ken whyte, Publisher at Sutherland House

 

This was a safe bet, too. More on this later.

 

Franchise authors are the other big category.

Q. Putnam typically publishes about 60 books a year. Correct?

A. 60, 65, sort of on average… I will say of those 65, though, a good portion of those are repeat authors… franchise authors that we regularly publish every year, sometimes twice a year.

— Sally Kim, SVP and Publisher, Putnam

 

Can you say “James Patterson” or “John Grisham?” Not only are they getting all the money, they’re squeezing the rest of us out of the available publishing slots. I don’t hold this against either author – I’m in favor of anything that gets an author paid, keeps people reading, and doesn’t involve AI-generated content – but how can publishers be that lazy or timid not to want to keep trying to develop more writers for their stables?

 

Publishing houses want a built-in audience.

In some of the cases, the reason they are paying big money is because the person has a big platform. And if that platform is there for the advertising, then the spend might be lower.

 

— Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, former Agent

 

I can’t blame them for this, but I’m also aware most corporations take it as the cost of doing business to build audiences for their products, whether we’re talking about cars  or dish soap.

 

A big audience means publishing houses don’t have to spend money on marketing.

Well, duh. Of course, that doesn’t mean they won’t spend a bunch to paper buses, subway stations, and other easily visible locations with ads when one of the big boys drops a new one, when all they’d have to do is let the word out through social media and the fans will line up to buy the book..

 

Publishing houses pay for Amazon placement.

Q.  Penguin Random House has hired data scientists to try and figure out these [Amazon] algorithms so that its books get better presented on Amazon than its competitors’ books?

A. One of the many efforts that we pursue, correct.

Q. And Penguin Random House pays Amazon to improve its search results?

A. There is something that is available to our publishers, it’s called Amazon Marketing Services, AMS, and all publishers can spend money and give it to Amazon to have hopefully better search results.

 

— Markus Dohle, CEO, Penguin Random House

 

We all know publishers pay independent bookstores for placement. (Cover out, front table, special displays, etc.) It’s also not improper for Amazon to feature the books it thinks people are most likely to buy. That’s what they do, sell books. Paying to juke the stats that feed the algorithms cuts the legs out from the smaller publishers and independents without Amazon acknowledging the search results that are ostensibly tailored for each reader are artificially skewed. Every day I’m one baby step closer to sending my books out free as PDFs to anyone who sends a request via social media or e-mail.

 

But even celebrity books don’t sell…

Just because the publisher pays $250,000 or $500,000 or $1 million for a book does not guarantee that a single person is going to buy it. A lot of what we do is unknowable and based on inspiration and optimism.”

— Michael Pietsch, CEO, Hachette

 

I told you we’d come back to the massive celebrity advances. There are a lot more quotes in Ms. Griffin’s article, but the gist of it is the publishers have no idea what’s going to sell. Frankly, they seem to have little idea what they’re doing. As I have said for years, publishers will freely admit they don’t know what will sell, only what won’t. And your book won’t.

 

Books don’t make money.

About half of the books we publish make money, and a much lower percentage of them earn back the advance we pay.

 

— Jonathan Karp, CEO, Simon & Schuster

 

Yet PRH was willing to pay $2.2 billion for S&S. If that’s not a prima facie case for people who

a.    Don’t know what they’re doing;

b.    Are at best disseminating about the money to be made;

I don’t know what is.

 

Oh, wait a minute.

 

It’s all about the backlist.

I would actually expect a book that is selling 300,000 units in a year is probably going to sell at least 400,000 or 500,000 over its life once you get backlist in there too.

 

Our backlist brings in about a third of our annual revenues, so $300 million a year roughly, a little less.

 

— Michael Pietsch, CEO, Hachette

 

Also known as the “long tail.” It doesn’t take Paul Krugman to figure out this is a good sales vehicle, given the primary decision factor when buying a book is author name recognition. The long tail would also benefit what used to be called the mid-list if publishers could be bothered to deal with the mid-list again, but they’d rather go the same route that has so badly damaged the film industry and bet the bank on bestsellers they already know are at best fifty-fifty to recover their money.

 

Amazon is the biggest threat to the industry.

Q. Are you concerned that Amazon will favor Penguin Random House Simon & Schuster in terms of promotion and distribution and discoverability?

A. Yes.

 

— Donald Weisberg, CEO, Macmillan Publishers

 

Because they’ll pay more to juke the algorithms. Just as Macmillan could do, and almost certainly does at the expense of smaller publishers.

 

A “Netflix of Books” would put publishing houses out of business.

We all know about Netflix, we all know about Spotify and other media categories, and we also know what it has done to some industries… The music industry has lost, in the digital transformation, approximately 50 percent of its overall revenue pool.

 

— Markus Dohle, CEO, Penguin Publishing House

 

Yet movies still get made and music produced. Maybe the publishers might want to look into a business model that provides for this. It’s harsh – and likely a death knell for small, independent booksellers – but any entity with $2.2 billion to buy a competitor has the wherewithal to adapt to the times.

 

Authors are getting more independent.

I think really from the advent of online—really, once the internet became popular, you know, we heard the phrase disintermediation. And I don’t understand why that wouldn’t be a possible prospect for any best selling author, to just disintermediate, to go straight to the internet and sell directly if you have a following… Colleen Hoover has published with both Amazon and Simon & Schuster. And her Amazon book was on the independent book sellers’ best seller list. So what that says to me is that a Rubicon has been crossed.

 

— Jonathan Karp, CEO, Simon & Schuster

 

Gee, I wonder why. How many of us have gone to conferences and heard how even the top sellers are regularly badgered by their publishers to write more books quicker, do more promotions, and fudge what they write to suit the publisher’s perceived audience? Who needs that bullshit?

 

Another publishing house bites the dust.

After the Judge denied the merger, Penguin went through a massive round of layoffs and Simon & Schuster was sold to a private equity company instead.

 

Private equity tends to have one game plan: buy a company, load it with debt, wring out costs to improve its financials, sell at a profit. Dealing Simon & Schuster to private equity, The New Republic warned at the time with some slight hyperbole of its own, would mean “absolute devastation and wholesale job loss.”

 

— ken whyte

 

Private equity firms are evil incarnate, cannibalizing companies and destroying jobs for the short-term profit of a few investors with no regard for an industry, or the economy. This is not unique to publishing. If these vultures didn’t see a way forward to make money from publishing, they wouldn’t buy the companies. There’s a cognitive dissonance here someone should be able to exploit at some level.

 

#  #  #

It’s a shitty situation, but it doesn’t have to be the nuclear winter of publishing. Baseball analyst Bill James once wrote that if Major League Baseball as we know it were to fold overnight, professional baseball would be resurrected inside of a year. Different teams in different cities, but there are too many people willing to pay to watch young men play baseball for the enterprise to disappear.

 

There are also too many readers willing to pay money to read for books to go away. The business model may change – it almost has to – but books will always be around in some form because there will always be people willing to pay to read them. To those who say the reading public is aging out, I say there are more old people on the way, and old people read more as other, more physical activities are denied them.

 

We’re living through an historical sea change, and history is never as clean, or inevitable, as books make it sound fifty or a hundred years later. It’s messy, it’s uncomfortable, and it’s a little like wrestling with a pig: you both get dirty, and the pig likes it.

 

But that doesn’t mean you can’t come out ahead if you stick with it.

 

 

 

Things All Writers Should Beware

 

Gabino Iglesias is a writer, professor, book reviewer, editor, and translator living in Austin, TX. He is the author of Zero Saints and Coyote Songs and the editor of Both Sides. His work has been translated into five languages, optioned for film, nominated to the Bram Stoker Award and the Locus Award and won the Wonderland Book Award for Best Novel in 2019. His reviews appear regularly in places like NPR, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the San Francisco Chronicle, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Criminal Element, Mystery Tribune, and other venues. He's been a juror for the Shirley Jackson Awards twice, the Newfound Prose Prize, the Splatterpunk Awards, and PANK Magazine's Big Book Contest. He teaches creative writing at SNHU's online MFA program and runs a series of low-cost writing workshops.

 

He and I have not met in person, but we follow each other on Facebook and (for the time being) Twitter. Even his casual comments are worth listening to, and you should pay close attention when he takes the time to spell something out.

 

The following list of things to beware when submitting to magazines and anthologies (or agents and publishers, for that matter) appeared in Twitter a little while ago and are worth the time of every writer, even if only for validation.

 

1. Unless you can buy food and pay rent with exposure wherever you live, focus on paying anthologies. There are some situations—charity anthologies, tributes, etc—where this rule can be ignored.

 

2. Any editor or publisher that asks you to pay to be in a book is a predatory asshole. Tell those people to go die in a tire fire. A real professional editor will never ask a writer to pay their way into an anthology. The money goes to you, not the other way around.

 

3. Just like you should never pay to be in an anthology, working with a professional publisher means that they will not ask you to pay for a cover, editing, proofreading, formatting, or layout. A real press takes care of all that, which is why sometimes small payments are okay.

 

4. Covers matter, and anyone who tells you otherwise is someone you don’t want to work with. If the cover is trash, there’s a chance they also don’t care much about what goes into the book.

 

5. If you’re reading a submission call and find a dozen typos and a few misspelled words, forget about it and move on. Your aim should be to always work with professionals who care about what they put out there.

 

6. Read submission calls carefully and follow the guidelines. Don't send in stuff you know isn't a fit. You want to work with professionals, and sometimes that starts with you behaving like one.

 

7. If you are ever in doubt about a publisher or editor, reach out to someone who’s been around the block a few times. Ask questions. Most of the writers who have been in the game for a while are willing to help new authors stay safe and make the right decisions.

 

8. I know this one is tough, but your desire to see your name in print should not blind you from the things happening around you. An editor or publisher who works with racists, bigots, or sexual harassers is not someone you want to work with. If it is, that says a lot about you.

 

9. Get a contract and read it carefully. Promises are for religious stuff and to help dying folks shove off this mortal coil in peace, not for business. Get things in writing and know what you're getting into.

 

10. Don't be afraid because big names are attached to a project or because lots of writers are submitting. Do your best, but do it. Submit. Try. Keep at it.

 

11. Lastly, don't take rejections personally. I've been rejected by strangers and friends alike. I've had to reject NYT bestsellers because their story wasn't a good fit. And remember: all editors have different tastes and rejections are invitations to send your stuff elsewhere.