Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America

Archive for September, 2009

Orion Among the Stars

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

Orion Among the Stars by Ben Bova
(Available for Purchase)

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Just In Time For Love by Michael Bracken

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

Just In Time For Love by Michael Bracken
(Available for Purchase)

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Straight to my Lover’s Heart by Richard Bowes

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

Straight to my Lover’s Heart by Richard Bowes

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Feral Cell by Richard Bowes

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

Feral Cell by Richard Bowes
(Available for Purchase)

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To Touch life by F. Alexander Brejcha

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

To Touch Life by F. Alexander Brejcha

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The Scent of Jasmine by Tom Brennan

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

The Scent of Jasmine by Tom Brennan

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In the Pound, Near Breaktime by Kent Brewster

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

In the Pound, Near Breaktime by Kent Brewster
Nebula Nominated Short Story, 1996

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Victoria Strauss — VDM Verlag Dr. Mueller

Monday, September 14th, 2009

For some time, I’ve been receiving questions about VDM Verlag Dr Mueller, a German academic publisher. VDM describes its business thus:

VDM publishes academic research worldwide – at no cost to our authors. Annually, we publish more than 10,000 new titles and are thus one of the leading publishing houses of academic research. We specialize in publishing theses, dissertations, and research projects.

VDM uses digital technology (which it dubs “print-to-order [PTO], a further development of the print-on-demand [POD] procedure”) to make its books and monographs “available” (which just means they can be special-ordered) through online and physical booksellers. There’s no cost to authors, who receive a “fee” plus “up to” 20 free copies of their book. There’s also no editing or proofreading: what you turn in is what’s printed, and the process for doing so, in which authors essentially create their own books and covers, is very similiar to uploading content to a self-publishing service. Retail prices are absurdly inflated, even for a digitally-based publisher. As for marketing, “data is optimized by the publishing house and entered in all relevant catalogues worldwide. The book is offered to the leading international book distributors.” Put another way: there isn’t any.

VDM, in other words, is an academic author mill.

Author mills, which must maintain an enormous volume of authors in order to make money, have a voracious appetite. Those that feed on book writers need only lie in wait on the Internet, since book writers are actively seeking publication–but students and professors may not be, or may be looking only in specialized areas, so rather than wait for them to come to it, an academic author mill must go to them. VDM (and its clones–see the last paragraph) do a lot of cold call solicitation.

If you receive one of VDM’s emails, and you’ve got an old dissertation sitting around, you may think you have nothing to lose, and might even get a little exposure and a bit of money. Be warned, though: the terms of VDM’s contract (which Writer Beware has seen) are not author-friendly.

- The contract requires an exclusive life-of-copyright rights transfer, without any provision for releasing those rights other than VDM failing to publish or deciding to discontinue publication. The author’s only possible recourse would appear to be Article 41 of the German Copyright Act, which allows writers to revoke licenses “[i]f the holder of an exclusive exploitation right does not exercise such right or exercises it insufficiently.” VDM doesn’t allow the author to exercise this entitlement until five years have passed, however–and good luck proving “insufficiently.”

- The contract allows VDM to transfer the licenses you’ve granted to third parties without your permission (though if it’s paid for those uses, you get 50%).

- In the contract I saw (as well as in this archived VDM author information sheet from mid-2008), ebook royalties were 40%, and print royalties 12%–both paid on net revenue. This may be a relatively recent policy for the company, however. My research turned up discussion from 2007 suggesting that VDM was paying print authors just 3% of net.

- Royalties are scheduled to be paid just once a year.

- Or possibly never. “In order to cover the administration expense and the data management,” VDM is not obliged to pay you anything if your royalties average 10 euros or less per month. With a print-on-demand academic book, this is entirely possible–indeed, it’s quite likely, especially given VDM’s eye-popping cover prices. Moreover, if royalties average 50 euros or less per month, you’ll receive book vouchers instead of money. I would guess that VDM rarely has to write a royalty check.

VDM also does business as VDM Publishing House, LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, Südwestdeutsche Verlag für Hochschulschriften, Verlag Classic Edition (VCE), and Alphascript Publishing–which appears to specialize in cobbling free Wikipedia entries into expensive books, (VDM’s defense of this policy can be seen here).

Tags: victoria strauss, Writer Beware
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Intro to Publishing Contracts

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

This 34 page .pdf document by Sean P. Fodera and C. E. Petit  provides an overview to publishing contracts.

Publishing contracts are, as a rule, neither well organized nor well written. Related, but critical, provisions are often scattered in provisions from the front to the back, and a provision on page six will often negate or vastly modify a provision on page two. Further, there is no such thing as a “standard” contract that cuts across publishers, across types of books, or across much of anything.
We have organized this presentation thematically, rather than trying to perform a paragraph-by-paragraph dissection of a contract that may bear little resemblance to either a preexisting contract you might encounter or your (or your clients’) particular needs. In the appendices, you’ll find two representative publishing contracts. Materials from the morning session include more publishing contracts and clauses, and comparing all of the materials should be educational—if all too often frustrating.

Download the .pdf

Tags: c.e. petit, contracts, Publishing, sean p. fodera
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Victoria Strauss — Writers’ Myth: “You Have To Know Someone”

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

We’ve punctured a number of writers’ myths on this blog, including the notion that commercially-published writers must give back their advances if their books don’t earn out, the fear that agents and editors will blacklist writers who displease them, the conviction that “just getting it out there” (via self-publishing, for instance) is enough to jump-start a career, the idea that getting published is some kind of crapshoot, and the “everyone has to start somewhere” excuse that throws so many writers into the arms of amateur agents and publishers.

Here’s another one: “You have to know someone in order to get published.”

Agents and editors simply aren’t interested in work by unknown writers, this myth goes, because unknowns are too risky. In order to get attention for your debut manuscript, you need to be famous, have a friend or relative in the publishing biz, be referred by a client, or already possess a publishing track record (hence a popular variant of the myth, “You can’t get published without an agent, but you can’t get an agent unless you’re published”). Without these connections, your chances of selling your first book are practically nil.

Of course, having connections doesn’t hurt. But trust me, they aren’t a pre-requisite for publication. If they were, very few debuts would ever reach the market.

Along with the “everyone has to start somewhere” fallacy, the “you have to know someone” myth is one of the most pernicious, because it convinces many writers that it’s not even worth trying for commercial publication. Instead of boldly querying the top agents who can get their manuscripts onto the desks of editors at big publishing houses, or going direct to the reputable independent publishers that accept unagented submissions, many writers who buy into this myth confine their queries to amateur or track-recordless agents, or decide to self-publish, or approach only micro-presses. Of course, while hooking up with an amateur agent is never a good move, self- or micro-press publication can be entirely appropriate in the right circumstances. But if you have commercial ambitions, it’s probably not the best place to start–especially if you haven’t even given the commercial route a chance. You’ll never know whether you could have succeeded if you don’t try.

We’ve actually touched on this myth before. Then, we had only anecdotal evidence with which to debunk it. Now there’s something a bit more solid.

A few weeks back, YA author Megan Crewe decided to conduct an inquiry into the publishing connections myth. She recently published the results of her poll–and they’re very interesting.

270 writers participated, representing a variety of genres: children’s picture books, middle grade, YA, adult genre, and adult literary/mainstream. Although “[o]nly 55% of the respondents had an agent when they sold their first book,”

[t]he majority of the authors who had an agent, got that agent with no prior connection (62%). They simply cold-queried the agent, submitted their book or proposal, and were offered representation…

Authors were even less likely to have a connection to the editor who bought their first book. 72% sold to an editor they had no connection to (28% cold-queried or submitted on their own, 44% had their agent submit to an editor the author didn’t know).

Megan’s conclusion:

The poll wasn’t perfect, but it seems pretty clear to me that having connections in the publishing industry is far from necessary when it comes to both getting an agent and getting an editor to buy your book. So if you have connections, sure, go ahead and use them. Certainly can’t hurt. But if you don’t have any, if you can’t afford to go to conferences to meet agents and editors, don’t despair. Cold querying works just fine!

There you have it–persuasive proof that you do not, in fact, need to know anyone in order to sell your first book.

(A note on the respondents who sold their first books without an agent: Given the reluctance of the larger houses to deal with unagented authors, the fact that nearly half the respondents had no agent surprises me. However, many respondents appear to have been children’s picture book writers, which is one of the markets in which it’s more feasible to go agentless, even with the bigger publishers. Also, the numbers may be skewed by when the writers sold their books–before the 1990′s, the big houses were still relatively open to unagented writers–or to whom, since smaller publishers are more likely to be willing to work directly with authors.)

(And another note, on why, rather than triggering publishers’ and agents’ risk-averseness, new writers can actually be more attractive than established ones: A new writer is an unknown quantity. He or she could fail–but s/he could also break big. J.K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer are extreme examples, but there are many more modest ones. An established writer, on the other hand, is a known quantity, since publishers and agents always have access to his or her Bookscan numbers–and this is not always a good thing, especially if the writer’s sales have been flat over a couple of books, or if they’re actually shrinking. In those circumstances, the publisher may well well feel that the untapped potential of the brand-new writer is a better investment than the lackluster track record of the established author, who may have proven his/her talent and professionalism, but has also demonstrated that s/he is not going to break out. This is why I’m always saying that while the difficulty of first publication hasn’t changed greatly over the past few decades, sustaining a career has become enormously more challenging.)

Tags: victoria strauss, Writer Beware
Posted in SFWA Blog, Writer Beware | 7 Comments »

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