[00:00:01.720] - Sunyi
Hi, I'm Sunyi Dean.

[00:00:03.600] - Scott
And I'm Scott Drakeford, and this is The publishing rodeo podcast.

[00:00:06.530] - Sunyi
In 2022, we both launched debut novels in the same genre with the same publisher in the same year. But despite having very similar starts, our books, and subsequently each of our careers, went in very different directions.

[00:00:21.870] - Scott
That pattern repeats itself throughout the industry over and over. Why do some books succeed while others seem to be dead on arrival?

[00:00:30.580] - Sunyi
In this podcast, we aim to answer these questions and many more, along with how to build and maintain an author career.

[00:00:38.420] - Scott
Everyone signing a contract deserves to know what they're really signing up for. In an industry that loves its secrets. We'll be sharing real details from real people. We'll cover the gamut of life as a big five published author, from agents to publishing contracts, finances, and more.

[00:00:59.720] - Sunyi
Welcome to Publishing Rodeo. So this week we are doing an episode on predatory presses, or vanity publishers, whichever your preferred term is. And this is a topic we've not actually gone into very much because I kind of assumed, wrongly, I think, that a lot of the people listening would be if you're on submission, if you have an agent, that's not necessarily an interesting topic to people who are past that stage of querying, but we do actually get contact from quite a few writers who are still at the querying point or who've had experiences with these kinds of presses in the past. And I think it might be a good idea to talk about these publishers and how people can keep themselves safe. So we have with us today, just a very quick aside, I'm really sorry. I've got a list. I've just had braces put in like two days ago. Anyway, we have with us James D. Macdonald, who I first encountered on the absolute right for forums. And if you've ever heard the phrase money flows to the author, I believe James is the person who's credited with actually coming up with that phrase and popularizing it.

[00:02:00.980] - Sunyi
And I have learned so much indirectly through his posts. I don't think he ever in his writings and his activities about vanity presses and how to stay safe. So if you'd feel up to it, would you like to introduce yourself and tell people how you are and how you came to be involved in fighting predatory publishers?

[00:02:17.660] - James
Hi, I'm Jim Macdonald and I am a writer. I've been published since 88 with my wife. We wrote together. We have upwards of 30 novels and a whole lot of short stories published for money because you can't take awards or the adulation of the millions to the grocery store. How I became interested in the demimonde of scam Publishing. There I was in beautiful downtown Colebrook, New Hampshire, where I live, and we've got a weekly newspaper which publishes things like the results of the Cub Scout Pinewood Derby and the week's menu at the high school and things like that. They have to do something to keep the ads, you know, hitting each other. So when local man publishes book, which I've been doing regularly for a lot of years at that point, hey, that made front page news. I got home, and here is the phone ringing, and my name is in the phone book. I'm not hard to find. Here's a guy calling from Groveton, New Hampshire, which is about 2020, 5 miles down the road, a decaying mill town, which is the process of having its last mill shut down. And he wanted to know how much it had cost me to publish my book.

[00:03:36.710] - James
And I said, no, no, you don't understand. I don't pay publishers. Publishers pay me. And we got to talking, and it turned out that he had sold his first book to what was called Sovereign Publishing up in Canada. And Sovereign explained to him that because publishing, especially first books, is so difficult, such a chassis thing, that publishers and authors split the cost of publishing. So he had a. He had mortgaged his house to pay his half of the publishing fee. Mortgaging your house in a decaying milltown. Oh, man, we're talking about somebody who is literally betting the farm on his writing. I've never heard of sovereign publishing, even though they claim to be Canada's fastest growing publisher. I suppose that's true. If they published one book last year, two books this year, that's 100% growth. That's, you know, pretty decent. I got interested in this, and I looked around. I was doing school visits, where you go to the schools and you talk to the kids about the happy, carefree life of the freelance writer and things like that. And I was noticing flyers from sovereign Publishing tacked up in the teachers rooms, do you have a book?

[00:04:53.510] - James
And I said, wait a minute. Because publishers generally don't go looking for authors. Authors go looking for publishers. This just did not smell right. The publisher of sovereign Publishing, I'm not making this up, was a guy named Don Felon, which should have been a clue. And he was collecting the money from the authors, and the money that they were paying was sufficient to pay to publish a book. I mean, they were paying a lot. But he was not using all that money to publish a book. He was using to print two copies at some jiffy printhead. And those get sent back to the author. Those were the author's copies, and there would be zero other copies out there. Don, he needed to get more and more people sending him checks. So he started to write letters to marginal agents out there. And there are a lot of marginal agents saying, do you have people submitting books to you that you don't want to represent? Send them to me, and I will send you a finder's fee based on what they give me. It's nothing. It's not a kickback. It's a finders fee. Perfectly legal. So he was getting more people.

[00:06:03.270] - James
Then he said, wait a minute. Why am I paying money to all these goombas out there? Wouldn't it be better for me just to create a literary agency myself and have people send their manuscripts to me, and I would sell the book to my own publisher? It was great. And then he said, well, if one agency is good, two would be better. So he had them. Late names like Anthony A. Aardvark. Literary relations all began with letter a. So they were at the top of whatever list, and people would send them to him. Eventually, authors started to call their agent on the phone, say, hey, what's the matter here? Haven't seen my royalties. You know what's up? And the agent would say, well, don't know a thing about it. And so the author would then call the publisher and not notice that the same voice answered the phone at both numbers. But eventually, authors did start to put things together. This is back in the early days of the web, when people were starting to talk to each other. And eventually, somebody entered a legal action against Don. And because they were Canadians, too, they could do that without, because getting into international law is just a real bear.

[00:07:12.050] - James
You don't want to do that. So Don decided to screw this. And he did. The midnight flit. He was gone. He was banished, leaving behind all the stuff in the office that he had rented. So the landlord said, well, you know, since Don left, everything here belongs to me, including all the manuscripts. So the landlord of the building took all these unpublished manuscripts and sold them to yet another marginal press up there in Canada, then wrote to all the authors because their authors names and addresses were right on the first page of the manuscript and said, we have possession of your manuscript. Unless you pay for its return, we will publish it ourselves and keep all the money. This is actually not right. But a whole bunch of authors did pay to get their books out of hock because the right situation was difficult at this point. And that's what became of Don. Felon. At about the same time, we had a guy by the name of Bill Apfel, if I recall correctly, out in Buffalo, New York, had this similar kind of scheme, which was he who set up as a book doctor. This is called Edit, Inc.

[00:08:27.070] - James
What Bill did, because he was. His day job, was a swimming pool salesman in Buffalo, New York. And I don't know if you guys know what Buffalo is like, but it's pretty friggin cold there. He had a lot of time and not a lot of sales, but he even got a column called ask the book doctor in writer's Digest. People would send them his manuscript, and he would have the manuscript edited and sent back. And people paid him a lot of money for this. What they didn't know was that Bill had hired a bunch of high school students to do the actual editing. You know, people in the honors english class, they. You know, they edit it. Whether they were good editors or not, I don't know. Bill then decided to do the same thing that Don felon had done with. With the agencies. He said, why am I paying these finders feeds to all these goombas out there, when I could just set up agencies myself and have everybody send their stuff to me? So he set up, you know, the 123 literary agency, the Abercrombie and Apple literary agency, and all these things.

[00:09:33.990] - James
His partner, that was Bill Apple, and his partner was Denise Stearns. And they did pretty well until the state of New York noticed that this was going on. And there were. There was wire fraud, and there were tax problems and all this stuff. Eventually, this is one of the rare cases where it actually went to court, went to trial, and Bill Appfell was required to repay $5 million in restitution to the authors, which will give you an idea of how much money he brought in. If he had to pay back five mil. Unfortunately, he'd already spent it. So I don't know if anybody got their money. But that was Eliot Spitzer, when he was attorney general of the state of New York, who did that before. He had some ethical problems of his own. I don't know if you recall what happened to Bora or Eliot Spitzer. That's aside from literary. That has nothing to do with literary things.

[00:10:26.720] - Scott
We're not from that area, and probably not that era.

[00:10:32.700] - James
About that same time, there was a guy down in Frederick, Maryland, Wilhelm Miners, who was from. From Holland, and he had a partner named Larry Kloepfer, another partner named Miranda. Whatever Miranda's last name was. Not important. She was the literary brains, because she'd been an english grad student before she ran into problems down in, down the southwest somewhere. And Bill Miners, he was with an out and out vanity Press. You send us the money and we will publish your book. He had used Bill Apfuls edit, Inc. As his editing arm. Because, you know, every author knows that your book has to be edited, right? What they don't know is that with a legitimate publisher, the publisher pays the editor. The editor is on the publisher's staff, and you, the author, do not pay diddly. And certainly you're not paying for a high school student to go over it with a red pencil, even though that that student might be really pretty good. But bill Miners in his. In his vanity press, and that was called Erica. House named it for his wife, Erica. He noticed something very interesting, which was that a vanity press author could.

[00:11:49.930] - James
Could sell 75 copies of his book, or if he was a real go getter, maybe 100, 2130 copies. That's, you know, sell them to mom and dad, your best friend from high school, the guys in dad's car pool. You take it down to the church hall after church and you sell it. You know what? People are sitting around eating coffee and drinking donuts or whatever it is you do at church reception halls. And you're going to want to have a couple of cases of books in your basement, just in case somebody wants to buy one. And a case of books in the trunk of your car. I mean, you just want those, don't you? He said, everybody, no matter how bad the book, if half the pages are blank and the rest are printed upside down, can sell 75 copies. So he came up with a brilliant plan, which was he would not charge anything. He would charge nothing. He would accept pretty much anything if he did the cheapest possible job of production and the cheapest possible printing, thanks to print on demand, you throw a manuscript file into a docutech machine, an IBM docutek, and it spits out a paperback book at the far end.

[00:12:59.840] - James
It's great. And if he raised the COVID price high enough to a level that only your family and friends are going to pay, because he figured only family and friends are going to buy it anyway, so what the hell? He could make a profit on those 75 copies. Now, if somebody sold only 60, that's okay, because somebody else would sell 80. It's all working the average, the same way a casino works. You know, somebody might make a million dollars at a casino, but that's because 10,000 other people lost 10,000. This was publish America, Pa. Otherwise known as publish anything, you know?

[00:13:35.310] - Scott
I think so. So, Jim, just to give you a little background, because I sure don't expect you to have listened to all of our episodes are. But we have. Yeah, I haven't listened to them all either. We have something, you know, like 40 or 50 hours at this point of basically talking through mostly traditional publishing and the positives and negatives and what we're, what we're hoping to do really with this episode is correct. What may be a misperception of. Well, a misperception on the part of some people who have heard us criticizing trad publishing. And take that as an endorsement of vanity presses, like Pa, like all these others that you've mentioned. But one thing that I find interesting as you're going through that last example of publish America, is that my complaints with traditional publishing, and I may get into a little bit of trouble here with respect to people. They sign on small deals and then do not do a very good job of publishing, mirrors that experience very closely. Right. Except that they have distribution networks set up and they can throw larger number of books onto shelves just by virtue of being the publishers that they are and having the relationships that they do.

[00:15:10.750] - Scott
And they don't have to really worry too much about it because they'll probably make money on any book they publish, even if it doesn't sell very many copies, because we. They don't tell us this, but it's very obvious that they spend a whole lot more on the production process on some books versus others. That said, traditional publishing does have a lot of legitimate positives, even for people who haven't received the lead title treatment. Whereas nearly universally, I would say. I like to hedge, but this is a case where it's probably safe to say universally, vanity presses and even, I guess, hybrid. I don't even know what you define as hybridization, but vanity presses are universally not a good idea. And we as a show do not endorse anybody ever paying money to have your book published, particularly in the case that this publisher does not then have set plans and capabilities to do something with that book. Now, when you get into indie publishing, right, when you're indie publishing, you're likely going to pay somebody for editing services, you're likely going to pay for production of your physical copies, maybe even design of your digital copies, etcetera.

[00:16:32.590] - Scott
And that's a little bit different thing, though. Maybe not too different, but yeah. Long story short, publishing rodeo does not love vanity presses.

[00:16:43.840] - Sunyi
I actually have learned something from the stories you're telling just now about the agency stuff, because, you know, I used to. I've spent a lot of time in, like, Facebook writing groups, talking to people about trad publishing. And there used to be, like, a couple of them, but one woman in particular in one of these Facebook groups who was, who claimed to be an agent, and she was always coming out to shell for vanity publishers, like Pegasus was one. She was always going, oh, no, they have legitimate contracts. I was thinking, what is this person who sends their authors to Pegasus? But actually, I mean, it's probably what you're saying. She's either on the take from them or she is them with, like, a fake account or something. Anyway, I have that lady blocked now because she drove me insane. But I think the most amount ive ever heard someone spending is about 25 grand on trying to get their book published. But it feels like even upwards of ten grand is not that unusual these days.

[00:17:37.580] - James
No, it is not at all.

[00:17:40.040] - Sunyi
Its a staggering amount of money. But one of the things that these publishers tend to say is they now, you know, as awareness of vanity presses have. Have grown, and I guess I tend to call them predatory presses because vanity gets people's backs up and it doesn't really matter. Right. Predatory. They kind of wear different faces, either legit or hybrid, or a lot of them will say, we are selective, and we do review our submissions. And I think that this is something you actually tested with, the Atlanta nights. The Atlanta Nights project, if you want to talk about that a bit.

[00:18:09.650] - James
Atlanta Knights. Yeah. Eventually, Wilhelm kind of pissed me off. I'd been quite vocal a number of places. So he wrote this. He created a webpage somewhere called authors market, or I think that was what it was called, where he said, you know, science fiction writers don't know what they're talking about. They are inept practitioners with undemanding art. So if they tell you that something's a bad scam or they tell you how to get published, don't believe them. Unlike publish America, which carefully vets all of its manuscripts, only picks the top ones and all this. So I decided to see if I could create a manuscript set with realistic characters in today's world, which publish America would buy. Even though it was dreadful. Dreadful, dreadful, dreadful. It was really bad. And I got together a whole bunch of other science fiction writers, and over a long weekend, we wrote Atlanta nights. Everybody got a list of characters with a one line description. The every single female, in addition to what they were and what their relationships were, was described as beautiful and bosomy, while all the men were described as incredibly well set up and the authors could decide what that meant.

[00:19:42.580] - James
And a very, very sketchy plot outline. Summary in this chapter, Callie Archer goes bra shopping. In this chapter, Bruce Lucent goes to jail, and so on. Authors were told, this is a sex and shopping novel set in Atlanta, Georgia in the present day, written by an enthusiastic but unskilled first time writer. And you know, long time prose can produce really bad prose. I mean, Eddie van Halen can make a guitar sound like shit if he wants to. Hey, we could, we can write badly. We really can. And then I put these together in the order received, not in the order of the chapters, that of this overarching plot of. And if an author failed to produce their chapter, there was just a blank there. There's no chapter in one of the chapters. I used a machine to a computer program to create text based seated on the three chapters before it and the three chapters after it. And it was just, it's a mess. Anybody who wants to, by the way, can find, can find the full text online. Or there are a couple places on YouTube where people have read the entire thing out loud.

[00:21:03.100] - James
It's wonderful. Also, the names of the main characters. If you take the initials of their main, the main characters names, it spells out publish America is a vanity press. We sent this thing off to publish America. A while later we got this wonderful letter saying this was going to change our lives, that our book had been accepted. Oh joy. Hot damn. We said, we have been vindicated. We are not inept practitioners of a undemanding art. We can create real life situations with realistic people and realistic dialog. At the Erasia convention in Boston in the spring, in late winter, and the very next day that we announced it on a Sunday and Monday morning, here's publish America writing back saying after further review, your book does not meet our high standards. Big surprise there. So then took and published it for free. And you can we published it@lulu.com which is a straight up you put in the manuscript, they run through docutech, you set your own price. There you go. And I set the COVID price so that the royalties per copy came back to the exact same as the royalties per copy of a publish America book.

[00:22:20.970] - James
Only our published on the docutech book was had half of the COVID price of a publish America book, and it's still out there. And buy one. Better still, buy a dozen. They make excellent gifts. If you go over to tv tropes, they have a really good summary of publishing Atlanta nights. And we had a good time with it. We were running I mean, it's the best bad book you could write in three days.

[00:22:53.500] - Sunyi
I just want to read this review of it by Teresa Nielsen Hayden, who's an advisory editor at Tor. She says the world is full of bad books written by amateurs, but why settle for the merely regretful? Atlanta Nights is a bad book written by experts. So there you go.

[00:23:13.200] - James
Yeah. Oh, we got legitimate reviews. I think it was the LA Times that wrote in their review. I mean, that's a serious, major newspaper. They wrote in their review, the muse struck like a stomach flu, and up came Atlanta nights. Publish America eventually collapsed. Hey, what can I say? Because it had, it was based on Sandhya. It was publish America that invented the term traditional publishing. Up until then, publishing was publishing called I've been publishing. That's what I do. But they invented traditional publishing. They were doing print on demand through lightning, lightning source, which was a company that owned a whole pile of docutechs. And you send in the manuscript and they spit out however many copies you need. It's an expensive process on a, on a book by book basis, but if you're only publishing ten or 20 books, you know, it's cost effective enough. Legitimate publishers use docutech machines to put out advanced reading copies, for example, where you don't need a whole lot of copies, but you need them tomorrow.

[00:24:31.150] - Speaker 4
And just to very quickly interject, there is actually a whole thing that you will find with the term trade publishing and traditional publishing.

[00:24:38.800] - Sunyi
And I think we've touched on it.

[00:24:39.970] - Speaker 4
Briefly before, but this is a good point to very briefly mention that writers of a certain generation, which I would count myself a part of, we were raised to say trade publishing, because that is a specific term that means a specific thing. Like if you go on the ping one.com website, it, you know, it says in the, about a section, we are one of the world's leading trade book publishers. That is because it means that they produce trade paperbacks or hardbacks from mass market distribution, whereas traditional publishing, you know, as Jim says, it was really a term that was invented by vanity presses to legitimize themselves. And they can use it because it doesn't mean anything. It doesn't promise that they have distribution. It doesn't promise they produce mass market novels. It doesn't promise that they go through any of the channels or work in any of the ways that a publisher, you would expect them to function. It's kind of like the difference between the word counselor and doctor, right? Or psychiatrist, I guess, at least in the UK. You know, you can set yourself up as counselor. I could do it tomorrow. I could start charging, I could start taking clients, and I could do that without having any kind of like, qualification because it's not a protected term, whereas I can't go tomorrow and call myself a psychiatrist or a doctor because those are protected terms and they mean something.

[00:25:52.290] - Speaker 4
It's why sometimes when you see hybrid presses or vanity presses that call themselves traditional publishers, that's why they can do it even though they don't offer any of the functionality or the distribution or the actual printing and mass market production of books that you would expect, because it just, like, it doesn't mean anything as a term. And it's also not really true. I mean, traditional, technically speaking, self publishing is the original traditional form of publishing. That's how people made books back in the day. And it's really a relatively recent thing in kind of the history of publishing that we had a publisher who will take on the costs and the financial risks to produce the books for you and distribute them. It used to be if you wanted to get a book out there in the world, you probably had to be some kind of aristocrat or businessman with your own funds and access to a printer and all that kind of thing. So just for lots of reasons, I don't. I still kind of hate the word traditional publishing, even though that is what we use now in modernization lands. But I do think that the origins of the word matter.

[00:26:54.030] - Speaker 4
But anyway, I'm getting massively, massively off topic. Really sorry about that. So back to publish America, and I'll let you carry on from here. Jim.

[00:27:02.630] - James
That was publish America. And there were. There were others. There was Lee Shore, what was his name, down in Tom Green County, Texas. What he did was he accepted manuscripts. He claimed to be a editor or an agent. He would open up the envelope enough to see if there was a check in it, and then he would send back to the. To the author. Here's what you do now. Here is a copy of my letter saying that. That you have an agent, because everybody knows that publishers want to deal only with agented authors. So you put. You put this letter saying that you have an agent right at the top of your manuscript. You're golden. You're an agent and author. And here's a list of publishers to send your book to. And he then cashed the check, and as far as I know, never even read the manuscript. It was great. Eventually, the sheriff of Tom Greene County, a guy by the name of Johnny Walker, said, wait a minute. And he eventually wound up in prison for a while, and he changed his online ad, and all these people had an online presence saying that he now lived in an exclusive gated community, which is why he could not receive phone calls and could only get letters on Fridays.

[00:28:31.090] - James
He got probation, and part of his terms of his probation were that he never again engaged in literary things. But his office manager, a young lady named Leanne Murphy, knew the whole deal, and so she set up the desert rose agency with the same scam, same exact thing. You got what's his name? Robert M. Fletcher, down in Baccarat on Florida. As far as I know, he's still in business. Bouncing Bobby Fletcher. He has down to a science. You enter through a portal on his webpage, and he's got a lot of web pages that are a lot of names. The New York literary agency, the bestseller literary agency, the poets literary agency, this and that literary agency. And so you send him your manuscript. 1214 hours later, he has an autoresponder set up that says, your manuscript looks interesting, but first you must have it professionally evaluated. Go with any professional evaluator that you wish, provided we approve them. We have got a special deal with a New York professional manuscript evaluator, and if you get three green lights from them, we will represent your book. And the professional manuscript evaluator was bouncin Bobby under a different email address, and he had a special deal for normally getting your manuscript professionally evaluated.

[00:30:00.870] - James
Cost you $180. But if you went with his professional evaluator, it costs only $90. He would now have a list of people who were willing to pay $90, and they all got three green light approvals. How's that work? And so he had this whole set of autoresponders. He did not have to do anything. Said, you know, we will. We will represent your book. And then he would, we will, we will submit it to your book to three New York publishers for merely $30 each. And he would do this around and around as many times as it took. And with people paying $30 a manuscript, $30 a submission, and the publishers, and I knew a good number of them, had never received the manuscript for him. And he would come back and say, well, here's your response. You got not right for us at this time. The market is crowded at this time. And so he said, well, I've got another list of three more publishers who want to see a book like yours. And this would go around and around and around until they got tired of paying money. But then, but then it got better.

[00:31:13.710] - James
He said, well, why don't I create a publisher. After they've gone around and around and around enough times, I've got extracted all the $30 fees I can. Happy day. Oh, look at. Oh, joy. Oh, joy. This publisher, strategic publishing, wants your book and will only cost you $2,000 to be published. Oh, joy. Oh, joy. Oh, rapture. He, too, had a contract with lightning source so that if he needed to publish, if he needed to print books, he could. But he's still in business, even though the state of Florida eventually came down on him for wire fraud. And he has clipped his wings quite a bit. But you can find these news stories. I read one not too long ago. A six year old boy in England had sold a 23 book series. Whoa. Soon to be a bestseller. And so I'm looking, and I looked, holy crap. He sold it to strategic, didn't he? Yes. So I guess mummy had some money.

[00:32:26.970] - Sunyi
Yeah. So, for newer authors, because I feel like vanity publishers are changing so much all the time in the ways that they operate and, you know, these kind of horror stories about fake shady agents and stuff. What advice would you give to authors currently who are querying, trying to keep themselves safe, trying to keep their work safe?

[00:32:46.230] - James
Oh, my goodness. A publisher that you want to talk with is one that has actual physical copies on the shelves of actual physical bookstores that you've seen with your own eyes, because they have distribution. Amateurs talk plot, prose talk distribution. So you go to a bookstore and you find books that are similar to yours, and you then submit it to those publishers because they have got actual distribution. And, okay, you're going to get 10% of the COVID price of, or 15% of the COVID price of the book, rather than your lower tier publishers that are offering you 50% of the COVID or 50% of the net or 75% of the. Of the. The profit or whatever they're offering. Because 10% of 100,000 is a hell of a lot more than 75% of 100. It really is. So you get their guidelines, and you follow their guidelines to the letter, and pretty much every one of them is going to say agented manuscripts only. And you do not go to Desert Rose, where they will give you a letter that you can Xerox and with a package saying that, yes, you do have an agent. Instead, you find people.

[00:34:02.900] - James
You find that agent's guidelines, and you follow them to the letter. And part of that is to test, to see, are you the sort of person who can follow directions? Are you. You know, are you going to be hard to work with? Because nobody wants to work with somebody who's going to be a pain in the butt. It's just because life is too short. Their desks are, you know, covered 3ft deep in other manuscripts. Are you that much of a genius that, that you can overcome being a jerk? And while you're waiting to hear, because this is a long process, I've seen glaciers. I mean, I've seen rocks grow from little bitty pebbles to great big boulders and die in less time than this process takes. While this is going on, you write a new, different, better book. The first book that you write is probably not going to sell anyway, because the first book that you write probably sucks, because, you know, the first time an Olympic championship figure skater goes out on the ice on skates, they probably fall down, don't they? It takes a while to learn how to do this, even if you are a natural storyteller and you send it out and you take it to the best markets you can, because the higher end markets get better distribution.

[00:35:19.690] - James
Our first adult novel was called the Price of the Stars. It was sold to Tor, which is part of McMillan family. Anyway, Tor. And it was. It did not come out as a front list.

[00:35:32.430] - Scott
We're both Tor.

[00:35:33.820] - Sunyi
We're both Tor authors.

[00:35:35.850] - James
Are, ya know, you. So it came out not as a front list, not as a backlist, and not as a mid list book. It came out as an off list special. And we were blessed by the fact we had a really great cover art. It was beautiful cover painting. And it went out to bookstores, and they had printed 5000 copies. And those 5000 copies sold inside of the first week. And the bookstores were calling back and saying, hey, who are these guys? They were people who, well, of all, were just great authors. And the other part was, we had a great cover, and it was in every frigging Walmart, Walden books and Barnes Noble, what may have you from coast to coast, because Tor had great distribution, and that book eventually went to at least seven printings, and it is still available in an electronic version. Buy one. Better still, buy a dozen and make excellent gifts. Been getting royalties in that twice a year. Since when? I think 90. I'll take. I'll take it. What more can I begin to tell you about that?

[00:36:46.390] - Sunyi
No, that's fine. I was going to ask a very quick, controversial question, actually, which is, what is your stance on hyper press?

[00:36:52.400] - James
The answer is four hyper presses. What's that even mean exactly? Now, if you're talking pure self publication, you remember Yog's law, money flows to the author. Good. When you're self publishing. You are the publisher, and you are the author. Unless you can see your way clear to taking 15% of the COVID price of every copy sold and put it into a bank account somewhere labeled authors, royalties, or mad money, or fun fund or whatever, unless you can see that you have no business publishing you as the author, you're just collecting money. You as the publisher, you're paying for the editor, you're paying for the COVID art, you're paying for the reviews, you're paying for the distribution, you're paying for everything. And it might take quite a while for you to make your money back. You may never make your money back. That's the thing. Legitimate publishers, big publishers, they have got a whole stack of money that they can use to support new, experimental, first time authors who probably will not sell a whole lot of copies, although I promise you, they will sell a lot more than 75 or 150 if you really hustle.

[00:38:17.220] - James
And no, you don't need to sell them out of the back of your car. Just remember that money flows to the author, even if it's going from one pocket to another pocket in the same pair of pants. 15% of the COVID price of the every copy sold goes to you, the author, and the publisher doesn't get to take that, doesn't get to keep it. And if they don't, if the book doesn't earn out, that's on them, and that's on you as the publisher, not you as the author.

[00:38:47.590] - Sunyi
Yeah, I think.

[00:38:48.370] - James
Remember that, guys?

[00:38:50.270] - Sunyi
My big thing with hybrid is. Is always just that. Like, they don't really tend to have the distribution. So I always question, like, are you actually getting more out of them than you would self publishing? And occasionally the answer is yes. I think the iconic example is probably J. R. Tolkien, who went with essentially a predatory press and just got very lucky. But most people don't have that experience. Before we wrap up, could I ask you if you want to plug yourself? If people want to. I know you still have books that you're selling these days, and if you still have, like, a website or a.

[00:39:21.660] - James
Place to find you online, any of the online bookstores, any of the real doors and Windows bookstores. The most recently published one was a reprint of our book nights weird. K n I G h t w y r d. It's an old word meaning fate or fortune. Our joke title when we were writing that was nights weird lady strange two, but it was on the New York Public Library books for the teenage list. It won the Mythopoeic Society's Aslan Award for young adult literature. Buy one. Better still, buy a dozen. They make excellent gifts. And it's been reprinted by Tor's essentials line, the science fiction of fantasy books that everybody should be familiar with. With. And I really enjoy that.

[00:40:18.830] - Scott
Very cool. Yeah.

[00:40:20.000] - James
Plus, you know, all of our short stories. Well, not all of them, but a great number of them are in electronic form in all the usual places. And I sell them mostly for $0.99 because they don't let me set the price any lower. I'd sell them for a quarter if it came down to that, because what's a. What's a reprint? You know, it's. You're paying me to take my advertising. Go you go me. It's great. Now you asked me what hill I will die on.

[00:40:52.210] - Sunyi
Yes, I did. We do often have that. Go for it.

[00:40:56.310] - James
Okay. I am going to put two spaces after every full stop after every period. Space. Space. You take my double space when they try it from a cold, dead typewriter.

[00:41:12.440] - Sunyi
Do you still use a typewriter?

[00:41:14.400] - James
No, actually, I use word processors because it's really easy to retype with them, you know, with a typewriter in order to get a clean page of clean copy. Oh, man, that just took a while. And a lot of white out. But with a computer, you know, you can do that. It's great. But I've ripped out all of the bells and whistles. I've made it as close to a typewriter as it'll get and still be on a keyboard on a computer. I learned how to type on a that's smart on a Remington portable that my mom had had back in the 1930s. It had a key press like a Charles Atlas hand exerciser. I knew back when I was ten that I wanted to be a writer. When I grew up, I knew that writers had to type. So I taught myself to type using a book and record combination for the White Plains public library. And so I did all the exercises, and every time I made a typo, I would get down and do ten push ups to remind myself not to screw up.

[00:42:17.880] - Sunyi
Wow.

[00:42:18.490] - James
Well, that's pretty much it. I'm a fast push ups, and oftentimes I will do push ups. Yeah, it's great.

[00:42:28.620] - Sunyi
You've been listening to the publishing radio podcast with Sonny Dean and Scott Drakeford. Tune in next time for more in depth discussion on everything publishing industry. See you later.