The HUGE Risks of Signing on With a Startup Publisher! – by Brian Whiddon, Managing Editor

Angela received an email from a new author (first book) who came across a fake “publisher” on Facebook. She sent Angela the information about the company.

Angela checked out the website and found numerous indications that it was a scam business. She emailed her findings to the author. One of the big “tells” was that the website was only 13 months old.

Angela advised the author to avoid publishing companies that are less than 10 years old. Most go out of business, and almost every new “publisher” or “publishing services company” that has appeared online in the past two years is a scammer. They are putting up dozens to hundreds of new websites daily.

The author wrote back, saying has always been someone who gives new companies a chance.

My Response:

Brian here. I’ll be tackling this one for Angela today.

I’m right there with you. I like to give new startups the opportunity to earn my future business. Notice I didn’t say that they deserve my patronage because they are new. That’s point number One.

Next, I love trying out a new restaurant that opens up in town. If the food sucks, I’m out 50 bucks or so. A local gunsmith just opened up a gun shop close to us. I let him do a little work on one of my guns that cost me around $150. He had to have a local business license to open the store. And if he disappeared, there is enough info available for the cops to track him down. When I need repairs done around our home, I hire a local handyman instead of calling one of the big home repair businesses in Chattanooga. I’m happy to give a guy a chance when the risks are low.

However, when Angela and I bought our house, we didn’t go with the small realtor working out of his own home after getting his license six months ago. We found a guy with an extensive portfolio of homes he’d handled – and he was affiliated with one of the big national real estate companies. Why? Because we were about to INVEST hundreds of thousands of dollars in a house!

When Angela and I sold our liveaboard sailboats (36ft and 52ft) one of our own relatives had just started as a yacht broker. He hadn’t sold his first boat yet. He really wanted us to let him sell our boats. Instead, we went with a certified yacht broker who lived on a boat on our dock, and understood everything about boat surveys, sea trials, the local market, what boat buyers look for, and what they don’t, etc., etc.

When you buy a car, do you go to the “Buy Here / Pay Here” car lot that just popped up on the corner last month? Or do you go to a car lot that you’ve driven by a hundred times and know they’ve been around for awhile. If you need heart surgery, will you pick the 28 year-old who’s one year out of his residency, or the 55 year-old who’s seen more open heart surgeries than he has weekends with his own family? If you were to find yourself on the wrong side of the law, wrongfully charged with a serious felony, do you get the most experienced attorney you can afford, or do you give your case to the kid who just got out of law school and needs a chance to prove himself?

Here’s the bottom line: your book is an investment. It’s a culmination of your hard work and emotional capital expressed in words. It’s not a $50 dinner that you can shrug off if the experience is bad.

It’s nice that you want to give a new business a chance, but you’re leaving some things out of the equation:

Just dealing with Amazon is a constant nightmare. Our publishing company is fighting with them all the time because of their stupid mistakes. Know why we can fight with them, and win? Why a real human responds to us every time? Because we’re big. We have have published more than 17K print and electronic books in the past 27 years. Someone who has just gotten into the game will be lucky to hear from a human being when they complain. Heck, they’ll be lucky to get a real answer to their question from a bot at Amazon.
You aren’t just dealing with Amazon. There’s going to be a printer, distributors, the IRS, I.T. people, possibly editors, marketers, cover designers, illustrators, etc. It’s a juggling act. Not many people have the wherewithal to do it. Those publishers fail. Of course, the scam publishers just take your money and run.
Royalties – guess who pays them to the author? That would be your publisher. Even if you sign on with an honest new company, if they don’t stay afloat, how will you get your royalties? Countless publishers have gone out of business over the years. When that happens, almost all of them owe their authors money…and those authors never get paid.
Your book will bound to your publisher. If they go belly up, you will need to get your production files back somehow. In most cases, those publishers who go belly-up leave in the dead of night. They stop answering emails and phone calls, and they won’t send their authors the production files. If you decide to have your book republished, you’ll need to change your ISBN’s. And, in many cases, authors need to have their covers and interior files redesigned.
Ninety-nine percent of all publishing websites we are finding online (that authors are reporting to us) currently are bona-fide scams.

Publishing your book is not a game, and “charity” should not play a part in the process. Book publishing is definitely something you don’t want to gamble hundreds to thousand of dollars on! You want someone who knows what they are doing – not someone who needs a chance to prove themselves. And, again, most of the new publishing websites online now are scams. Thousands of them!

You asked in your email that we recommend any “small or up-and-coming publishers that are reputable.” Unfortunately, we can’t do this for one simple fact:

Those publishers have not yet established their reputations.

BookLocker HAS.

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Angela is not only the publisher of WritersWeekly.com. She is President & CEO of BookLocker.com,
a self-publishing services company that has been in business since 1998. Ask her anything.