Published on August 29, 2012
Remember me? I miss you. You are by far the best publisher I’ve met so far. You answer e-mails, you keep promises, and you pay royalties on time to your writers. My current publisher doesn’t do any of that, and that’s why I’m contacting you. I plan to enter a complaint into your Whispers and Warnings section, but I want to touch base with you before I do it, and explain.
(My other publisher) started off as a dynamic, responsive and very active publisher when she initially persuaded me to sign on. In September 2011 she did the royalty accounting and paid me a big check for the months up to and including May 2011, which covered the first month of my sales surge. I sold over 17,000 e-books on Kindle that May. In June, I sold over 19,500, over 10,000 in July and over 6,000 in August. I don’t have exact figures because she never sent me exact figures after May.
The problem is that she has not paid me royalties covering the period June 2011 to the present. And, she stopped sending me monthly sales figures around the same time. Also, she stopped answering my e-mails, except for very occasional one- or two-sentence responses that never mentioned royalties. It has now been 14 months without a royalty payment to me.
Her other writers I am in touch with have similar problems with her, all centering around a lack of communication, missed deadlines and royalty problems.
What else can I do?
Published on August 29, 2012
Little did I know ten years ago, when I decided to send my manuscript to BookLocker.com, that I would one day be standing at a podium with the Canadian Minister of Veterans Affairs accepting a prestigious award.
Published on August 22, 2012
We’re watching the forecast with a great deal of caution and a bit of worry. We already had Tropical Storm Debby so we think it’s somebody else’s turn to get a boatload of rain. 😉
Published on August 22, 2012
worst book proposals and query letters
Today, I’m going to share another installment of our popular column, World’s Worst Book Proposals. Yes, we can learn from others’ mistakes!
Published on August 22, 2012
Letters will return next week.
Published on August 22, 2012
Writing about real estate opens many potential markets: big city, small city and suburban newspapers as well as consumer and trade magazines. Magazine markets may be local, regional or national in their coverage. Occasionally, a real estate subject such as the rise of World Trade Center 1 (the Freedom Tower), on Ground Zero of the World Trade Center, is national news, resulting in syndicated newspaper articles. Additional research can turn a subject that starts as a one-off local story, such as covering a local warehouse roof with solar panels to generate electricity, can also be written as a national trend story.
Published on August 22, 2012
We’ve all heard that old axiom before: the only way to write is to sit down at the computer and type away. Yet that discipline had me feeling all tapped out. Ideas no longer flowed from my brain, to my hands, to the paper. What little I did manage to write seemed dull and lifeless. No wonder. I was dull and lifeless. Clearly, it was time for me to get away from the computer.
Published on August 15, 2012
Frank’s friend, Caleb, who has been part of the family for years, is visiting for two weeks and we are having a blast!
Published on August 15, 2012
complaints, Complaints about specific publishers, lulu, pod complaints
We’ve previously covered the numerous complaints posted about Lulu.com to their own forums by their own authors. The complaints are about customer service, quality, costs, and much more, including the fact that it’s difficult for authors to get a response out of them.
But, savvy Lulu authors have figured out how to bypass regular email. They’re posting complaints directly to Lulu’s Twitter account. Here are a few snippets posted just in the past two weeks…
Published on August 15, 2012
In the July 25 edition of WritersWeekly, someone asked you how your covers could be so inexpensive and what he’d get for his money. My answer??? A GREAT cover. When I self-published the first edition of my book, I paid a “professional” cover designer $2000. I told her EXACTLY what I wanted in terms of fonts, images, etc., and trusted she would put it all together into something great. When she seemed to misunderstand, I actually found some photos and put together a “sample” in Photoshop. She absolutely refused to give me ANYTHING like what I wanted–finally coming up with a Picasso-esque mess that I would have been embarrassed to use. She claimed she had created a cover and, despite the fact that I couldn’t use it, she got paid in full.
My son took my “sample”–tweaked it in Illustrator–and that’s the cover I finally used on the book.
For the second edition, I went with BookLocker.com and Todd did my cover. I sent him the cover of the first edition and told him what I’d like (essentially, the same thing I told the original designer). He came up with exactly what I wanted on the first try! In about two days! We tweaked the colors a bit and he even found me a couple of images that I loved for next to nothing.
So, to the guy who asked the question…what you will get (from BookLocker) is an extremely professional and talented cover designer who should be making a LOT more…but I’m sure glad he works for BookLocker!
Thanks,
Judy Yero
Teaching in Mind: How Teacher Thinking Shapes Education
PUBLISHER’S NOTE:
See examples of BookLocker’s cover HERE.
Click on each cover to see the entire cover (front, back and spine).
Todd’s covers are only $200 because we send him so much business. Of course, we pass that savings on to authors. 🙂
