My POD Best Practices articles series states that POD publishers “should not do business of any kind under a false name.”
A reader notified me last week about a website that appeared to be set up to help authors find the best “indie publisher” for their book…
This Week:
When it comes to submitting a query, article, manuscript or poem, I’ve broken every rule. My problem stems from my elementary school days. I was told by teachers and friends that I could write. I made my best friend, Josephine, weep over my love stories. My first grade teacher marched our whole class into the third and fourth grade classroom to read my story about the birthday party. (True, it was only a small international school with combined classes.)
Six months ago, the credit crunch seriously hit my writing income. I’d made the fatal mistake of ‘putting all my eggs in one basket’. That ‘basket’ – a women’s weekly – changed its format and no longer needed the well researched features I’d been supplying.
Last week, I told you the road was clear and that we could get to our land in Western Maine. Despite having a terrible cold, with a cough I can’t seem to shake (no, it’s not Pertussis), we drove to our land on Saturday. It was a perfectly beautiful Spring day! The sun was shining, the birds were singing, and the trees on the mountain, while still pretty bare, had tiny buds that you had to squint to see. The stream was gurgling from the recent snow melt and Max and Mason tossed in one pebble after another.
There are lots of snakes in the Print on Demand (POD) industry. While most companies charge too much, way too much, there are a few that offer good services at reasonable prices. Some of those even offer reasonable customer service!
This week, we are consolidating the entire list from Part I, Part II, and Part III.
But, first, I need to rant. Being a POD publisher myself, I hear from authors who have been ripped off by other POD publishers on almost a daily basis. Some of their stories make me sick. From elderly authors who were convinced to give more and more and more of their retirement money to the POD publisher (who knew all along that person’s memoirs would likely never sell more than a few copies to family members), to authors who paid thousands when they could have paid hundreds to a better POD publisher, to authors who were forced to pay hundreds to fix the POD publisher’s own mistakes, to authors who gave up rights to their current and future books to a company that pretended to be a “traditional publisher” but who was just another form of vanity publisher, preying on authors and hoping they would buy more and more and more books.
Angela is on Spring Break with her children and hubby this week (meaning she’s working part-time). Letters to the Editor will return next week.
Until recently I have always been a staunch proponent of free enterprise, laissez-faire capitalism and Atlas Shrugged. But that’s coming to an end.
Success comes about in the strangest of ways sometimes. Since I first started submitting my writings in 2005, I’ve racked my brain, trying to write the perfect query letter, and concocted outrageously-creative subject lines, hoping to capture the attention of anyone who might be on the other end of my e-mail, desperately trying to draw them in with my title and keep a hold of them until the end of my query. In my mind, once I stole their attention, they’d respond with that good news e-mail we all want to receive. That’s what we writers strive for, right? Right.
As I wrote a few weeks ago, we’re going to spend our free time this summer building on our land in Western Maine instead of taking long RV trips. Richard learned from our neighbors there this morning that our road is clear of snow and ice now so we can drive out anytime we want!
