Jean Harkin's Blog - Posts Tagged "halloween"
Halloween Horrors of Publishing
I didn’t need to refer to Stephen King to recount these horror stories. Two fellow authors have furnished some frightful tales:
The author who I quoted last month as having suffered through his publishing ordeal, sustained new shocks following his novel’s release. He ordered two boxes of his books from the publisher to sell himself. In the first box he found two misprints. In the second box he found his novel printed with a page of blurbs from someone else’s book after the copyright page.
His marketing attempts ran into bookstore snafus that almost read like scams. In his first approach, he found that the store would land on the favorable side of a 60/40 split, and to make sure, the store would ring up the sales. For his $20 book, the store would earn $12 (for what?), and he would net $8. He had paid $9.25 to the publisher at author discount, thus actually losing $1.25 on each sale.
That bottom line has me spooked of scheduling a bookstore event!
Another author spent six years crafting her first novel. At a writing conference, she was thrilled to garner attention from an editor with a big-name publishing house. Following instructions, she submitted the first 25 pages of her novel for review in advance of meeting with the editor. The meeting turned out to be a terror: the editor lambasted her for not including a cover letter and had nothing good to say about the novel excerpt. Says the author, “I was so disheartened that I did not write a word for six months.” Bewitched!
She never finished that novel but went on to publish four successful ones, one with a major publisher and three with small presses.
Enchantments can happen! I have been assigned an editor, and my novel Promise Full of Thorns is scheduled for December release. We’ll see! “Many a slip”. . . stay tuned!
The author who I quoted last month as having suffered through his publishing ordeal, sustained new shocks following his novel’s release. He ordered two boxes of his books from the publisher to sell himself. In the first box he found two misprints. In the second box he found his novel printed with a page of blurbs from someone else’s book after the copyright page.
His marketing attempts ran into bookstore snafus that almost read like scams. In his first approach, he found that the store would land on the favorable side of a 60/40 split, and to make sure, the store would ring up the sales. For his $20 book, the store would earn $12 (for what?), and he would net $8. He had paid $9.25 to the publisher at author discount, thus actually losing $1.25 on each sale.
That bottom line has me spooked of scheduling a bookstore event!
Another author spent six years crafting her first novel. At a writing conference, she was thrilled to garner attention from an editor with a big-name publishing house. Following instructions, she submitted the first 25 pages of her novel for review in advance of meeting with the editor. The meeting turned out to be a terror: the editor lambasted her for not including a cover letter and had nothing good to say about the novel excerpt. Says the author, “I was so disheartened that I did not write a word for six months.” Bewitched!
She never finished that novel but went on to publish four successful ones, one with a major publisher and three with small presses.
Enchantments can happen! I have been assigned an editor, and my novel Promise Full of Thorns is scheduled for December release. We’ll see! “Many a slip”. . . stay tuned!
