With that suitably insect-bound quote, on to pillage: The perils of publishing parasites (2)

 

This is actually a serious bit, somewhat more suited to arousing anger than cavalier treatment of arthropods by the BBC or genre snobbery. Basically: be warned.

 

You have sent out your book chapters to all and sundry. The road has been long. Oft it is that you have near lost hope. Like someone adrift on the infinite ocean, you would take any line cast to you… but be warned.

 

The letter turns up, after so long: they want to see the whole book. Some publisher, or agent, has snapped at it. After the years of waiting in the wings, at last the cue is spoken, you can make your entrance onto the stage.

 

At some cost you prepare a copy of your manuscript (double-spaced) and post it (with return postage, no doubt) with jubilant feelings. You count the days, waiting with bated breath. You imagine the eager scribe poring over your pages, the fruit of your long labours. At last the letter arrives.

 

They love it

 

Only…

 

They’d be every so glad to publish it if only you could see your way to contributing a little to the costs of publication: you being a new writer, you see, and them taking a big risk on you, and obviously you’ll make it all back, eventually, but until then, well, surely you can see that it’s only reasonable, so sign the enclosed contract and let the magic start and so forth and so on and so forth.

 

You might think that this would come from fishing the wrong ponds but no, there is your publisher, plain as day in the Yearbook/Handbook. Surely they must be reputable? Surely, therefore, the practice they describe is the norm, in the industry. How are you, the aspirant author, to know?

 

The practice is not normal in the industry.

 

I have run into this twice so far, and both with names that I got from the Handbook. I suspect that the firms in question evade detection because they claim that they only sometimes ask for a “contribution” towards publishing costs. It doesn’t matter, they’re still vanity publishers.

 

Vanity publishers will tell you all about the later-famous authors who started off that way. Vanity publishers will promise a great deal.

 

The publisher I hit upon got as far as bunging me a contract, whereupon in exchange for a four-figure sum they would publish my book and make me a genuine bona fide author. The word “vanity” was never mentioned, but that was entirely what they were. Thankfully the internet can be your best friend here. A quick spin about the world wide web revealed some extremely vocal dissatisfied customers. A little more digging found very little in the way of pedigree as far as the publisher’s stable of authors went. For a rather large sum of money, according to the sources I discovered, I would have got an extremely small print run of badly-made books, no publicity, nothing. Aside from something self-congratulatory to stuff my library with I might as well have been royally mugged as take up their contract. Moreover, there is a reason that vanity-published authors find themselves lacking credibility — the people telling you so earnestly that they want to publish you may not even have read your book. They just want that fat cheque, in return for which they will promise steak and cook up gruel instead. The point for them is that initial outlay of yours. They will publish anything, dross upon dross, and if your silk purse is tumbled amidst the sows' ears, it's only by chance. They don't care, although you can be sure they will claim credit if the book somehow, despite these encumbrances, actually takes flight. All told, like any con artist's game, they make it look as though you can't lose, but you can't win. At the time, however, I agonised for some time before turning them down. When you’ve been on the long road for years enough, even the mirages make your mouth water.

 

The second experience was with a purported agent. The chappie contacted me, I even spoke on the ‘phone. He told me how many people he had placed. He only wanted a little reading fee, just a few hundreds of squids, peanuts really. Again, heart-in-mouth, all elation – genuine interest from a genuine publisher…

 

Until I did my ground work. This time the agent chappie did much of it for me. He had a website with his authors on it. I looked them up, I noted who had published their books. Amazingly, I had hit upon a second-generation parasite. All of this man’s authors, who had paid him up front for the privilege of his representation, had ended up published by vanity publishers, for which, of course, they had also paid.

 

For the avoidance of doubt, I called a genuine agent that I had been submitting to for a while, without success (3). I ended up speaking to the agency’s owner, after whom it was named, who assured me that no reasonable agent would be asking me to make that kind of a deal.

 

By another bizarre coincidence, a friend of a friend turned out to be one of the dodgy agent’s authors. The friend (4) had mentioned to me that the friend (5) had a book in print, so I got his number from the friend (6) and had a chat. “Do not under any circumstances have anything to do with him,” the friend of a friend said. “He’s a waste of time.”So, saved a fair whack of money, but I can’t say I felt good about it at the time. The problem is that you go so long with only rejection, and then these peddlers of false hopes loom from the mist, and for a moment, just for a moment, you think you’ve cracked it. You run towards the oasis, crying and whooping, and if you’re lucky you come to your senses. If not you find you’ve been stuffing your face with sand. It is a vile trade, to prey on people who are very earnestly trying to make something of themselves, to lure then in like a big, ugly deep-sea fangly fish (7).

 

So be warned, and remember, the internet is your friend in this. One advantage in a medium that offers a free soap box to just about anyone, is that dissatisfied consumers can make put their cautionary tales into the public domain. If you get an offer from a publisher or agent that seems dubious, check them out. After all, if they’re the real deal then they’re going to be up front about publicising themselves, and especially all those other well-known authors they publish or represent.

         (1) The title is from the de Morgan reworking of Jonathan Swift: de Morgan writes, “Great fleas have smaller fleas upon their backs to bite’em, and those fleas have smaller fleas, and so ad infinitum.” While the metre is more regular than Swift’s “So naturalists observe, a flea / hath smaller fleas that on him prey…”, de Morgan misses the pointed final couplet, fitting here, “So every poet in his kind is bit by him who comes behind.”
 

        (2) Not a particularly dire Hanna-Barbara cartoon in the 70's, although perhaps it should have been.

 

(3)   By the most freak of coincidences the agent I called is now my actual agent. Just one of life’s weirdnesses, but I still remember their kindness in actually taking the time to set the record straight.

 

(4)   My friend, not the friend of a friend

 

(5)   The friend of a friend

 

(6)   Oh, you get the idea.

 

(7)   What the hell am I talking about? http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail119.html