Tales of a De-Published Author (Part 2)

It has been a week since the announcement about Booktrope closing their doors was sent out to their community of authors and publishing professionals. A lot more is known now than seven days ago. Information has been flowing out in a flood after the initial, worrying trickle. Booktrope has not issued a press release concerning their decision to terminate operations at the end of the month, and they have stated that they will not release one. They have given a very precise account of the state of affairs which led to the decision to their community, but I'll respect there wishes and keep it confidential. For a public statement they are pointing people to an article on Geekwire, even though they say it was written without “any input from Booktrope.”

On Twitter, the hashtag #BooktropeSuvivor has been gaining popularity as the members of the community reach out and share their feelings and experiences in this challenging time. I’m not alone in blogging about it. I have read several articles from authors and in one case editors affected by Booktrope’s decision. Reactions very widely. Some writers feel biter disappointed. Others sadness, one blogger compared Booktrope to Camelot—too good to last. In Ally Bishop's in depth blog, they talk about how they saw this coming and that the business model was never a viable one.

There is definitely a divide in the community, which has been exasperated by the stress of the situation. Some writers always saw Booktrope as a family. Some never did. Personally, when I signed on, they were growing rapidly and the dozen or so employees weren’t enough to offer personal service to the hundreds of writers in their stable.To me it was very much an online publishing service. Read the PDFs, follow the checklist, and only contact someone when there’s a problem you can't solve on your own.

But just because Booktrope was never a home for me, doesn’t mean I have anything less than complete sympathy for its employees and owners.This must be no doubt harder on them than those of us with books in the game.This is their vision and livelihood that’s ending.This is the business they put blood, sweat and, tears into that's closing. This is hard for me as one of their writers, I can't even imagine what they are feeling.

In the mass of bulletins and FAQs, Booktrope has been sending out, they are encouraging writers to self-publish or find a new publisher for their books. Since there is little that they can do to help authors find a new publisher, most of the information has been oriented toward flipping the books back onto the market.

There is certainly a strong incentive to do so since the author reclaims Booktrope's 30% of the profit and very little work is required. The major downside to it is that the author has to shoulder all of the self-publishing expenses. And they have to front this money on books, which are not receiving a launch buzz or are in anyway are expected to perform differently in sales than they are today. For books with steady sales, this makes a lot of sense. For others where the sales are flat, like mine, it is a harder choice to make.

To get the book back up may cost anywhere between fifty up to four hundred dollars or more. I haven't had time to do the research to know exactly what I'm looking at. If it's fifty bucks, then it's pretty easy to swallow. If it's, say, three hundred, that's three-hundred dollars that would likely take years to recoup, if it ever does.

In my earlier post, I made a big deal about continuing the profit sharing with my editors and designer, but upon further reflection, I have come to realize that would only be an issue if sales were outrageously good. And if they were, I would cheerfully cut the checks. So I no longer see that as a drawback. But there is still an attraction to doing a full rewrite and re-launching a brand new addition. At least that would put a better product on the market and perhaps hit the reset button on the whole thing.

As far as finding a new publisher goes, does anyone know of a publisher willing to put out a previously published book, which had lackluster sales? And a publisher that would actually be more beneficial to sign with than self-publishing? If you do, I would love to know who they are.

There are still twenty-four days until Mr. 8 is pulled from the shelves. The only decision I have to make in that time is do I want to try and self-publish it and have it up in early June, to minimize the time it's off the marker, or do I wait.

I'll keep you posted on that decision and on anything else I learn.

Tales of a De-Published Author (Part 1)

If you follow me or if you follow the publishing industry, you have probably heard that Booktrope has decided to close their doors and call it quits, pulling all their titles from the shelves.

If you'e not familiar with Booktrope, it utilized a new model they called team publishing. They created a community of authors, editors, cover designers, and publicists, who would come together and publish a book. It was hybrid publishing with many of the DIY aspects of self-publishing, but it was a system where the author didn't have to pay upfront for their own editorial and design services and where they had a company backing them with expertise and protecting them with their legal team. The idea was that everyone worked on the projects for free in exchange for the percentage of the profits.

Booktrope hasn't announced what precisely led to their decision to close. Although its easy to speculate that they were not getting the market share they needed to survive in the highly competitive publishing world. I could also further speculate that, they were a victim of their own model. They grew a very large community and produced a large volume of titles each year (several hundred in the past year alone). It is easy to see that this wasn't be something that could be easily scaled back, like a small indie publisher might be able to. And it wasn't a company that could be "restructured" like a big publishing house, which had room for streamlining.

The news of their closure came as an extremely disappointing shock to me. As readers of this blog know, I had a lot of regrets about things I wish I had done differently with Mr. 8, but that didn't mean I wasn't proud of it. I was proud of the accomplishment and I was proud to be able to say I had a published book for sale. To find out that this was no longer the case was a biter pill. Not to mention, in the world of a writer, having a book published is the only point you can truly put it behind you. It's done Sure, the marketing never ends. But you'll never have to think about changing those words again. To learn it was being handed back to me felt like a huge step backward.

But the truth is compared to many of Booktrope's writers, I am very lucky. There are writers with many books published through the company, sometimes entire series, many of them profitable. Their books generated an income and they were given just one month's notice that all of those books were being de-listed. Then there are the editors and cover artists, who may have been signing onto a book a month or more, with he expectation their work would be paid for in the future. Now they might not see another cent for their labor, depending on how things shake out.

So what is next for them? For me?

Right now, all that is known for certain is that ll of Booktrope's titles with the possible exception of those listed in Amazon Encore are being pulled form the stores on May 31st. On June 1, the copyrights go back to the authors and each team member retains ownership of their own work.

That last detail makes things very unclear. And makes the way forward (from an author's perspective) murky. In the initial announcement there was some hint that authors could just put up the books as self-published. But there is an overload of questions that surround what that process would look like. And this question of ownership is not the least of them. I hardly want to be playing payroll, dividing up royalties among five different parties spread over three countries. Not that they don't deserve payment for the good wok they've done. But it a hard enough challenge finding spare time to write, never mind figuring out exchange rates.

For the time being, we are all waiting to hear more. There are a lot of blogs who write about the experience of getting published. If you're interested, stay tune and I'll tell you all about my saga of being de-published.