Choices

Been thinking lately about choices, and what they mean.

I think 99% of us wanting to be published aren’t going to get the publishing angels to present us with a 6 figure contract, a huge initial print run and all the publisher promotion dollars we could ask for.

I figure we have three possibilities.

1) With a combination of luck, talent and perserverance, we might get offered a contract by a major NY publisher. Which, don’t get me wrong, would be fantastic, but it’s not all roses and chocolate.
Chances are the initial print run would be small, small depends, but anywhere from 5000 copies to 20,000, (my guess, if I’m wrong, sorry), probably no publicity budget and 8% royalties on sales.

2) With a combination of luck, talent and perserverance, we might get offered a contract by an E-Publisher. This is nothing to sneeze at either. E-Publishers offer much, much higher royalty rates, easy access to books and are seeing dramatic increases in their readership.

3) We could continue to submit and continue waiting. Not as much fun as the other two, but more likely…

I’ve been thinking about my choices, because a couple of things hit my radar recently. As Molly mentioned in her blog, our friend and critique partner Theresa who’s E-Pubb’d was trying to get her recently print published books(by her E-Publisher) into a local bookstore for an upcoming book signing.
This is not the first time this issue has been raised. A couple of other E-Pubb’d and small print pubb’d members of our local RWA chapter have tried to do the same with varying success rates.

I would love to see Theresa sit at that booksigning, my fingers are crossed that this will happen.
But, one of the drawbacks of choosing an E-Publisher is not having the distribution networks in place that the major publishers have. This is, hopefully, offset by the higher royalty rates.
I’m not sure how important a booksigning is for most of you, but I’ve known of writers beating their heads against the wall because they can’t get a print copy of their book into their local bookstore to show family and friends.
A woman on one of my loops, went so far as to get angry with her local bookstore, the manager and their head office. The manager of that bookstore has since decided not to hold another booksigning because of that incident. Because of one author’s frustration, other authors, whose books are available can’t have booksignings there.
This seems ridiculous to me. Surely this woman knew when signing with an E-publisher that getting her books into these stores would be difficult, or even impossible. Didn’t she understand the pros and cons before signing a publishing contract?
The other thing this woman forgot is once we sign a publishing contract, we’re no longer bookstore customers.
They’re our customer. We want bookstores to stock our books, hand sell one more copy, talk about the lovely local author who comes in to visit every once in a while.

That woman, who is E-Pubb’d, but shall remain nameless, pissed her local bookstore off so much, that if she did accept a print contract one day, they’d probably go out of their way to shelve her books in with manuals on automotive repair.
But it was important enough for her to get that booksigning that she just didn’t care and I’m not sure I fully understand why.

For me the key is being published, getting a contract, an editor who loves my work. The rest very much less so, and to be honest the idea of sitting at a booksigning makes me shudder.

I’m curious. Is it important to other people to see their book in print, or is it enough knowing a reputable publisher loved it enough to offer a contract?