Wesoomi
Publishing Redirection:
This
essay can properly be seen as addenda to my series, “On Writing and Publishing
(W&P).” Those essays are still in my archives where they will remain until
I publish them as a book. Before I get into that, I want to make one thing very
clear. When I say I, me, or my, I really mean I, me, or my. With just two
exceptions, which are properly identified, a single person, using several
pseudonyms, wrote everything on this website. The single person is myself, William
E. Steinman. The pseudonyms are Willie Gaffer, Markus Thyme, Madam Evelina
Maria Bellenda, and Crazy Louie.
In the
W&P series I described the bumps and pitfalls I encountered in my attempt
to become a successful writer and publisher. These efforts began in 1994 when I
began writing my first book, “The Wesoomi Gardening Journal.” If you notice the
date on this essay, you may realize how much time I have invested in this
effort to be successful. I am nothing if not bullheaded.
When I speak of success, I am talking about
the financial factor. As far as writing is concerned, I consider myself to be
successful. I have had very favorable reviews of my books and my website takes
enough hits to make it clear that people are reading what I write. Also in publishing,
I consider myself to be successful in that I have learned the profession of
book publishing from editing through layout to production. My books look very
good and are very good. My shortfall is in the marketing part of publishing and
only there.
By the
title of this essay, redirection, I mean a redirection in my ongoing effort to
understand and be effective in marketing. One of the reasons I have been
unsuccessful is I have been depending on other people to do the things they
claimed they would do. I have had a complete misperception of the publishing
industry and how it works, or in my case fails to work. I had a gut feeling
about this marketing problem when I wrote my first book. I should have trusted
that. I was right. Rather than wasting my energy trying to play-the-game, I
should have invested my energy into figuring out how to beat-the-game.
In a very
real way, this brings me back to where I began about 12 years ago. With my
first book, I thought about being just a writer and working with a publisher to
bring my work to the public. After checking out the book “Writers, Market,” I
noticed some problems with that approach. First, it was not clear that any of
them even wanted to publish my book. Second, the times of response to queries
they gave made me think I might expire before I heard back from a query. That
made me think I might do better by becoming my own publisher. That started me
on a long and interesting road.
The first
step on that road had me trying to market my first book directly by mail order.
From that, I learned that advertising does not work. At least, it did not work
for me. At a cost of several hundred dollars in advertising, I sold exactly one
book. I also tried sending the book to booksellers and reviewers. That did not
work either. I spent several hundred dollars on postage and got one review in a
minor suburban newspaper. I have a great deal more to say on reviewers in my
W&P essay 43, “Book Reviewers.” I was learning, but I am a slow study. So I
had a lot of gardening books and virtually no customers.
The next
step was an attempt to get book distributors interested in handling my second
book, “The Gaffer’s Shorts.” I sent letters and even made some phone calls.
That was when I learned it was possible to sneer over the telephone. I got
sneered at. I finally found one distributor who seemed reluctantly willing to
handle my book. I also found a publishing industry magazine that said they
would review my book. It turned out they lied. Between the two of them, the
distributor and the magazine, they subjected me to one of the nastiest
experiences of my life. I discussed that in detail in W&P 54.
Live and
learn. Onward and upward. Around that time, I decided to create my own website to
advertise and market my books. By then, I had my third book, “The Siege of
Acheron.” I learned the art of website design so I could create and put up this
website. I think it’s a very cool site. I hope you do too. Although maintaining
the site is not very expensive, sixty bucks a month, I have not sold enough
books to cover a fraction of that cost. People visited my site, they read my
essays, but they did not buy my books. I was definitely still a nonprofit
company.
Finally,
a couple of years ago, I pretty much gave up on marketing. I said so on my
website home page. I decided to try to find a buyer for my company and or my
books. I still wanted to get my books to the public and this seemed like
something to try. I discovered the booksellers would not even look at honest
queries, so I decided to try to find and agent to represent me. That led me to
the realization that the agents are flat out dishonest.
This is
the truth. I selected my latest and most important book. For that book, I
queried 30 agencies. Each one of these agencies said in their profile that they
were seeking new writers. Each one of them said they handled the type of
material I was offering to them. Each one of them rejected my offer
out-of-hand, refusing to even look at the book I offered.
Now, to
be fair, there are some reasons for these agencies and publishers’ failure to
consider new material and new writers. It has to do with the development of the
personal computer (PC). The industry was getting overloaded even when people
had to use typewriters. Now, the PC along with the word processor make it
possible for a lot of lazy people to put a lot of words on paper and deluge the
publishing industry with their twaddle. Most of them don’t even have sense
enough to proofread and edit what they send. They have not made any study
whatsoever of the writing profession. Consequently, agents and publishers are
deluged with manuscripts, literally tons of them, mostly bad. They don’t have
time to reply to them, let alone read them.
I’ll get
more into the publishing industries failure to adapt to change later on. For
now I want to acknowledge my own culpability. I am not playing the blame game
here. I have made a number of mistakes along the way. Some of them were very
costly. The biggest failure was my own inability to grasp the essentials of the
obstacles that lay before me in my new endeavor. I have covered all of these in
my W&P series. However, it’s just water over the dam, as we say. What we
do, is learn from the past while we look ahead to our next attempt. This
implies that I have a new plan. For sure, there would be no reason for this
essay otherwise.
I have
already said I have failed in marketing so far. In fact, I have not sold enough
books to pay for my ink cartridges, and I must accept a large part of the
responsibility for that. Therefore, from now on, this thing will be on a trust
based. If I lose my butt, I will lose my butt, but I am going to get my books
out there. After 12 years of reasonable diligent effort, I am firmly convinced
about the publishing industry.
I have
been sending my books to the wrong people. The only reviewers that count are
the readers. If my books are good, you will sell them. I have determined, with
the exception of only two people, the entire publishing industry is dishonest.
I must go around them, directly to the book-readers, you the people.
I call
this new plan, the Trust Based Initiative. What that means is I will trust you.
Previously, I have been offering you my books and requiring payment with the
order. I was asking you to trust me to ship the book after I cashed your check.
In my new plan, I will trust you to mail the check after you get the book.
The plan
is very simple.
You order
the book, you get the book and then you pay for the book.
Look at
the descriptions of my books in Our Publications.
If you
find a book you want to buy, look at the price list to find the price.
All of
the books are discounted from the cover price.
The
prices are the same to everyone.
If you
still want the book, fill out an order form and mail it to me.
Wesoomi
Publishing.
Orders
Make sure
your name and address are very clear and easy to read.
Do not
send any money with your order.
When I
receive your order, I will ship the book to you.
When you
receive the book, and not before, send a personal check or money order to me.
There will be an invoice with the book.
Make the
check payable to Wesoomi publishing.
What I
want from you after you get the book is a check or money order. I have no way
to deal with credit card orders for two very good reasons. One is, to take
credit cards I would have to raise the prices on my books. The other reason is
about security. I do not want to put up a secure website and I do not want to
be responsible for your personal information. Whether you know it or not, there
is no such thing as a secure website. You may have come to that conclusion
yourself if you have been keeping up with the latest news. Security is only as
high as the integrity of the lowest paid worker involved.
When you
order, if you include you email address, I will send you a confirming email.
The email is only for conformation of order. I will only send email to confirm
you order or to clarify your order. I know about spam. I get more of it in a
day than you will get in a month. I would not do that to my customers. Believe
me, I hate spammers as much as I hate any other terrorists.
Now, a
bit about prices. These books are available directly from Wesoomi Publishing
only. They are not available through booksellers. I will be offering the same
prices to everyone. I offer each book at a fixed discount price regardless of
quantity. I have no special quantity prices for booksellers or distributors. I
am up to here with booksellers and distributors. I don’t want to deal with them
and I sure will not pander to them at your expense.
Looking
at this new plan it might seem like I am giving my books away. In some cases
that will be true. I know some people will cheat me. That is their problem, not
mine. They will have to resolve that in their own conscience. My main goals are
to bring my books to public attention, and at least break-even. I think there
are enough honest readers out there for me to do that. After all, to be
consistently dishonest takes a corporate executive, a politician, a holy man,
or a top drug company salesman.
My guess
is, using my trust based initiative, I will sell books and make a bit of money.
Of course, it should be obvious that I will not be able to continue this if I
lose money doing it. I am a retired guy living on a fixed income, a Ford
pension. I’m sure most people are aware of the abject failure of FoMoCo
management and what is the likely result of that. For sure, the managers won’t
get punished.
Enough
about my happiness. Now I want to get into how publishers and agencies fail in
handling submissions, and how I think it could be done. Before I do that I want
to discuss submissions from writers to Wesoomi Publishing. At this time, I just
cannot deal with submissions or queries. It should be clear that the purpose of
Wesoomi Publishing Company is to publish my books. At this time, that is taking
all of my available resources. I am a staff of one. I don’t know if that
situation will ever change. Unless it does, it would be dishonest of me to encourage
submissions. I would not have time to read them.
If my
situation did change and I wanted to encourage submissions, I would have to
figure out how to do it. I have already noted that the publishing industry has
failed in this effort. The sheer mass of submissions has overwhelmed the
industry. Rather than figure out and set up a business plan to deal with that,
the publisher’s solution is to just evade the problem. They simply refuse to
look at anything that did not come through an agent. They use the agents as a
first filter.
The
business model for the publishers has changed since the golden days of
Hemingway and Steinbeck. Back then, many publishers really were about
literature and literary values. They sought out good writers who had something
to say and nurtured them. No longer! The current business model for most
publishers is the bottom line rules everything. It is not about good
literature. Their MO is to pander to children and childish people, the rabble.
The goal is to publish whatever the rabble will buy. That is how we came to a
state of decadence where we can find true romance twaddle and smut in hard
covers.
The
publishers are deliberately and consciously shutting out new material. When
they do happen to find something new, it is strictly an accident, like the
Potter books. They do not seek new material or new writers. On the other hand, I
am convinced there are still enough thoughtful people out there who want good
stories and thoughtful books. My motto is still he same, thoughtful titles by
and for thoughtful people.
For the
agencies, the situation is a bit different. I have already pointed out that
they have failed to do what they promise to do. The business model of the
agencies is not to seek new and great literature, but to keep a stable of hacks
who will produce the twaddle the publishers want for their bottom line.
The
agencies’ dishonesty is not by intent. It is caused by their incompetence,
their inability to do what they set out to do. They are, for the most part, dilettantes
who do not know how to run a business. They have no business model and no
skills to apply in creating an efficient or honest business model. They are
usually one or two person operations with an office, a phone, and an email
address. I suspect they spend most of their time schmoosing with publishing
editors to keep their contacts open. That leaves them very little time to
examine new material from unknown authors.
So what
is a writer who has good stuff to do? My very best suggestion is to do what I
am doing. Do it yourself. Go around all of these stonewalling dilettantes and
bureaucrats directly to your customers. Read my essays on writing and
publishing. Write and publish your own books and market them directly to the
buying public though a website. You need not make all of the mistakes I have
made. You can and should learn from my mistakes. This essay is about correcting
one of my mistakes. The moral is, trust people. I believe that will work.
I also
believe there is one other business model that would work. That would be to
have the alleged author pay for editorial services. If you expect a publisher
to invest several thousands of dollars in you masterpiece, then you must be
willing to invest in it too. Perhaps a reading fee of from $1.50 to $2.00 per
page would be appropriate. The point is to pay the editor who does the read and
the professional critique in response to the writer. At one time, I had a
proofreader going over my books before publication. I paid her somewhere around
$1.50 per page to do that. It was money well spent. It saved me some serious
embarrassments.
Here is a
thing, as a writer, you will want to realize. Your first book would probably be
rejected even if you could get a publisher to read it. There are several why’s
to this. The reasons range from hackneyed styles and bad structure to bad
grammar and spelling. There is also a problem with copyright infringement,
slander, and libel. I once actually tried to read a book a person who thought
he was a writer sent to me. It turned out to be a very poor rehash of “Zen and
the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” Now copyright infringement is very hard to
prove but a honorable publisher would recognize it and reject it out of hand.
The same is true of libel and slander. Magazine hacks get away with it all the
time but I would not publish it.
The point
is, your first effort is likely to be poor work. It takes as much time to learn
good writing as it does any other profession. When you consider that, It is not
a bad idea to pay someone to proofread your work and criticize it. If you stick
too it, it will be money well spent. So I am suggesting, if you really want to
be a writer with all of the glitz and glamour, it makes sense to pay someone to
teach you how. Think of it as tuition. Have you checked out the tuitions at our
universities lately? A few hundred bucks would seem like peanuts. If I ever get
to the point where I can and want to publish other people’s work, the pay for
edit model is the one I would most likely implement.