Author Topic: The view from the other side?  (Read 8364 times)

Zorag

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on: August 01, 2010, 02:53:06 AM
I am not a writer.  I accept this.  I am considering putting together an anthology and self publishing it.  Where can I find some information on this?

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eytanz

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Reply #1 on: August 01, 2010, 04:45:54 AM
I think the main question is - are the works you are interested in collecting copyrighted? If so, you need to get permission from all the copyright holders or no respectable organisation will publish you. If you have such permission (and can prove it), or if the works are all public domain, I think it'd be the same as self-publishing anything else.



Zorag

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Reply #2 on: August 01, 2010, 06:18:43 AM
I planned on finding previously unpublished work.

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eytanz

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Reply #3 on: August 01, 2010, 01:00:08 PM
In that case, getting permission will presumably be part and parcel of finding the stories. I've never self-published anything, but there are tons of resources online for it, and I'm sure someone here can direct you to good ones. I've heard good things about lulu.com from people I know online.



Zorag

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Reply #4 on: August 13, 2010, 11:18:08 PM
I've actually been told that in some circles, lulu.com and similar sites are red flags.

I haven't had any real time to search the internet for this info, but should be able to soon.  What I do not want to do is either insult someone by offering a ridiculously low amount of money or end up with a pile of grade school level writing.

A friend of mine uses a service called Taxi to submit music that has been requested.  They have a $5 submission fee.  This is a "shoe box" fee.  It keeps people from just sending in all of their work to every request.  I am going to try to see if there is a similar service for writers. 

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Reply #5 on: August 13, 2010, 11:53:14 PM
Hey, Z!

Just so you know, suggesting a writer pay a submission fee is a Very Big Red Flag for most writers, and actually groups like Writers Beware spend a lot of time and energy explaining to authors why it is a very bad deal. (The basic explanation is this: money should flow to the writer, not from the writer.

So from an editing POV, I would not recommend it. From a writing POV, I'd flat-out ignore it.

Lulu and other POD presses aren't necessarily a bad deal, as long as you (the editor) are going to pay your authors. For The Love (FTL) markets that use vanity presses and don't pay their authors, or vanity presses that ask authors to pay for their own books are part of the above-mentioned red flags.
« Last Edit: August 13, 2010, 11:55:16 PM by DKT »



Zorag

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Reply #6 on: August 14, 2010, 12:09:11 AM
Yeah, I figured asking for a submission fee was a red flag, but figured there is probably a similar service available.

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falconesse

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Reply #7 on: August 14, 2010, 12:14:38 AM
Lulu (in my experience) isn't a red flag.  It's honest about what it does:  offers a platform for you to publish your work.  They've recently started offering some packages for marketing and distribution, and those I can't speak to.  But as far as "Hey, print my book" goes, they seem to be on the up and up.  You retain all rights to your work and can distribute it as you please.

The thing to know is that if you're ordering in small quantities (as with anything), the cost will be higher.  The more you order, the lower the bound book cost will be. 

There are other sites out there that do the same thing Lulu does, but that will mislead authors into believing their books will be on the shelves of every Barnes & Noble in the country, or that they're going to send out press releases to national media outlets.

Lightning Press might also be an option for you.  It's the same company that Ingram Book Company uses for their print on demand titles, and they will also do small print runs for you.  I'm not sure how their prices and services differ from Lulu's, but it might be worth checking out.

A couple of things to consider as you go:

How/where do you plan to sell this anthology?  Who is your primary audience, and how will you reach them?  How will you advertise it?

A submission fee might ring some warning bells.  Five dollars isn't exorbitant, but a lot of people are going to be following Yog's Law:  Money flows toward the writer.  Be ready to have people question the fee, and possibly decline to submit because of it.  There are a lot of scams out there where people will say "Hey, I'm holding this writing contest!  $10 entry fee!"  Then they get a hundred entries, pocket their thousand dollars, and walk away.  Asking people to pony up to show they're serious isn't necessarily going to be to your benefit, story quality-wise.

You might get a more positive response by simply setting a strict submission window, and allow only one submission per person ("no multiple submissions" in the local vernacular).  If you get buried in submissions, enlist a few trusted readers to help you wade through the slush.

I'd suggest looking around at some of the other anthologies out there and checking out their submission guildelines and pay rates.  You can find a good range of them listed at Duotrope, for starters.

Good luck!



Zorag

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Reply #8 on: August 14, 2010, 12:22:34 AM
Thanks for the information so far.  I've been skimming Writer Beware.  Again, I have no intention of charging a fee, but was looking for a slush reading service for lack of a better term.


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DKT

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Reply #9 on: August 14, 2010, 02:00:10 AM
What's the difference?


Zorag

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Reply #10 on: August 14, 2010, 07:02:58 AM
I would probably have to be the one paying the slush service.

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Zorag

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Reply #11 on: August 14, 2010, 03:30:41 PM
What would be a fair deal for a slush reader?  One of my concerns is that I will be swamped with garbage.  I do not mind working through stories, but trying to deal with stuff that is just plain bad worries me.  FWIW, I will be looking for apocalyptic short stories.  I do not want the focus on the disaster, but rather on the people surviving.  The Road Warrior, Fallout, even Waterworld would be good examples.  I am working on markets for the book already.  As to copyrights, if the pay is .05 per word, what is a reasonable agreement?

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Zorag

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Reply #12 on: August 14, 2010, 03:37:48 PM
Is it reasonable to request first rights to the characters but release those rights if I am not interested?  Reprints are another concern.  I would want all print rights, but other formats would belong to the authors. 

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falconesse

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Reply #13 on: August 14, 2010, 04:44:41 PM
What would be a fair deal for a slush reader?  One of my concerns is that I will be swamped with garbage.  I do not mind working through stories, but trying to deal with stuff that is just plain bad worries me.  FWIW, I will be looking for apocalyptic short stories.  I do not want the focus on the disaster, but rather on the people surviving.  The Road Warrior, Fallout, even Waterworld would be good examples.  I am working on markets for the book already.  As to copyrights, if the pay is .05 per word, what is a reasonable agreement?

I don't know very much about slush services.  I'd be afraid that the slush readers might not have the same tastes as you, or might not know exactly what you're looking for.  What about getting some friends together who enjoy the same kind of stories as you do to help you with the slush?  Take a Saturday afternoon/evening, buy pizza and beer for them (or other comestibles of their choice), and tackle the slush pile together.  That way, they can help weed things out with you, and anything that's borderline, they can put into your pile for the final say.

You won't see me arguing with five cents a word. :)

I'd suggest looking at the agreements that are up on other anthology sites.  Duotrope has a good listing of anthologies, and most of their websites will have the guidelines up.  Or take a look at SF/F magazines' guidelines.  I think those will usually be pretty similar.

Is it reasonable to request first rights to the characters but release those rights if I am not interested?
 

Eep.  I don't think so.  Copyrights should always stay with the authors.  Those are their characters, and their worlds, not yours.  Taking those rights away from them will steer people away.

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Reprints are another concern.  I would want all print rights, but other formats would belong to the authors. 

What you're purchasing would usually be the right (or license) to print their story in your anthology.  Period, the end.  What they do with it after should be up to the authors, including submitting it to other print or online markets or even other anthologies as a reprint. 

So, you shouldn't be buying ALL print rights.  You'd be buying what's called "first print rights," and it's pretty much what it sounds like:  your anthology would be the first place their story appears.  Some places will have a clause that basically says the author needs to wait 90 days after the book comes out/story goes live on the website before submitting the work elsewhere as a reprint.  (Or that it can't appear anywhere else for 90 days.  I'm not sure which it is, off the top of my head.)

So let's say I submitted a story to you and you accepted it.  If I wanted to, I should be able to post the story on my own website 90 days after the book came out, or send it to an online magazine as a reprint. 

Make sense?



Zorag

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Reply #14 on: August 14, 2010, 10:00:16 PM
Makes sense.  My desire from a slush reader would not be whether or not the story was to my taste but merely technically proficient. 

As to worlds and such, Star Wars anthologies are letting other people come into the existing world.  If I were to establish a world, it would be different to want to maintain rights to the characters.  This is not what I want.  Perhaps I phrased it wrong, but my desire was merely to be offered the story first (if I am going to try to publish more books).  The author would be under no obligation to sell it to me, merely give me the first chance to make an offer.

The 90 day clause makes me uncomfortable.  If I am only getting First Print rights, why would I want to pay rates this high?  I am not trying to come across as greedy.  I am trying to understand the industry.  The author being able to put the story up on their own website bothers me greatly.  Why would anyone in this day and age buy a book when they can get the content for free?  Also, as part of publishing, I was going to try to put out an E-Reader version.  If the best way to do that is to offer residuals on top of initial fee, I would be open to that.

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falconesse

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Reply #15 on: August 14, 2010, 10:54:57 PM
As to worlds and such, Star Wars anthologies are letting other people come into the existing world.  If I were to establish a world, it would be different to want to maintain rights to the characters.  This is not what I want.

If you're creating a world in which the stories have to take place, then you're letting people play in your setting.  Unfortunately, I don't know how rights work in shared-world situations.

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Perhaps I phrased it wrong, but my desire was merely to be offered the story first (if I am going to try to publish more books).  The author would be under no obligation to sell it to me, merely give me the first chance to make an offer.

It sounds like you're talking about "right of first refusal," which I've heard of when one author is selling a book to a publisher, but I've never heard of when it comes to short stories or anthologies.  I'd say the best way to get an author to come back and publish with you again is simply to do a good job the first time around, and build a good relationship with them.  Locking them into having to show their next story to you first (even if they don't have to take the offer) would set off alarm bells for me.  If you buy a story from them for one anthology, you could always send them an email when you're planning the second to see if they have something they'd like you to consider.

Quote
The 90 day clause makes me uncomfortable.  If I am only getting First Print rights, why would I want to pay rates this high?  I am not trying to come across as greedy.  I am trying to understand the industry.  The author being able to put the story up on their own website bothers me greatly.  Why would anyone in this day and age buy a book when they can get the content for free?  Also, as part of publishing, I was going to try to put out an E-Reader version.  If the best way to do that is to offer residuals on top of initial fee, I would be open to that.

Most authors probably wouldn't just put the story up on their sites for free; that was just an example of what they could do.  More likely, they'd turn around and try to sell it to another market that accepts reprints and get paid for it again.  But the point is that the rights belong to the author, not to you, so what they do with their print rights is theirs to decide.  They're not going to get 5 cents a word for the reprint, either.  What you're buying is the right to put it out there for the first time. 

And, from the writer's side of things, 5 cents/word isn't all that high.  It's the absolute minimum for SFWA professional rates, and yeah, I'd be ecstatic to sell a story at that rate, myself.  But once a writer's established, that figure will usually go up.  It also doesn't have to be 90 days.  It could probably be six months, though I'd say that's about as far as I'd go.  That's why I'm suggesting you take a look at some of the other anthologies out there that are putting out calls for submissions to see what they're doing.  Here's the language from the submissions page at Beneath Ceaseless Skies:

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Rights: For this payment, we purchase the following rights:

First World Serial Rights
First World Electronic Rights
An Option to buy Non-Exclusive World Anthology Rights
An Exclusive Period to buy Limited-Time Exclusive Audio Rights

(This means that our payment buys the rights to publish your story on the Beneath Ceaseless Skies website, as well as the option, at our choice, to pay you again at the reprint rate specified in the original contract (usually 2 cents per word) to reprint your story in any future anthology of stories from Beneath Ceaseless Skies and distribute that anthology anywhere in the world. It also gives us a time period during which we have the exclusive option, at our choice, to buy limited-time audio rights to your story, at the rate specified in the original contract (usually 1 cent per word), and podcast your story from the Beneath Ceaseless Skies website.)

(You can't publish that story as a first-run or "new" story anywhere else in the world, and you can't have it appear anywhere else, in print or online or as audio, before or for ninety days after we publish it. But after that you can have it reprinted online and/or in a reprint magazine and/or in any reprint anthology, like one of the many Year's Best collections.)

(You also can't sell the audio rights to anyone else for ninety days after we publish the story. And if during those ninety days we buy the audio rights from you, you can't have the story appear in audio form anywhere else before or for ninety days after we podcast it. But after that you can resell the audio rights, including to one of the many fiction podcast websites.)

We also hope that you will let us keep the story in our online archives after ninety days.

That's pretty standard for what I've seen in other online magazines.  But if you're taking all print rights, then yeah, you're going to lose some writers.  The stories are theirs; you're simply buying the right to publish them before anyone else does.  Again, I can't speak to how that affects shared worlds.

As for why someone would buy the book if the content is available for free, it's worked well for Cory Doctorow and The Baen Free Library.  If I put up a story and said, "Hey, my story is in this anthology!" with a link to the anthology, then people who dig that kind of story might go ahead and buy the whole thing, because there's even more tasty post-apocalyptic goodness inside.



Zorag

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Reply #16 on: August 15, 2010, 03:33:09 AM
Thank you very much.  The example of the offer helped a lot.  It's probably really close to what I will end up offering.  I do appreciate your time in responding to all my questions. 

I have no intention of setting up a shared world.  I was trying to contrast that concept with what I have in mind. 

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Reply #17 on: August 26, 2010, 08:07:41 PM
Have you thought about soliciting?  You could even search the EA podcasts for authors and contact them.  Ask them to send you a story and tell them you'll give a flat rate if you like it.  Some podcasts here have never been published in print at all and you could probably offer the author like $50 and get a guaranteed good story - hey, it passed Ben's (or someone's) muster - right?

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Reply #18 on: August 26, 2010, 10:09:12 PM
Have you thought about soliciting?  You could even search the EA podcasts for authors and contact them.  Ask them to send you a story and tell them you'll give a flat rate if you like it.  Some podcasts here have never been published in print at all and you could probably offer the author like $50 and get a guaranteed good story - hey, it passed Ben's (or someone's) muster - right?

IANAPA(Published Author), but $50 is really cheap, and anthology contracts should have royalties.

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Reply #19 on: August 28, 2010, 10:11:59 PM
Well, I am published actually.  $50 is hardly a pro-rate, but unless your name is Ray Bradbury you're not going to net much from a short story anyway.  One can only charge what the market will bear, after all.  I would take $50 for one of mine.

On the subject of royalties: most novels don't sell enough copies to net royalties.  Usually, a novelist can count on the advance only.  Anthology collections don't sell enough that I would really could royalties as a huge plus.

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Reply #20 on: September 07, 2010, 05:10:17 PM
Well, I am published actually.  $50 is hardly a pro-rate, but unless your name is Ray Bradbury you're not going to net much from a short story anyway.  One can only charge what the market will bear, after all.  I would take $50 for one of mine.

One of the top erotica anthology editors only offers $50 plus two contributor copies, and -- although Nobilis would probably have more details on the actual writers -- it seems like the authors in those are fairly well-recognized within the erotica community. 

Just saying, $50 isn't bad. Eight $50 stories = one car payment.

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DKT

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Reply #21 on: September 07, 2010, 05:39:53 PM
Well, I am published actually.  $50 is hardly a pro-rate, but unless your name is Ray Bradbury you're not going to net much from a short story anyway.  One can only charge what the market will bear, after all.  I would take $50 for one of mine.

One of the top erotica anthology editors only offers $50 plus two contributor copies, and -- although Nobilis would probably have more details on the actual writers -- it seems like the authors in those are fairly well-recognized within the erotica community. 

Just saying, $50 isn't bad. Eight $50 stories = one car payment.

Making 8 sales in one month to cover said car payment is the real trick  ;)

Most anthologies are not pro-rates - and I suspect a start-up antho on your own dime is not going to be one. That would be really expensive. Having a flat rate ($50) is a decent way to go, or you could pay $.02 a word, as some very respected anthologies do (Clockwork Phoenix).

All that said, authors are first going to be looking for anthologies that either pay well, or are very well-respected, or both (like Dark Faith - which did offer pro-rates).


Zorag

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Reply #22 on: September 12, 2010, 02:10:06 AM
Thanks again for all the info.  I am now working harder at gathering publishing info.  I am not sure exactly sure how much I will offer per story, but I do have a better idea of how much to budget.  This project has been moved to the back burner.  The good news is that I will have more time to gather info.

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Zorag

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Reply #23 on: November 20, 2010, 11:46:05 AM
Ug.  Now I know why movies have executive producers.  Any joy I would have in creating this is being slowly killed.  I know there would be pride and a sense of accomplishment when it was completed, but the joy is gone. 

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