Doing a Lot with a Little or Very Little with a Lot: Small Presses, Contests, and Scams

Bookseller, publisher & author breaks down small press book publication & distribution

Welcome to our weekly column offering perspectives on lit mag publishing, with contributions from readers, writers and editors around the world.

---

Publishing is a precarious, and sometimes obscure, business and many in it are there because they have a ridiculous and abiding love for what they do. Likewise, there are all kinds of authors, trying to get published, who don't know a lot about the business yet also have a ridiculous and abiding love for what they do. I get annoyed every time I hear about an author who’s been mistreated by a publisher, or someone calling themselves a publisher. That's why we need to talk about a few things, why we need some transparency, especially in the small press corner of the literary world.

Most small presses are run by the dedicated; they love books and authors with an undying affection. They take risks, investing time and money in project after project. However, some people who call themselves publishers make their money before the book ever goes to press and have little interest in selling books thereafter. Before you sign with a press, you want to know they’re in the business of selling books. How do you know they have no interest? By the way they distribute and how they set their discounts. To explain one thing, I first need to explain another.

Print on Demand

The benefits and the pitfalls of the Print-on-Demand are well-known. POD allows small print runs (even single books at a time) at minimal cost. It’s a boon for self-published authors and for small presses. Even the Big 5 have moved some of their backlist to POD. The two largest POD printers are Amazon and IngramSpark.

In the same way that POD means anyone can publish a book, it also means anyone can call themselves a publisher and run a literary contest. Writers should know the signs that distinguish a legitimate small press—no matter how small—from, let’s be nice and call them, a faux-press.

Investment

A traditional press—whether large or small—invests time and money in your work in a variety of ways. Editors work with the author to structure and sharpen their manuscript. Designers create a cover and a unique interior design for the book, and marketing develops a plan for promoting the book. With large publishers, this might be accomplished by an entire team; with a small press it might be one or two people. Regardless, this is an investment which requires no cash from the author.

Traditional publishing manufactures thousands of copies of your book, warehouses them, and ships them. Print on Demand relieves publishers of that expense. A faux-press fronts almost no cash to put a book in print. Their editorial services may be minimal or non-existent, their interior design the same for every book, their covers created using a simple template. Their entire ‘design and creation’ process could take less than twenty minutes. They have invested almost nothing.

If I put ten titles from ten small presses before you, and you have a mildly discerning eye, you could pick the books that had an interior designer. If you read twenty pages of each, you might be able to tell if the manuscript had been edited by an impartial editor. And covers, well, we all know what bad covers look like.

There are great small presses—some you’ve heard of, some you haven’t—which provide these legitimate services for their authors and do them well. There are others, our fauxs, however, where any attention is rudimentary. If your press isn’t spending time on editing and design, and spending no cash to publish, they bear almost no financial risk in publishing your book.

Distribution, Discounts, and Returnability

There are four ways a book is distributed in our current system:

1)      Amazon. This is its own ecosystem. Some people do very well self-publishing and selling through Amazon. Most don’t. I’m not going to talk about Amazon here.

2)      Barnes & Noble, the largest brick and mortar bookseller. Generally supplied directly by publishers and Ingram.

3)      Independent bookstores. Every year more and more indie bookstores open. They are responsive to their community, hand-sell books, provide spaces for author engagement, and the chance to actually browse and discover.

4)      Websites, either the author’s or the publisher’s.

Distribution is distinct from marketing, but it’s difficult to market if you don’t have distribution. Marketing is how you interest people in your book (author events, book festivals, readings at libraries, social media); distribution is how books get to customers. Here’s a great introduction to distribution from Jane Friedman.

When a bookstore orders a single book for a customer, or needs books for an event with an author, they order through Ingram. Ingram is the largest nationwide book distributor; they sell to everyone who buys books. They get books to the stores and, through Ingram Spark, their POD arm, to publishers and authors. They are supplied by the major publishers, by distribution services (like Consortium, SPD, etc), and by small presses themselves. Amazon POD also distributes through Ingram.

Unlike every other retail business, bookstores do not set the price of their merchandise, the publishers do. Two things make this system workable. The first is the discount publishers (and Ingram) offer booksellers. The standard discount to the bookseller on Ingram is 42%. It’s slightly higher from publishers, when the store pre-orders. This discount allows the bookstore to make money on the book.

The other is returnability. All major publishers and very many small presses allow for the return of unsold books within a certain period. This incentivizes stores to order more books for possible sale than they might otherwise. Discounts and returns attempt to compensate retailers for their lack of control in pricing.

(Yes, I know it's a totally weird system, but it's how book distribution works.)

If retail stores want your book, they go through Ingram. Books with standard discounts (42% from Ingram) and returnability encourage the store to bring the book in. Books printed through Amazon appear on Ingram at 25%, non-returnable. (Amazon has no real interest in selling through other vendors. More on that here.)

Advances

Upfront, small presses may pay an advance to the author, work with them on editorial changes, design the book inside and out, set aside a small publicity budget, even send out Advance Reading Copies to reviewers and booksellers. When a copy of the book sells, the press is paid a percentage of the cover price (after the bookseller takes their 42% and Ingram takes 13%, and the cost of production is deducted). The publisher then pays royalties to the author at the agreed percentage from the remaining amount, according to the contract.

This is how it works with a traditional publisher, large or small.

However, with the aforementioned faux-publishers, that’s not how it works at all.

Some require the author to buy 30-50 books as part of the publishing agreement; some  require a 200 copy pre-order before they publish. There are presses that set their discounts on Ingram at 5% or 0 and non-returnable, which means the bookseller has no incentive to bring that book into the store. In fact, they’d lose money on every copy.

These are  difficult things to explain to an author who’d like to do a reading, present at a festival, or get their books into schools. Even at 25% and non-returnable, bookstores may choose to order a single copy for a customer, but they can’t stock more without potentially operating at a loss.

Additionally, some fauxs don’t distribute through Ingram or Amazon, so the only place your book can be purchased is through their website. Some are only available on Amazon.

In short, these publishers don’t appear to be in the business of selling books. Nearly every copy sold, you’ll sell yourself.

Why So Many Contests?

Writing contests can be found in every corner of the writing ecosystem and they are open to writers in every genre. Entry fees vary, as do the cash prizes or advances. Sometimes a contest has a famous judge, sometimes not. Nearly every contest promises publication—on a website, as a chapbook, or a book. Many of our faux-publishers run contests.

The mechanics of these contests are sometimes murky. Often, little is known about how editorial choices are made. (If there is a big-name judge, they generally only read a very small percentage of the submitted material.) It’s usually unclear who sifts the slush pile and chooses whether to move it on to the judge. Some publishers use interns, some use students, some have a standing committee. Some have more dubious practices. Generally, the person submitting isn’t privy to these details.

Contests are big business. If 300 people pay $30 each for a novel contest, the press takes in $9000. Let’s say they pay a judge $500 to read the top three and choose one. The prize money may be $500, even $1000. They spend a little time formatting the book (often they’re loaded in directly from Microsoft Word) and creating a cover. They don’t pay anything for a book until it’s ordered. Conservatively, they’ve made $7000 on a book they don’t need to sell. Their return on investment is exponentially higher running the contest than selling the book.

When they do publish the book, it might be listed at 10%, 5%, or 0% discount and non-returnable. It might only be available on Amazon, or only on the publisher’s website.

These publishers don’t appear to be in the business of selling books. They’re in the business of doing something else.

Not All Contests are Bad; Most Small Presses aren’t Scams

True small presses take a risk on your work. They want to sell books. They’re investing their time and their money in material they choose to champion. Though they might not have a huge publicity budget, they are your advocate.

When we started Scuppernong Editions in 2018, we knew we wanted our books to be widely available. We wanted a store like ours—Scuppernong Books—to be able to order them anywhere in the country. We set our discounts at 42% and made them returnable. It means less money for us per copy, but the potential for wider distribution.

We print POD through IngramSpark. We generally invest around 100-150 hours in each book we publish, from editing to design. We don’t get paid. (Of course, we’d like that to change in the future.)

I’ve personally published two books with different small presses. Each of them used POD, I assume through Amazon. Each was listed on Ingram at a 25% discount and non-returnable, which isn’t the best, but is at least workable. Bookstores could be convinced to order copies for an event.

I’ve entered contests; I’ve won a couple. I rarely enter them now, but if I do, I do my research. I know what the finished product looks like; I know how it is distributed.

The thing is, the normal author can’t look up publisher discounts on Ingram. So, you could make a friend in bookselling who’d check it out for you, or you could ask the publisher, the people running the contest. These are the kinds of conversations authors and publishers should be having with each other. As publishers, we need to be transparent about what we’re offering; we need to spend some time explaining the business to our authors.

Don’t be so grateful to be published that you miss the red flags and skip the fine print.

Authors need to ask these questions:

1)      Will I be working with an editor?

2)      Are your books Print-On-Demand?

3)      How are your books distributed?

4)      If they’re available through Ingram, what are the discounts to booksellers?

5)      Are they returnable for booksellers?

For contests:

1)      Who is the final judge?

2)      How are editorial decisions made (before the final judge)?

3)      Is the contest award a prize or an advance against royalties? (A prize is unconditional cash in your hand. An advance against royalties is essentially money loaned to you in anticipation of your book selling enough copies to warrant that payout. If your book doesn’t ‘earn out’ your advance, you might have to pay some of the advance back.)

Your publisher should be your partner in this weird adventure. You deserve transparency, which gives you the ability to make an informed decision about your work and how it presents in the world. Trust your gut. Ask your writing friends. Do research. Then, make your choice.

[NOTE: Much of what I’ve said here doesn’t apply for poetry and poetry presses. Poetry is a separate beast. If you’re a poet, you know it’s true.]

---