Publisher Blues: How to Find and Choose an e-Publisher

Publisher Blues: How to Choose

Part 1

by Brenna Lyons

Which publisher/s should I submit to? or… What is/are the best, stable market/s for my work? This is one of the most important questions an author will ever ask, whether he/she is going to publish electronically or not. In many ways, the important factors remain the same: a fair contract, quality product, reliability of royalty payments, distribution channels, and so on. But, finding an indie/e publisher is not the same as finding a NY conglomerate publisher.

For one thing, according to Para Publishing, there are six recognized conglomerate publishers in the US, four of whom are not US-owned. Some other sources include a seventh. Those would include: Random House/Bertelsmann Group, Holtzbrinck/Macmillan, Harper Morrow/Harper Collins, CBS/Simon and Schuster, Groupe Lagardere/Time Warner, Pearson/Penguin Putnam, and Reed Elsevier/Harcort and Holt.

At the same time…and from the same source of Para Publishing, there are more than 86,000 small and self-publishers in the US alone and between 300 and 400 medium-sized publishers in the US alone. The US alone…and no single entity tracks all publishers. Now, that’s not saying that all small or medium-sized publishers do e-books, and I can name a few that don’t, but with that staggering number, it’s easy to see why you will never find a comprehensive list of e-publishers, as you do for NY conglomerates and their associated lines.

So, where do you start? How do you find the needle in the proverbial haystack? There are several good ways to set out to find an indie/e publisher for your books.

The first way is to start making a list of indie/es that put out the type of book you have written. As I’ve told authors looking for a print publisher to scan their bookshelves or browse the bookstore to find publishers that put out their type of books, e-authors can do the same. Start with the e-books/trade paperbacks you read. Even if you don’t, go browsing.

Fictionwise is currently the largest reseller of e-books; imagine Barnes and Noble for e-books or whatever the largest chain bookstore is, in your corner of the world. You can start by browsing the genre pages to the left of the screen and making a list of publishers in your genre. Then go to Fictionwise’s publisher page. Clicking on a publisher name from your list will take you to the books they have listed on Fictionwise. Each publisher page comes complete with a link to the publisher’s home site, where you can learn more about them and purchase more of their books. At the time of this article (early 2008), there are only 684 publishers listed on the Fictionwise site. As I said, even the largest reseller only tracks a drop in the bucket of available publishers, and you’ll notice that the NY conglomerate e-books are listed with the indie/e-books on FW, which means not all of the 684 are indie publishers. Fictionwise has recently purchased eReader.com from Palm, so I won’t tell you to check out eReader, as I would have even a few months ago. UPDATE TO THE ARTICLE: Please note that B&N has recently purchased FW and is currently adding the FW databases of e-books to the B&N site.

If you write romance or erotic romance, you might also want to check out ARe. AllRomanceeBooks.com is one of the larger resellers, but it focuses only on the romance sub-genres.

Now that you’ve finished browsing through virtual bestsellers, you might want to see who the award-winners are. Sadly, there is no central list of what e-books have finaled or won in every major book award in existence, and since many print books are available in e-book and vice versa, sorting it out would be a mess.

At the same time, there are two awards that are only open to e-books: the EPPIE and the Dream Realm Award. The EPPIE is the longest-standing (at 10 years) and most-inclusive (at more than 30 categories of fiction and non-fiction). The Dream Realm Award is a close second at 8 years and 7 categories of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror, as well as YA, romance and erotic cross-genres thereof. Browsing the former winners will give you an idea of what companies compete best. Granted, like any professionally-judged award, only those who enter are competing for said awards. That a given, the EPPIE has had entrants from NY publishers, like Kensington and Harlequin, as well as former NY Times bestsellers, like Robert Adams and Piers Anthony.

In addition, awards like the IPPY, open only to small independent presses and self-publishers, may add some companies you might like to investigate to your list.

But not all indie/e publishers list with one of the larger resellers. Not all of them will show on the bestseller lists that the resellers post or on the yearly one that IDPF posts, which is cobbled together from a scant handful of the possible sources for sales data on e-publishing. Not all of them have won awards or even entered for them, especially newer publishers.

You might wonder why anyone would go with a publisher that is not established yet, and that will be covered in next month’s column. One reason is that, just as editors and agents leave one NY publishing venture and start their own literary agencies, established publishers from one indie may choose to leave the nest and start their own publishing ventures, bringing all of their amassed knowledge and business contacts/networking with them. In just such a way, Crissy Bashear of Samhain was once a part of Ellora’s Cave. In short, Samhain started life with a professional bearing, feet on the track and running. That is just one of the many variables that will take you forward from this point. This early in the selection process, even new publishers should be considered viable choices.

Back to the subject of making that list of prospective publishers for your work, you can ask for which publishers other authors would recommend or not, based on their experiences, and what publishers readers prefer to purchase from in your genre. Writer’s lists, like ERA-Writers, FictionThat Sells, MikesWritingWorkshop, BroadUniverse and PNWriters, are a good place to start. Yahoogroups also has a wide array of genre lists for authors and for readers. While readers will share their favorites…and sometimes the ones that aren’t favorites on list, many authors prefer to share their poor experiences off open lists and only list their good experiences in the thread. Remember to invite them to contact you off list.

Now you have a personalized list of potential markets to submit your work to.

As I said, there is no single list of all indie/e publishers in existence. With the number that come and go from the market every year, such a thing would be impossible to keep current. Like any other business venture, there is a steep rate of attrition on new publishers. Most small businesses fail ultimately, and 85% of those that fail do so within the first five years. For that reason, next month, we’ll be looking at risk management and finding the stable indie/e publishers.