By the time you read this, Invasion at Bald Eagle will no longer be a Grand Mal Press book and will no longer be on sale (not from anywhere reputable and or respectful of copyright, anyway).
When the editor-in-chief at Grand Mal Press, Ryan Thomas, got in touch with the GMP stable of authors in early September to tell us the publisher would be altering its business model, I allowed myself to indulge a glimmer of hope. I had very much enjoyed working with Ryan on producing my novel and he had always treated me fairly and with courtesy*. But my prevailing instinct was one of dread.
Sure enough, it turned out that, due to financial and time pressures on its small team, GMP was moving to a print-on-demand model. Authors could choose to continue on with GMP or, if we weren’t happy with the new arrangement, pull out and have all rights (including the cover art!) returned to us to do with as we wished.
I agonised about it for a while, but I had already been down the POD track with Ghost Kiss and Asylett Press and, for someone who would rather gouge out his own eyes than play salesman, it was really a no-brainer. I had to end my relationship with GMP.
What drew me to Grand Mal Press in the first place was its traditional publishing model. An author whose manuscript was accepted would be paid an advance and he could also hope to pocket further royalties once his book had earned out against the advance. All editing and cover art costs were covered by the publisher. In other words, it adhered to Yog’s Law: money flows towards the writer. But sales were slow, to say the least, and I knew the reason why.
It’s a common problem among small presses. They are helmed by writers and editors who know everything about editing, designing and publishing a book, but nothing about promoting and distributing it, which requires a totally different set of talents and industry contacts. I could start up a publishing company that would rival any other for quality of product, perhaps, but it would fail. Why? Because I have no relationship with distributors, marketing bores me blind, and I wouldn’t have the time to devote to it. I can barely keep up with this blog and my social media presence.
There is a reason that writers write, editors edit, publicists publicise and distributors distribute. It’s because they are all full-time jobs that require unique skills. POD and e-book technologies have made it easier and more affordable to create novels, but promoting and selling novels is as difficult (or more difficult) than ever. The claim that such technologies have “levelled the playing field in publishing” is one of the great myths of the 21st century. All they have done is allow inept authors to flood the market with awful books and make the good ones harder to sell.
So I don’t want to take what I see as a backward step. My goal now is to work with properly established publishers. I don’t mean that as an insult to Ryan or GMP, and I wish him and the authors who continue on with GMP all the success in the world, but I won’t feel I have succeeded as an author until my books are available in a bookstore. That was never going to happen under the old GMP business model, and it certainly won’t under the new one.
* While I don’t care for the new GMP business model, I would work with Ryan again in a heartbeat.