The Geneva Writers’ Group (GWG) is a non-profit group with links to International PEN, the International Writers’ Residence at the Château de Lavigny, the Paris Writers’ Workshop and the International Women’s Writing Guild. Founded in 1993, GWG brings together over 200 English-language writers from 25 countries. Its objective is to encourage all forms of creative writing in English. Its members gather once every month from September to June at the Geneva Press Club, with a program of writing workshops, critiquing sessions, and master classes.
Earlier this month GWG held its annual conference and one of the sessions was Alternative and Self-Publishing with invited speakers Melissa Rosati (consultant), Nancy Freund, Katie Hayoz(authors), and publisher John Hunt of John Hunt Publishing UK. The speakers discussed the alternatives to traditional publishing (pros and cons), the attraction of e-books for authors and readers, the steps to self-publishing, and how distribution and promotion is handled.
Below is the transcript of the address delivered by John Hunt at GWG 2014. What it reveals is that not all publishers approach independent and self-publishing in the same way and publishers can and do introduce innovative and cooperative structures, ideas and methods in an effort to constructively integrate alternative and viable new ways for authors to publish books beyond industry-prescribed paths.
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I think the original title for this session was going to be something like traditional publishing or self-publishing. I’m not sure that there is such a thing as traditional publishing any more. A site like Preditors & Editors for instance characterizes any publishing company that charges authors for anything in any bit of its business as a vanity publisher. Penguin Random are the dominant players in the traditional publishing market, bigger than the next four put together. But they also own most of the vanity publishing market, since their purchase of AuthorHouse a couple of years ago.
Similarly with self-publishing. It’s a misnomer. No author edits, designs, prints and distributes their book themselves. Everyone pays for help somewhere along the line. And they’re usually working with the same individuals and companies that the big guys work with, just paying more for it.
So what are the alternatives? Over the last year I’ve heard of author publishing, indie publishing; self-publishing, assisted self-publishing, fully assisted self-publishing. Agency-assisted self-publishing is a new one for me today. Then there’s community publishing, partnership publishing, co-operative publishing. And so on. Even hybrid publishing, where you use a different model for successive books.
I do think there’s an identity crisis in publishing. I welcome that, I’ve never really thought of it as a proper job anyway. It’s not like writing for a living.
Let’s step back a bit. For a potted history of publishing; the first professionals in this area were the monks, the church. From Gutenberg onwards, the key players were the printers. They ruled for a few centuries, until with increasing literacy the market was big enough for people to make a living selling books, rather than just printing them. Bookshops became the main players. Printers were relegated to service providers. You even got to the point where intermediaries between author and bookseller and reader became a specialism in itself, and you get the rise of what’s now called the publishing industry.
Now, print technology, and the internet, has changed things all over again. I’ld hazard a guess that in the 21st c, the winners will be the authors. And the current disposal of income, roughly 10% to the author and 90% to the publisher and trade, will be reversed. The author will start with 100%. If they decide to use a publisher, the publisher keeps, say, 10%. And then there’s a series of decisions to be jointly made about how much more the author is willing to give up for the services along the line that the publisher can arrange.
That’s going to be very different from book to book. Traditional publishing is a one-size fits-all solution, dating back from the days when the only possible sales were obtained through sales teams visiting shops to grab shelf-space. But the value that a publisher can bring to a good author today varies hugely. Some manuscripts for instance need rewriting. Others need virtually nothing done to them. Some authors are more clued up on their own market and can reach it more effectively through the internet than any publisher could. Others are appalled by the idea. The traditional one-route-only option, “get published properly, or never see the light of day”, has disappeared, and good riddance to it. But the other available option, of self-publishing, I think is really tough. I don’t honestly know, I’ve never done it. But I suspect there will be relatively few who can do it successfully.
So is there something in between?
I guess I’m probably on this panel, because we’re a kind of hybrid, trying to do something different. We didn’t set out to do this, with some new kind of vision in our heads, it’s just developed as we’ve tried to make sense of the author/publisher relationships.
Basically, we’ve tried to reverse-engineer the publishing process. Rather than authors existing to support a publishing house, we’ve tried to create a system where the publishing house exists to support authors. We encourage authors to get involved. No author has to do anything, but if they want to, even start earning money by working on other authors’ books, they can.
We don’t have any full time staff. There are about four dozen people involved with the business, freelance, mostly living in France, Ireland, USA, north England, working from home. They’re mostly authors. We work through a common database, and a forum. Everyone has the same access to every bit of information. Which means that we don’t meet, because it’s impractical for us all to collect in one place, and we don’t use email, because then there are things being said and agreed that not everyone else can see.
We work with authors on the same principle, though the information they can see is a little more restricted. So they can see their own sales figures for instance, every month as they come in, but not those of other authors. They can see where their books are on the production schedule, what has been done on the marketing. They have free use of the contacts database, and can add contacts. We have about 30,000 contacts in retail and media and online, mostly added by authors. We work with these authors through an author forum. Any author can see all the comments and queries that are raised.
The business grows and develops through authors getting more involved. Trevor Greenfield is an example. We published a book of his nearly ten years ago, one of our first, an Introduction to Radical Theology. He enjoyed the process, and asked if we needed any proof reading or copy editing doing. So he started doing some of that, and moved on to some publicity as well. A couple of years ago he set up his own imprint within the business, Moon Books, for pagans. It’s worked, we published 40 titles there last year, set up a FB page there 18 months ago which grows by 1000 per month, we have an authors group there which does much the same kind of thing as the Geneva Writers Group does, we have an online magazine coming for it, and so on.
Across the lists, we’re coming up to a couple of dozen different imprints and 300 new titles a year.
I think there are some advantages for authors working this way rather than self-publishing, or even traditional publishing.
We do have quality controls. We have a strict filtering system, we decline anything we do not think is worth publishing, and every publishable manuscript gets a minimum of three readers reports, which the author can see, and is copy edited and proof read by us.
Secondly, it’s usually quicker and less trouble for the author. I used to reckon each new book took a few hundred emails from contract through to royalty payments, if you counted all those copied around and so on. We’ve broken down that process into 50 or so separate stages, notifications go out at each point to the relevant people to tell them what’s happening, what needs doing. Our average from submission of a proposal to a contract is 10 days; from submission to publication is 6 months.
Because we can publish more books, we can get our costs down. As we get our costs down, we can give more in author royalties. On all our books we pay 50% on the ebook sales. 10% on the print edition, going up to 25% after 5000 copies, with the exception of our top level contract, where it’s 25% from the beginning.
As we improve our systems, we can offer more. For instance, last year we allocated a publicist to every new title, every title gets some initial publicity, which the author can see, and every time it sells another 500 copies a trigger goes to that publicist to put in some more work. So the better a title does, the more promotion it gets, rather than being forgotten about.
Most of all, I think, as we publish more authors, we can build in more support structures. For instance, we have a bookshop signing session somewhere in the world about once every working day. The chances are that there’s another of ours in the same subject area within an hour’s drive.
On the downside
We can only work with authors and publishers who can function happily with forums and databases, and don’t need to have conversations over the phone or by email, let alone the traditional publisher lunch. It’s a self-determining kind of process. People feel comfortable with it, or they don’t.
Where the consensus of the readers is that they like the book, but we’ll lose money on it, we’ll ask for a subsidy from the author. The average is around £1000. That happens currently on about one in four new titles. Across the list, it amounts to one in ten. It varies around the different imprints, and between fiction and non-fiction. But having any subsidized titles on the list at all gets us characterized as a vanity press on some author internet forums. Though every title gets treated the same. No bookshop or reviewer is going to know if one title or another has had a subsidy.
The way we work doesn’t suit everybody. And it hasn’t been easy to set up. But we learn from the authors. It’s down to them to find the balance of what works best, and fix the identity crisis in publishing, because they, in this case, are running the business, and they have a foot in both camps.
About John Hunt
John works mainly on the editorial side. He drifted into publishing after getting a scholarship to Oxford University and a Double First degree in English, back in the mid 1970s. Having worked for publishers large and small, he started John Hunt Publishing Ltd as a co-edition (packaging color books) publisher in 1989, and over the last decade it has been reinventing itself as a trade publisher. He’s written a couple of books himself to try figuring out how this author/publisher process works.
About John Hunt Publishing
John Hunt Publishing began in 2001 under the name of O Books, and now publishes 300 titles a year. In 2010 the company began reorganizing itself into a number of autonomous imprints operating worldwide in different genres.
The imprints are largely run by authors who have gravitated to being involved in publishing, whether coming up through editing, design or marketing, and they draw in turn on a pool of like-minded people. A central office looks after sales, accounts, and royalties.
We rely heavily on in-house online publishing systems, designed by authors, for authors, in order to be lean, quick, and hand back to the author as high a proportion of the sales income that we can achieve. For example, our ebooks royalties are 50% of receipts (averaging about one third of the sale price), which is the highest royalty rate we are aware of in commercial trade publishing.
What also distinguishes us from other publishers is our attention to marketing. We provide every book with a basic promotional campaign (including but more than the usual press release you usually get with commercial publishers). And then, for every 500 copies sold, we dedicate another round of publicity. This way, the books that are succeeding in the marketplace get the attention they deserve. 90% of our sales come through the bricks-and-mortar and online retailers.
Mick Rooney – Publishing Consultant
If you found this review or article helpful, but you’re still looking for a suitable self-publishing provider to fit your needs as an author, then I’m sure I can help. As a publishing consultant and editor of this magazine, I’ve reviewed and examined in detail more than 150 providers throughout the world like the one above. As a self-published and traditionally published author of nine books, I understand your needs on the path to publication and beyond. So, before you spend hundreds or thousands, and a great deal of your time, why not book one of my personally tailored and affordable consultation sessions today? Click here for more details.
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Hi Mick, it’s a really helpful piece, as I hesitated when I first approached JHP with my upcoming (third) book. My NY agent could not place it for several months, and when I heard of this publisher I was not sure if it was for me. My agent said she had not heard of them.
Fast forward six months, and I am about to have my book published by Axis Mundi, an imprint of JHP. I got offered a more-than-fair contract, and the team that deals with the production of my book is fantastic. True, I did not get to go to lunch with them – and everything is done online through ‘the system’ – but who cares? They are much better than two other traditional ‘small’ publishers I’ve published with in the past. They’re an honest, forward thinking bunch and after the UK Society of Authors vetted my contract, I felt comfortable about going ahead, as should anyone else who can not get a large deal with a big publisher.
They expect their writers to do their bit of promotion – but so does a large, traditional publisher these days. One of the best bits about being a JHP author is the supportive community of authors that one meets through the online forum. And – the more than fair royalties you get if your book sells a good number of copies, as well as the feeling you get that these people really like books, and care about what they’re doing.
I am the above-mentioned Nancy Freund, fortunate to have shared the GWG panelists’ table with John Hunt. With a background in traditional publishing distribution, I come to Alternative Publishing from another hybrid angle. Hearing John’s presentation in Geneva, and now reading it again, I find it utterly refreshing to see how this company has evolved. JHP is doing exactly what I have thought for YEARS someone should attempt to do for authors. Very fair, smart, and progressive. These are exciting times for authors and publishers alike, and John Hunt is a shining light among the examples to be found. I’m grateful for this opportunity to see his fine presentation in print.
I listened to John Hunt and the panel at the GWG Conference. As a future JHP author, it is helpful to reread the presentation. I look forward to the experience when my book comes out with the Bedroom Books imprint in the Autumn.