An Interesting Question 01st October 2010.

A potential author asked us an interesting question yesterday, a real potential banana skin one.

This particular person submitted a manuscript which we read through and after a discussion between us decided the book was potentially marketable and was of a suitable quality for us to offer the author a contract. So far so good. When the author received the contract we received a question back in return.

No harm in that, for sure, we anticipate there would be some questions coming back relating to contract terms etc. etc. that would be entirely normal. What we didn’t expect was a question along the lines of “How big are you and why should I place my book with you?”

Just think about that for a moment.

This person has trusted us enough to send us their manuscript in all its glory and we’ve spent a long time (each) reading through the whole book and making comments, and then discussing and finally drawing up a contract offer. At this point we’ve already committed a lot of time to the book, now they are effectively asking us to “sell” our services to them.

We don’t represent ourselves as being a large organisation – that should be blatantly obvious to follows of this blog given the number of “hats” I personally wear. Our Notes for New Authors pages on our submission section (which is always open even if Submissions is itself closed), paints a fairly bleak picture in order to discourage those who think “I’ve written a book – now I’m rich”.

So how do we answer this question? If we give the author too much information, then we risk that information being passed on to other publishers – who, like ourselves, don’t provide this information up front. We are not a public company – we actually don’t have to disclose information we don’t want to the populace at large, only, regrettably, to the taxman.
Of course, we answered the e-mail in a reasonably polite manner – I left that to my business partner – she’s much politer than I am.

My point though should be clear – why ask these questions at this point? – why not ask them first? – before committing us to the amount of work we’ve now undertaken for what may turn out to be nothing.

DO YOUR RESEARCH FIRST. Simple.