by Lynne Connolly

I’ve been involved in e-publishing for around 8 years now, so you could say I’ve been there since the Wild West Frontier days.

I joined RFI West, (those of you from those days, I can feel your shudders) and the contract was signed and ready to go in when I received emails from people I trusted, saying “don’t.” So I waited a week and the whole situation exploded. Someone left RFI West, claiming she hated the way they were defrauding authors and she started a new press called NBI.

That went well for a while, about two years, before Penny ran off with the money. We’ve never been able to track her down, and I believe the IRS is still looking for her. But by then, people had heard of me, and I was recruited. Ellora’s Cave was interested, when it first started out, but I hadn’t anything to send them at the time.

Then I joined Triskelion. At first, that was good, too, checks on time, sales pretty good and growing but then the owners invested in a new website and decided to go for it in a big way, and went mass market paperback.

My first print book did pretty well, and I got a check for 1500 copies sold once returns were taken into consideration. Not brilliant by Penguin standards, but it was growing.

Everything went wrong very fast, and what really killed Triskelion was the returns. They didn’t expect the returns to be so high. Add to that the volatility of the owner (who must have me on Google search, since she keeps popping up anonymously on posts I’ve made or commented on, so hi, Kristi!) and the addition of another disastrous, but hugely expensive website, and disaster ensued.

But before then, I saw some interesting things, and I’ve seen them again and again in e-publishing companies on the brink of closure.

There are some smaller e-pubs that look very interesting, so this doesn’t mean all. I now write for the three largest e-pubs, Ellora’s Cave, Samhain and Loose-Id, and I’m very happy with them, so I’m writing with the weary cynicism of someone who’s sitting on the porch watching the world go by. But I never take anything for granted.

These are symptoms that aren’t cast in stone, there are always exceptions, but they might be warning signs, red flags when you’re looking at an e-pub.

1. Writers you don’t see anywhere else. This is often a sign of owner/authors using a variety of pseudonyms to bulk up the author roster. Considering there are thousands of unpublished, sometimes desperate would-be-published authors out there, it’s something to think about. A writer who opens an e-publishing house often sees it as a way to get her work out there. Not a bad thing, considering the likes of Jaid Black and Treva Harte, but when the entire staff consists of writers who manage, edit or do cover art on the side, it’s something to note. Especially when the writers don’t admit to the pseudonyms, but set them up as totally different personas.
2. Poor editing and bad spelling. Look at the website, the excerpts and then take a peek at some author websites. True, not every author starting up has the money or the time to get something big and flashy going, but she should be able to spell, or at the very least, use Spellcheck. A hastily erected author website, with poor spelling, bad design, often with colors that make your eyes bleed, isn’t good. Most reputable e-pubs will check an author’s website on or around the time of signing, and will give advice to the author about the site. That this publisher hasn’t, might be a bit of a warning.
3. If you venture to criticize the publisher on a public forum, you get a plethora of emails saying how good that publisher is, that they always pay on time, that they are like (brace yourselves) “one big, happy family.” It’s got to the stage that when I see that phrase, I back into the nearest wall and hold my hands in front of my face. Because adherents can get positively rabid about it and can lambaste you for saying anything.
4. Poor cover art. Every publisher, even the big ones, uses stock photos of one kind or another. Bigger publishers have annual or bi-annual photo-shoots, with an idea of books to come, and general poses, and the artists sort through them to find the one they want. But when the photos are used badly, when they appear on the book cover snark columns regularly, be careful. Poorly pasted together snippets, Photoshopped images that haven’t been worked on properly, cover artists who are the owners who do it in their spare time. Not good. Cover and blurb are enormously important marketing tools to interest new readers to an author or book, so skimping on these isn’t a good sign.
5. Bad books. Okay, every publisher has them. But if you read a book from a prospective publisher and you cringe, maybe you’d better think about how you’d feel if that publisher took your offering. You’re going to have to be nice to that person.
6. Insistence on publisher loyalty. A big, big one, this. If a publisher insists on you supporting all the authors, whatever you think of them, then back off and think about it. While no publisher appreciates public bad-mouthing, especially if you haven’t raised concerns with them first, they don’t expect blind loyalty, or they shouldn’t. I’m sure they’d all love it, but if you disagree with a policy or dislike a book, some publishers would ostracize you and even punish you if you go wrong.

I have to admit, I saw this first hand. With Triskelion, I was one of their best-sellers, and I was one of the privileged, although I didn’t realize I was receiving any special treatment. I just thought that was the professional way to cope. Until I heard horror stories from other authors who Kristi had victimized and abused. I always said I’d see as I found, and I started to find out when I asked to be released from my contracts. I wrote several series for Triskelion, and Kristi tried to keep hold of one book from every series, so stopping me selling them to anyone else. It was so blatant, so obvious. But another publisher was very interested in one particular series, so I negotiated my way out of it and a month or two later, Triskelion went bankrupt. I now think that even at the time I asked for my release, Kristi and Ron Studts were planning to go bankrupt, and keeping me was either spite, or an effort to hold on to an asset. I expected better treatment than that, but seeing the way others were treated, I should have known better.

So if you get six out of six of the red flags above, be very, very careful.