How Penguin/Book Country Is Running The Con Game

Penguin’s announcement about “publishing” services for self-publishers through its Book Country subsidiary caused quite a stir in the blogosphere. Especially among members of the self-publishing community. Well it should have. Many of the more successful self-publishers are long-established, experienced and have dealt with traditional publishing, indie publishing and self-publishing. They know a scam when they see one. Book Country, my friends, is a scam, pure and simple.

In response to the stir, Penguin issued a statement through paidcontent.org. In smooth, grifter’s patter they attempt to lay fears to rest. Let’s examine the con, shall we?

Step One: The Assurance of Legitimacy: This is where they tell you, Yes, indeed, we have your best interests at heart. Look at all the wonderful things we do for you and your writer brethren.

The Book Country Community is free and always will be, it’s a great resource for writers – so far, nearly 4000 people—who are using the site to workshop their fiction.

The Book Country publishing services were introduced to give genre fiction writers a new path to publication, if they want it.

Step Two: The Hook. Certainly you can do it other places– but we’re better! We charge more to prove we’re better. You don’t want to be a cheapskate and look like a cheapskate, now do you? And it’s hard! Oh yes, self-publishing a book is so hard with all that horrible, icky business stuff writers hate so much.

The publishing tools offered by Book Country are focused on quality and convenience. They are not intended to be the least expensive in the market – the free, instant ebook sites exist and they may be the best choice for some writers.

However what you get on Book Country is not the same as what you get at these other free sites. On Book Country, you can publish high quality ebooks and print books, and you don’t have to upload your books in multiple places, manage multiple ISBNs, or manage multiple accounts.

Step Three: Introduce the Fear Factor: Hand coding! Oh my God! Coding! It’s so hard and complicated. Coding! Um, can we examine that for just a moment? If you are using a word processor, you are coding a manuscript. Every time you format the margins, indents, italics, bolding, fonts– that’s coding. There are many ways to format a book for epubbing. A Word file, formatted to specs provided by Mark Coker’s guide over at Smashwords (a free guide), can be uploaded to Smashwords and they’ll convert it to different ereader formats for you. You can learn basic HTML, which isn’t difficult. You can download Mobipocket Creator for free and convert your files. Guido Henkel wrote a comprehensive series on his blog about producing a top quality ebook– for free! If formatting still looks like too daunting a task Guido will format it your files for a flat fee. You can also find help over at Joel Friedlander’s blog, The Book Designer. You can hire Joel to do all the work for you– for a flat fee! You can hire Joe Konrath’s ebook producer, 52 Novels. Flat fee, every one, and much cheaper than Book Country. Not only that, but when you hire a formatter they actually do the formatting and present you with files ready to be uploaded at the distributor of your choosing. For $99 and up, Book Country gives you the instructions and you still have to do the formatting yourself.

In all three packages offered by Book Country, our ebooks are individually hand-coded, not run through a software program with no human intervention. In the two user-formatted options, we give you instructions on preparing your book file for best presentation when we turn the file over to be coded. You could do this formatting work and upload it for free elsewhere, but on Book Country we’ll produce a professional grade ebook that looks terrific.

I highlighted that last sentence for the irony. The absolutely worst formatting errors I’ve seen in ebooks have come from the traditional publishers, like Penguin.

This means you get great looking chapter openers, drop caps, and you won’t end up with bizarre spacing issues that confuse and frustrate readers, not to mention diminishing the perceived value of the writers’ work. These abnormalities happen often on the free upload sites.

If you opt for the $549 package, we will do all of the formatting and the coding for you, for BOTH eBook and Print files.

Step Three: The Fine Print. Now that they have you all excited and fearful about that dreadful, awful, impossible, ‘leave it up to the professionals’ coding and formatting, (a few hours worth of work for only $549– and remember, no editing or proofing of the content) then you find out what it really costs you.

As for the sales transactions after a book has been published, like many sites, Book Country takes a percentage of each sale of a book.

When we distribute your book out to other sites, the third party sites also take a percentage. This is not unusual. This is how many new publishing operations function. In contrast to traditional publishing houses, Book Country offers the author a much higher percentage since Book Country is not incurring editorial, marketing or publicity costs.

They are doing a few hours worth of work, if that much. They want you to be afraid of what is actually the easiest part of self-publishing– the formatting and uploading to distribution sites. What makes a self-published book successful is well-edited content, marketing and publicity. None of which Book Country will do.

Book Country is incurring costs to code the professional ePub file, set-up the print file for printing, distribute the book files and the metadata out to all retailers, account for incoming sales in multiple channels, and pay out to authors on a monthly basis. Not to mention the cost of maintaining the Book Country site and all of the tools, like the Genre Map, that are meant to help authors actually find paying readers, very valuable benefits.

Again, they make the details sound as if only a professional should tackle them. The truth is much different. Once a file is formatted, it takes about five minutes to upload the file to the major ebook distributors. How hard is it? Well, you set up an account with Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Smashwords or CreateSpace or any other outlet of your choosing, then you follow the Step-by-Step instructions. You can purchase your ISBNs from Bowker or accept the ISBNs provided by the distributors (some free, some for a minimal charge). What about that terribly dangerous sounding metadata? Shouldn’t professionals do that? Okay, metadata. Your book title, author’s name, copyright, book description, keyword tags. What’s truly insulting about this pitch is this, Book Country isn’t reading your manuscript, so they cannot produce the actual metadata content. Which means, you will have to provide it yourself anyway. All they’ll do is fill in the blanks.

And just how valuable are those valuable benefits? Are readers going to be flocking to Book Country to buy self-published books? Why should they when they can go to Amazon or B&N? Really. Think about it. Who?

Book Country can make your book available everywhere that ebooks are sold.

So can you. Traditional publishers have a lock on distribution into brick and mortar stores for print books. They do not have distribution channels unavailable to self-publishers (other than the Book Country site itself and again I wonder how many sales they will actually make). Self-publishers can even list their books on OverDrive to get them into lending library systems.

Step Four: Fast Talk, Double Talk, Confuse the Issue:

We distribute more widely with a single upload than any other self-publishing side today.

Unlike other sites, we are non-exclusive. We do not restrict writers to only sell within our site in order to be eligible for a certain percentage of each sale.

We do not charge writers a per-megabyte download fee when someone buys their book. (Read the fine print on some of these other sites!)

We do not set a maximum price for your ebook.

We do not charge a monthly listing fee to keep your book available for sale. It is like consignment, we take a percentage to cover our costs only when you succeed in making a sale.

All of the above is pure bullshit. Self-publishers work distribution and pricing deals with every distributor. It’s not rocket-science, it’s not magical, it’s nothing special. Yes, each retail outlet has its terms and services policy you must agree to. And yes, each retail outlet takes their cut. If you deal directly with them, they take only their cut. Amazon’s cut, for instance, is either 30% or 65% depending on how you price your book. What Book Country is proposing is to take an additional cut off that (up to 30%!) because you know, they worked at least two or three hours to format and upload your manuscript. Oh but wait, they’ll handle all that pesky accounting, too. Reality check. When you create a publishing account with Amazon, and the other distributors, you have access to that account. You can check your sales every day, every hour if you want. The systems are automated. You always know exactly how many books you’ve sold. Then every month, their automated systems deposit your money in your Paypal account or they send you a check. Real difficult, right? What Book Country proposes is to set up accounts to which you will NOT have access. You get to take their word for it about the number of sales. Am I accusing Penguin of chicanery? Not at all. But I’ve worked with traditional publishers for twenty years. They do not have open books. Period. If you want to audit their accounts, you will have to jump through some very expensive hoops.

Step Five: Reel Those Fish In! It’s common knowledge that most writers would give up their left nut and first born child for a publishing contract. Stars in their eyes, hope in their hearts, dreams in their minds. Penguin knows that. So subtly, with no specifics, all they have to do is very casually mention Penguin “staff” (as in editors) and a whole lot of writers are immediately thinking about being discovered and having Penguin turn them into literary stars.

The Penguin logo is in the footer of the Book Country site so you can easily click to get an explanation of the fact that Book Country is a subsidiary of Penguin’s with its own dedicated staff.  I’ve attached an image of a Book Country book so you can see the Book Country logo on the spine.

Reality check, folks. Editors at the big publishers are NOT reading self-published books in order to discover stars. Editors at publishing houses are barely able to keep up with reading what is on their desks. They don’t even have slush piles to read through any more. They let agents take care of that. Are agents combing through self-published books to find stars? Only if the writer is making a whole lot of sales and noise. Quite frankly, if a writer is making a whole lot of sales on their own, what do they need agents and publishers for? (don’t jump in and answer that, because that’s a whole other issue) Book Country’s ‘dedicated’ staff will be busy fleecing the ignorant and unwary out of their money. They won’t be reading the works they ‘publish.’ Period. End of story. That is the truth.

This is a con job, plain and simple. Do not fall for it. Do not get tangled up with these people legally or emotionally. If you are considering self-publishing, make sure your motives are pure and you are willing to do the work necessary. There are no shortcuts, there are no cheats. Look over in the sidebar at my list of blogs under Writing and Publishing. Start reading those people. They are generous and wise and will tell you what you NEED to hear.

*****

Update: November 27. People have pointed out that Book Country is offering a distribution/retail outlet for self-published novels. That’s a good thing, right? So I checked out BC as a retail site. Not a particularly good thing. My review here.