Hope is a dangerous commodity for an author. You hope to find a good agent, you hope to find a traditional publisher, you hope to sell books and you hope to become the next **** (insert famous author of your choice).
Hope is important, I have hope with every submission that comes through, but hope is fragile.
I am not going to rant about how frustrating it is from a publisher's point of view when we receive yet another round robin email from an author who can't even be bothered to tell us the name of their book in the email and orders us to reply to them because they deserve it. Instead I want to make a brief journey into the world of the author.
It's a hard job being writer, you (or we in this case), slave for months or years on a book. We throw it out there to receive endless rejections from traditional publishers and agents. Then if we get a sniff, the up hill climb often means we are left in limbo for months and months only to receive pennies for our trouble when the book is finally published. No one advertises it, or helps with understanding the world of promotion, etc. There are a lot of myths around traditional publishing, about how it works and how wonderful it is, the holy grail for an author. More like an alchemists quest for fools gold, I reckon.
I've met commissioning agents from traditional publishers, as a writer, and I have never been so savaged or humiliated. In fact I vowed never to have a book published by people who treat authors so appallingly and their opinions were just that, opinions and we all know about opinions and certain parts of the human body!
So, here I am, as a commissioning agent for Mirador Publishing. A small and compact company which specialises in partnership publishing - poo poo, I hear you cry, but wait... Give me moment. I pay for and publish my own books under this scheme and damn me, we are good. We turn around your books quickly (and yes we read them), we offer a fast service and if an email isn't answered we aren't ignoring you we just didn't receive it or we are having thoughts about it further up the food chain. We are always there, we never leave you hanging and we offer good advice on artwork and everything else. If we make mistakes we try to solve them quickly. We offer great royalty rates and we work hard with our indie authors. I am proud to be a part of our team and that team includes our authors, many of whom I count as friends and colleagues.
We ensure your book is given a fair chance and if you work for your book, we will work for you. Partnership publishing is fairer, smoother, and for me the only way to publish. You just have to pick the right company, one you feel is friendly, capable and able to offer a fair deal. This is your small business, your book, so you want to make certain you pick the right business partner.
We want your dream to be a reality. It's a long term investment both financial and emotional for us, we don't believe in making life any harder than it has to be for you or ourselves. So don't throw mud at indie authors, partnership publishing or self publishing programmes, we are hard working companies who want to help people reach new goals in their lives. That isn't a bad thing because we give people hope and that's more than you get with a traditional publisher in my humble opinion....
