Easy to remember. They both have three letters.
If you are trying to sell a book either to a publisher or an agent, watch out for any of them that require a fee either directly or indirectly. For example, an agent will read your manuscript but will charge a “reading fee” to do so. Or the agent will read it for free then say you need to pay their editor to edit it for you. Or a publisher will say you have to help carry the load and pay for some of the publishing costs.
Run away.
Here’s another example. It is an actual email I got today. Odd thing is, it didn’t come to any of my writing email addresses. It came to one that is rarely used. Wee-erd.
Airleaf Publishing and Book Selling Services is the only company in the publishing industry contacting bookstore owners and selling books.
Whether you published your book print on demand, or with a subsidy publisher, we will sell it for you. (And no, you don’t have to reprint or republish with us.)
REACH 2000 BOOKSTORE OWNERS FOR $199!
We are offering our $399 Introductory Bookselling Package for just $199! That’s a 50% discount! This offer is only valid until Wednesday, September 17th!
What we do next is write a custom promotion about your book and then send it directly to the owner’s of 2000 independent bookstores. You approve the promotion, and can make any changes you want. You also help choose what part of the country and what kind of bookstores to target. We follow up all responses by mail or telephone.
As part of this package, we will also stock and sell your book in our stores in Harrison, Ohio, Martinsville, and Nashville Indiana. We can have your book for sale on our websites TODAY!
To take advantage of this amazing offer, call me
1-800-342-6068or email[email protected]!(If you don’t want to receive emails about selling your book just hit reply and type “REMOVE”.)
Craig Gustafson
Author ConsultantPS. Check out our ads this month in Oracle Magazine and Veterans Reporter, and our new websites (long list of websites deleted)
Okay, class, let’s dissect this letter, shall we?
- The first sentence just makes no sense. How can they be the only company contacting bookstore owners and selling books?
- Subsidy publisher equals vanity press (so sayeth Wikipedia). Print on Demand, aka POD, is also another name for vanity presses(so sayeth Georganna). Vanity press equals “Look What I Did, Ma!” (so sayeth me)
- “This offer is only valid until Wednesday, September 17th!” And I ask: of what year? Sept 17th this year was a Sunday. Yesterday, to be exact.
- Oracle Magazine is a real magazine, but I can’t really tell who the audience is. Part web, part business, part…something. Veterans Reporter is, as far as I can tell, a newspaper for veterans who live in Nevada. So how would their two ads have worked to convince me to give ’em a try?
- Oh, and lest we forget…NEVER EVER EVER reply to unsubscribe to an email you never asked for. NEVER. By doing so, you just validate your email address as working.
To recap, I pay them $200 and they do a “custom promotion” for my book, contact 2000 bookstores, and tell them my book is for sale. Oh, and my book will be on the shelves of the company’s three bookstores in addition to being listed on their website(s).
Tell ya what, pay me $20 and I’ll pull out the Yellow Pages and contact at least ten. Gimme $50 and I’ll look on the internet for all the bookstores within a hundred miles of me. While not 2000, I betcha it would be a coupla hundred or so. As for the customized promotion, I’ll read or print what you say your book is about.
PS: And because I am such a geeky dork, Wednesday September 17th happens in 2008 (so sayeth timeanddate.com).