Beware of publishers bearing gifts….

As a lot of people know the vast influx of new publishers opening up and self publishing becoming easy and more lucrative to do, older e-book publishers have been losing authors. The obvious question arises from this – if you were a good, honest publisher paying a healthy royalty percentage and treating your authors like people and not with contempt, then in theory you shouldn’t lose writers because they would be loyal to you. That’s the theory. As we know theory doesn’t always work. The reality is a lot of e-pubs set themselves up as demi-goddesses when they were at the height of their popularity when it never occurred to them that they could fail or that publishing would change. Hindsight - 20-20 or what?

So I’ve been hearing from various sources that some of these supposed demi-goddessses are now trying to be ‘nice’ to writers and they’re giving niceness lessons to their staff in order to stop the exodus. Uh-huh. Two thoughts on that – it’s a bit bloody late and people – writers – for the most part – are not that bloody stupid to believe in someone who has treated them like crap suddenly wanting to be their best friend. And secondly, beware of publishers bearing gifts.