Working with freelancers

Cost-effective for small press

Certainly a lot of free-lancers work in the publishing industry. I actually find that quite healthy. Freelancers cost a little more per hour but you only “employ” them for the number of hours you actually need. On the whole, they’re paid per task anyway. This is a little different form employing someone full-time and having to find them work to justify their salary. We can outsource when we don’t have the time ourselves.

Pros and cons of being a freelancer  

It’s actually hard work being a free-lancer. You live on a knife-edge, not knowing always when the next job will come in. You tend either to be busy or looking for work. A nifty free-lancer manages to work and look for work at the same time.

People decide to go free-lance for all sorts of reasons:

·         They want to be in charge of their own time.

·         They want to be more selective about the work they do.

·         They combine this free-lance work with other work – often their own writing – or looking after children, pets or elderly parents.

·         They want to get away from having to work in the city.

Most will of course work from home, with a few going into the office, as and when needed.

The sort of work they can do

Even the bigger publishing houses use freelancers for some of these tasks. Freelancers can:

·         Read submissions

·         Complete structural edits.

·         Copy-edit

·         Proofread

·         Publicize the book

·         Market the book

Perhaps we also need to remember that the content-providers – the writers and the illustrators – are all free-lancers and work from home, so publishers are already used to how this works.

Other benefits for small press

The free-lancer will work quite quickly. They need to get though a certain number of jobs in order to pay the mortgage, the other bills and to put food on the table. But this is never at the cost of quality. If they don’t provide quality you’re hardly likely to ask them again.

A few new freelancers may undercharge and take on too much work. But even they are worth giving a chance. They will be meticulous in their work, if a little slow. If you have the time, it’s worthwhile helping them through the learning curve.

Some freelancers I know

·         One combines working with a primary school as a teaching assistant with doing occasional editorial work for us.

·         One who was made redundant, a published writer, supplements her income by offering in-depth critiques, copy-editing and proof-reading.

·         A former editor at one of the Big Six now offers critique services to developing writers.       

      

     

Foreign Rights and Missed Opportunities

The three small indie publishers I work with all always offer world rights contracts. Our books are sold everywhere, and printed “locally” in the UK, US or Australia. The printer absorbs the shipping costs. Our e-books are available worldwide. We probably do it because in an operation as small as ours selling more widely means more sales.  

I read fluently in several different languages. I used to buy books from Amazon.fr, Amazon.de and Amazon.es and pay the high postage. The books on Kindle, I thought, would stop all that. Not so. It’s actually harder to obtain a Kindle book in a foreign language than it is to buy a print version. Ironically, now that Amazon has woken up to the territorial issues, it’s now harder to buy print copies.

I can understand why publishers want only to sell in one country. There may be something in their contract with their authors that makes this necessary. Selling foreign rights, anyway, can bring in some significant money. This transfers then also to e-books.

On the other hand, I can’t understand why small publishers and self-publishers would choose anything other than worldwide availability for an e-book if they don’t have to work under those constraints.   

There is another problem, however. E-books carry VAT and VAT varies in rate in different countries. Of course, we’d rather that no books attracted VAT but even that is likely to vary from country to country. For this reason, e-books from another country often have to be purchased through an agency in our own country e.g. Amazon UK. Those that are available are not well catalogued. You often need to browse them on a foreign site and search them on your home site.

Book distribution is governed by some restrictive copyright laws whihc actually were brought in to protect the film industry. In pre-digital days films were released gradually to various countries – it couldn’t be done any more quickly because of physical limitations. So the video and more recently the DVD was not released until after the film had done the round of cinemas for a certain amount of time. The same pattern was then imposed on the music industry. And now we also this issue for some books.

The consumer misses out. And ultimately it is the consumer who provides our sales. So, we miss out.

Yes, we need to worry about VAT; yes maybe there should even be some import duty. We have the technology now that could allow automatic interaction with the agencies that control these matters. After all, the same technology allows an instant download of an e-book, a piece of music or a film. The law does not. Is that law still appropriate? And if it is, why can’t we at least use technology to help us to implement it efficiently and fairly?   

Aren’t we missing an opportunity here?   

Contacting your publisher

I took a look at another “small press” publisher yesterday. Actually, they weren’t so small. They have about twenty imprints, a handful of permanent staff, they use a lot of freelancers, and have about 100 titles. They’re small in the sense that they aren’t one of the Big Six. They admit to concentrating mainly on mid-list, and as with many indies, all the staff work from home. For some strange reason, many people distrust a lack of office.  Pause for thought there: my husband, senior systems architect for IBM, currently working for General Motors and in daily contact with the US and India, works form the smallest bedroom in our house. If IBM can do it, why not publishers?

My husband’s main gripe is that he spends so much time on the phone in meetings, he can’t actually get the work done. Thank goodness for the time difference. It gives him a clear run in the morning.

Writers and publishers are also busy people. I’ve only supplied a contact telephone number on my publishers’ site because there was the suggestion again that a publisher without a landline phone number and an address is not a real publisher. I don’t particularly like the phone. I find it difficult to speak on the phone and when it rings it interrupts my train of thought. In an email I can give a more measured response. But even email can be disruptive. I actually only go through it once a day in detail, though I will have it on, and will answer any urgent matter quickly. I also tend to let the phone go to voicemail and process all of my calls in one go.

However, an author’s perception of what is urgent and a publisher’s may be different. We find it urgent if a writer has not returned proofs or supplied a bio within the time-frame requested. Writers find it urgent if they have not heard form the publisher in a while. This worries me slightly. I am also a writer and between my writing, publishing and teaching activities, I rarely notice the time going by. With my own publishers I assume no news is good news. That has always been the case.

The small press publisher I looked at yesterday does not even respond to email. In fact they don’t even give an email address. All contact is through a contact form. However, once you are an author and your book is out, you have access to a database that shows how and where your book is selling and that helps you to assess where and when you can give an extra push to sales yourself. Not a bad idea. I’ve managed to contact some of the authors they publish, who are all also published elsewhere, and they all seem happy. Worth considering?

But when should you contact your publisher? Obviously, when you can’t meet a deadline or something happens in your life that is going to hold back publication. Certainly, if you haven’t heard from them within the timeframe that they originally suggested or if you suspect something has gone astray via email or snailmail. And you should be business-like and to the point. Even your discussion of editorial and marketing issues should be calm and collected. Do remember yours is not the only book they’re dealing with.

Publishers are on the side of writers – without them there would be nothing to publish. They want the best possible book and they want it to sell well. We’re all in this together. Allow your publishers to spend their time on what matters most: making great books and getting them out there.        

Book covers

They remain as important as ever – perhaps more important now that there are legitimate ways of self-publishing, especially electronically. They are also, some claim, one of the clearest signs of amateurism. I recently heard someone who edits for the one of the Big Six claim that “publishers know about covers”. Many authors I know dislike the front cover that the publisher has provided. The publishers defend them by saying that they know what attracts readers and they know how marketing works.I’d actually dispute that the Big Six always get it right and that the indies and self-publishers get it wrong. Bridge House has produced some fabulous covers – including those produced by three professional artists and a professional photographer, but also some rather splendid ones produced by the partners. In fact, we love our covers so much we actually used them to produce a calendar one year.   

For The Best of CaféLit 2011, we used a stock picture and only spent a few pounds. We like it so much we may well continue to use it, but with different colour ways in subsequent years.   

 

 

My son, one for the professional artists who has worked for Bridge House, contacted me recently. He is also a fashion designer and works free-lance. He’d been knocked off his bike and had a broken foot, so was confined to the house. Did I need any illustrations doing? As a matter of fact, I did. One Red Telephone book is just going through the publication process. He has produced the most stunning Red Telephone cover yet. One of the competition winners has produced his own cover for the book we are going to publish. Coincidentally, it is very similar in style to the one produced by my son. Are we developing a house style?  

What must a cover do? It must attract and intrigue. It must be true to the content but there should be no spoilers. It’s useful if the blurb suggests certain aspects of the book and the cover supplements this or even suggests something slightly different; the latter increases the intrigue.                            

Working with interns

It’s a sad fact these days that you can’t get work without experience and there is even great competition for unpaid work experience. There’s a lot of talk about the unfairness of this at the moment and employers are being accused of getting labour for free.

But proper internship isn’t about getting free labour and arguably it’s fair that the interns aren’t paid because it takes the employer longer to stop what they’re doing and show the intern how to do it. The intern is also given some training.

How much the intern can gain from their experience depends on what the employer is actually offering.

It’s quite common for internships with publishers to last a couple of weeks. The intern does indeed do the coffee run but s/he gets to sit next to an experienced worker and watches some of the important action, joining in it from time to time.

At The Red Telephone and Bridge House we’ve done this a little differently. We haven’t invited them into the office – we don’t have one. We all work from home. Five interns have worked for five hours a week for fifteen months, swapping roles every three months. They have worked on submissions and enquiries, and taken it in turns to aid the three partners. They’ve been copied into all but the truly confidential emails. They’ve written acceptances and rejections on our behalf and sometimes sent out contracts. They’ve even, under supervision, helped with the selection and editing of texts. 

We haven’t been able to adhere to our rota too rigidly – one partner left, one intern found a job with a magazine and another with a radio station. At times there has been less work on offer. At other times we could have found them much more to do. But they always set to willingly and they have all done well. Even the ones who found paid work managed still to do some work for us. We wish we could offer them full time work but we can’t.

However, we are prepared to give them glowing references and we’ve added them to our list of free-lancers whom we do pay.   

The Joy of Producing Books

I recently received a copy of Wild n Free (Paws n Claws, 2012). This is an anthology of stories by children about wild animals. Royalties are donated to the Born Free Foundation. I was one of the readers of the stories submitted and I’m pleased to say that my personal favourite went on to win its section, the judge being Lauren St. John. I had nothing to do with the production of the physical book but the designer I work with at Bridge House, The Red Telephone and Chapeltown Books did the Kindle version. The cover artwork is also by one of the children and there are several drawings within the book. It’s a pleasure to hold and looks grand on the shelf. The stories are fascinating. 

Bridge House’s On This Day is almost ready to go. This has been a challenging book to produce. Authors have disappeared, failed to return proofs or provide bios and slotted all sorts of mysterious things into their text that has really thrown the formatting. But never mind; in a few hours it will be loaded up to the printer. We’ve released the cover to a few interested parties. It entertains. Readers can spend a pleasant time matching the dates with world-stopping events and newspaper headlines. Somehow, because it has been so difficult to produce, it will be all the more satisfying when this book is out.

I’m currently editing Bridge House’s Science Fiction selection – in fact actually waiting for about half of the edits to come back from authors. To date this has seemed far less fraught than On this Day.  I’m going to call it Eslewhen and the cover will be of a desolate landscape – photoshopped to make the colour surreal. Such fun!

The Red Telephone is about to start producing more e-books – watch the web site- submission details coming soon. Our 2011 competition winners will still have paperback books produced. Thereafter, we shall publish e-books initially, and only produce print books once 1,000 copies have sold.  It isn’t quite the same, producing an e-book. You don’t actually get to hold it in your hand. It still needs a cover, though, and a very good one at that. You still get some of the fun of the visuals as you load information up to websites and gradually start to read book reviews, and then find lots of mentions when you Google the book. There’s always merchandise too – using our pals Vista Print and Café Press, you can get postcards, business cards, leaflets, T-shirts, mugs, mouse-mats and lots of other things made at a very reasonable, though they’re probably more for the authors than the publishers.  

In my study there is a shelf full of books into the production of which I have had some input. Near them are books I have written, produced by other publishers. If I ever have any sense of failure – and I’m afraid that happens a lot to writers and publishers – you have to acquire a thick skin – I only need to look over to those two shelves and I then feel no shame in saying “I made this."