Article on "hybrid publishing" seems to be trying to shift the ground

I was just curious to know if anyone read this Huff Po piece. I found certain points disconcerting, and potentially misleading, but I don't have the inside knowledge of publishing to refute them.

In my prior understanding, there are no "hybrid publishers," only hybrid authors (both trade and self-published), or trade publishers that own subsidy presses. But author Brooke Warner asserts that there are "[t]raditional publishers who've been brokering hybrid deals for years." She also refers to "a false dichotomy in the marketplace that there are those who pay to publish and those who get paid to publish. The truth is much blurrier than that."

Now, clearly Warner has a dog in this fight. She owns She Writes Press, which charges authors substantial up-front fees for publication, and has defended that practice elsewhere.

So why don't I just dismiss this? First, because I've had problems trying to decide how to approach books from SWP. As a reviewer, I've received three and read one, assigning freelancers to review the others for our paper. They're definitely not your average subsidy-published books, and I tend to believe Warner when she says she curates her list and is carving out a market niche. Overall, the quality seems high.

And yet, I'm not happy with the deal such a publisher is offering to writers. It makes me, as a journalist, look askance at the books in a way I wouldn't otherwise.

Perhaps Warner wrote this piece (and similar ones) to counter such skepticism, but I have to say it's not working on me yet. I'm not convinced that a $4900 publishing package (noninclusive of developmental or copy editing) is a better option than putting together one's own self-publishing plan.

I also wonder about the potential for abuse — i.e., it seems like there's a lot of incentive for such a "partnership publisher" not to curate its list so carefully, for the same reason I'd never accept money from authors to review their books.

For the record, SWP claims to have solid distribution. From the website: "We have a whole team of reps who go out into the marketplace to sell books, not just to the big accounts (Amazon, B&N), but also to independent bookstores, libraries, online retailers, and specialty markets."

While I'd like to approach all books on their own merits, a busy reviewer has to do triage; the name on the spine matters. So far I've given books from SWP the benefit of the doubt, but I still firmly believe that money should flow toward the author, and that the whole purpose of gatekeeping and "curation" is to make that possible. What do others think?

I'm a reviewer as well as a writer, so that's the perspective from which I approach it.

Reviews may not mean diddly-squat to a book's success, but for whatever reason, I still receive dozens and dozens of ARCs and many more emailed pleas from writers every year. I could toss away all the ones that aren't from Big Five publishers, but I choose to give them consideration instead. If authors all agreed with you that reviews were meaningless, I'd have an easier job and a ton less correspondence to deal with.

I agree she's co-opting the term, which has been used until now to refer to authors.

What of her insinuation that trade publishers are making so-called "hybrid" deals under the table? I would have ignored this, but recently someone told me about an author with a respected small press who had to pay for her own editing (that is, the press outsourced the editing at her expense). Are situations like this as common as Warner implies? Or is she using a few nontypical, reprehensible examples to support her argument that, since you'll pay to publish no matter what, you might as well do so with her?

It's so different from everything I've read here -- and what I've personally experienced in publishing so far -- that I hope people aren't getting their impressions of the industry from pieces like this. But I do hear from a lot of writers who self-published because they read somewhere that that was the first step to getting an agent and a trade deal. So misinformation matters.

Booktrope sounds interesting.

The Otter said:

I don't believe that any respectable small press would do this...and if some do, they shouldn't. Personally, I would not sign a contract with any publisher that asked me to pay for my own editing.

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Agreed, and I hope the case I heard about was rare — or that I was misinformed. But it troubles me to see that presented as the norm.

My feeling is, if you're a content provider of any kind or size and you want someone's content, you should provide the editing, or outsource it to freelancers you have vetted and pay them. I wouldn't trust an editor I hadn't vetted to produce the final product I needed.