Meeting with Publisher for the First Time - What Should I Ask?

What experience do they have? What experience does their editor have? Cover artist? How do they intend to sell their books? Any marketing? How much will they expect their authors to promote their own work? The works of fellow authors? Who are the other five authors? Are they already established authors? Or are they completely new too? Are their books in the same genre as yours? Or is the publisher taking on a variety of genres (a red flag if they don't have the experience)?

Ask what royalties they pay. If the response is something like "__% of net profits," then ask them to define "net." Among small, new publishers, this term is often variable.

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"Gross profits" is also a slippery term. Basically anything with "profits" needs to be defined.

Also make sure you're getting paid for every book sold. Some of the less reputable publishers in Bewares were only paying royalties after a certain amount of books were sold--you know, to cover their expenses. Basically, any time the publisher is taking money from the authors, or not paying them because the publisher needs to "cover/pay their own expenses" is a red flag. Those expenses are supposed to be paid by the publisher.

This is possibly something you don't want to hear, but a lot of writers would caution you simply not to go with any publisher less than two years old. I'm suspicious about their wanting to meet with you in person, as that isn't common.

If they tell you they want/need money from you for ANYTHING. Please tell them to go to hell. If they ask you for money for promotion or blah blah whatever their sob story is, and they tell you "new authors don't have a chance without paying for blah blah" it's a scam.

Real publishers don't ask authors for money, and decent non scam self publishing services won't lie or try to mislead about what they are.

Yes, the magic words you want to hear are "% of gross cover price".

Do not let them push you to sign anything when you go to the meeting. If they offer a contract then if they are a legit publisher they will give you enough time to review it and have it reviewed by a lawyer if you wanted to do that.

A writer acquaintance of mine and her agent were once invited by a publisher to "pop in" and have a cup of coffee and a chat about the manuscript they were considering. This was a London publisher who probably couldn't imagine that anyone who counted didn't live in London. But she and her agent lived in Northumberland. They traveled down for the day (nearly 400 miles) had the meeting and in the end the publisher didn't take the book. She says it was the most expensive cup of coffee she's ever had.

Okay, here's a list of things you should be interested in, many of which should be stated in your contract:

- What rights do you retain (e.g. movie, audio rights)
- Who covers cost of editing, covers, returns, etc.)
- What are you contractually required to do (covey first refusal opportunity for sequels, Return of corrections within X days of release, etc)
- Do you have input on cover design
- How many E copies can you send out for review/contests before being required to buy.
- Does the publisher send out review requests, or you, or both.
- How long is the agreement in affect for.
- What about unresolved change issues with the editing staff.
- Are your royalty/share rates confidential.
- What minimums must you fulfill for self promo (like your own website)

That should get you started.

Becky Black said:

Yes, the magic words you want to hear are "% of gross cover price".

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% of price received is also acceptable and indeed more commonplace than cover price. You get a cut of what the retailer pays per copy, which at least implies they are set up to sell your books to retailers.

"Net of profits" is the red flag, because it implies they're deducting the costs of publishing, which is nebulous and slippery.

Torgo said:

% of price received is also acceptable and indeed more commonplace than cover price. You get a cut of what the retailer pays per copy, which at least implies they are set up to sell your books to retailers.

"Net of profits" is the red flag, because it implies they're deducting the costs of publishing, which is nebulous and slippery.

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Thanks for the clarification, Torgo.

"Net" shouldn't be nebulous. If it's not defined in the contract you could be paid 172% of "net" and never see a penny in payments.

Sunstreaker84 said:

Thank you so much for the advice in here, guys. They offered me a book deal and I said yes!

I did my research on them, and they are legit, if untested. I've pored over the contract (and had my lawyer do the same) and as far as I can tell, there's no downside. The dreaded "net profit" was mentioned; but my percentage was over the threshold that I've read to watch out for in those situations, so that should offset the nebulous nature of "net."

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I do hope you had a literary attorney experienced in publishing contracts look over it. A general contracts attorney can tell you if the contract is legal, but not necessarily if it is good.

As for the "net profits", the usual standard I've seen isn't a "threshold", but for the publisher to clearly define how they do their accounting. As Old Hack said, they can offer you 100%+, but with some clever accounting, you might still never get paid.