Self-Publishing Contracts: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Mainly the Ugly.

I often advise on self-publishing contracts and was recently contacted by someone who had won a competition to be self-published. He was worried about the contract he was being asked to sign - primarily because of the low royalty rate being offered. Quite apart from the fact that the rate was desperately low at 10% of net receipts, this represented a figure that was a third of what was on offer for non-competition winners - i.e. those who were paying the full rate to be self-published by this company. The whole deal didn't smell good and the author asked if I would take a look.

The contract was really a collection of all the areas of concern in a typical self-publishing contract and I thought I would post about some here and ask you to please, please check your contract carefully - before signing it!

My main worry with many of these contracts (and therefore the businesses behind them) is the overall lack of transparency. Many of the contracts I have seen are extremely vague when referring to what the author should expect to receive. Worse, they are deliberately misleading. For example, in this particular contract (and on the company website) there is continual reference to printing the book. What is not made clear is that it is a print-on-demand set-up. While POD can be a useful way to get copies of book at a lower cost than bulk printing them, it does have certain disadvantages, including being more difficult to get them in to high street shops as they are non-returnable and the higher cover price which makes them more difficult to sell.

What was also not made clear but was implicit in the wording is that the author would have to pay full price for copies of their book - and with only one copy being given to the author at publication, this could end up quite costly for them - which is where the self-publisher can top up his profit.

Talking of which, the royalty rate that flagged up the initial concern with the author is, indeed, way too low. You can expect to see rates around this mark in a traditional publishing deal (although this is likely to be on cover price rather than net receipts) where the publisher bears all costs and (in theory at least) has a solid sales and marketing plan along with significant scale of distribution. In a self-publishing set-up where the self-publisher is providing the minimum of service and you are providing everything else, the royalty should be significantly higher.

And finally, for now at least, my favourite bugbear: self-publishing companies proudly stating that they will make your book available on every Internet retail site and make it easily accessible to '3500 wholesalers, booksellers and libraries worldwide'. One, 'make available' is very different from 'sell ' and two, the simple act of allocating an ISBN is all it takes to do the above. That's it. It is a fully automated process but one that, with a bit of creative wording, can look like a specialist task that can only be offered by a publisher. It's simply not the case.

So please, please, please read your contract. And if you don't like what you see, don't sign it. And if you are in any doubt, send it to me. For more details go to The Self-Publishing Advice Service.