Oh boy, oh, boy, oh boy.
I couldn’t wait to jump on this one.
I had a feeling about this ever since I started seeing a lot of hybrid publishers pop up on my Instagram and Facebook Feeds as ‘paid ads’. But now, my prediction is slowly but surely coming to life.
Hello, My name is Dominique Gibson, self-published author of The Truson S.E.T. series and two nonfiction books The Gibson Newsletter: A Year in Review. So, I just so happen to wake up this morning to a Youtube video created by Alyssa Matesic about this huge publishing news about a new publishing company forming around the publishing space called Author’s Equity.
To dig a little further when it came to this issue, I went introduced to an article about this particular subject and decided to share this with all of you:
Click here for the article.
Both the video and the article talks about how some of the biggest names in the publishing (Aka the publishing veterans) are forming a new publishing house titled ‘Author’s Equity’. Some of these big names that are forming this new publishing company is Madeline Mclntosh and Don Weisburg, who served as the CEO of Penguin Random House and Macmillian and Nina Van Moltke, president and director of development at PHR US (Whatever that means). Anyway, The article states that it would abandon the traditional publishing models by offering no advances but will offer a higher percentage of the book profits–a model that is used by most hybrid publishers.
WAIT, WHAT?
You read that right.
They basically said that they are going to be a hybrid publisher that offers authors no advance but a higher percentage of royalties to the authors. Now, don’t get me wrong, if the royalties are as high as the Amazon royalties that self-published authors get whenever they publish a book on Amazon (70%), then that would be great. But I am not sure I would agree when it comes to giving out no advances on this. How many years would it take for an author to publish with them without an advance (One year, two years?).
For authors who dreamed of living off of the advance to supplement their bills, this would be a huge game changer and not for the better. After everything that I have seen and heard over the last year or two when it came to traditional publishing, this is just giving me vibes that traditional publishing is going down a slippery slope when it comes to both debut and established authors who are so used to the ‘old-fashioned way of doing things that this new model would either turn them off to traditional publishing completely or look for other alternatives (Self-publishing).
What do you guys think?
See you soon.
Dominique Gibson
