Submissions
What we're looking for:
A criteria for getting published with us is being able to use a database, and to be willing to contribute to it. Manuscripts and proofs are exchanged through the database rather than by post or email. Your book will have several pages of its own on our database, with the scheduling and copy visible, you can add to it and amend it, monthly sales figures will be there, and all the marketing on every title is visible for you to see. We add around a thousand new “activities” a month to the database, several hundred new contacts (currently 16,000 media and retail), and send out about a few hundred review copies a month.
It doesn't matter where you live. Around half our new authors are from North America, the others from the UK and most countries where English is a major language.
Our list started in 2004 with titles on world religions, but we've moved on to MBS (Mind Body Spirit), self-help and we're branching out into philosophy, psychology, women's studies, culture, the environment and a number of other areas which you can see starting to develop on the website. We publish little fiction, we find it hard to market.
In everything, we focus on the "mid-list" rather than celebrity mass-market publishing on the one hand or highly academic on the other. We're looking for good popular writing; the new, non-generic, ambitious and risky. We particularly enjoy the books that cross boundaries and push out the envelope, that are in their way unusual or definitive (or both). In Zer0 Books for instance we're starting a list exploring intersecting ideas in philosophy, politics and aesthetics that challenge received opinion, whether in academia or the "moral majority".
We publish a small number of books each year where we really like the text and feel they make a good contribution to the list but they are not "commercial". Poetry usually comes into this category, and books that are more autobiographical than subject-orientated. So 1 or 2% of our titles are subsidized by the author. The rest are financed by the publisher in the traditional way.
We are very hesitant about re-issuing books that one of the larger publishers has dropped or a self-published book. Even if the publisher has declared it out of stock there will still be copies around with wholesalers and distributors for years to come, at heavily discounted prices, and bringing out the same book with a different ISBN invariably causes confusion and trouble.
We only publish titles for which we have at least worldwide English language rights. Our systems are based around all books being available everywhere, for review and for sale.
We do not reply to multiple submissions from authors, submissions through the post (unless with an SAE), or to submissions that have little or no relation to the areas we publish in.
What we offer;
*worldwide sales and distribution in English language markets (around 80 sales people)
*competetive royalty rates (starting at 10% of receipts and moving up to 25% on quantity)
*high discount levels to authors (starting at 50% and moving up to 70% on quantity)
*access to one of the most extensive publisher marketing databases
*tracks to follow on similar titles
*response times (like on whether to publish or not) in hours or days rather than weeks or months
What we don't offer;
*lunch
*phone calls
*a contract with better terms than those of all our other authors
*advances
A fuller explanation of how we work and what we look for in a proposal can be seen in "Our publishing process".
So if you are writing a new book that fits our list, and we seem like a possible publisher, for O Books email
for Zero Books, email
tariq@tariqgoddard.demon.co.uk
for Circle Books, email
tstaveteig@myliterarycoach.com
Say something about who it's aimed at, how you reckon it's going to sell, what your qualifications for writing it are and attach as much text as you have (as a plain e-mail attachment in Microsoft Word, not from a mac, not in rich text, not as a zipped file). It doesn't matter if it's not finished yet, but we can't respond to questions like "I've got an idea about writing a book, how do I go about it and would you publish it". If it looks to us like a good possibility, we'll usually respond in around 24 hours and send you a password to get into our database, (there is a link to it in the menu on the left), where we get to the next stage, which could take another day or two. But we need this introductory email from you first.
If this business doesn't sound as if it's for you, or if we turn the proposal down, I’m sorry we can’t help by recommending other publishers. We don’t know them. You have a wide choice; there are several hundred serious publishers in the English language world, 70,000 registered with the main databases, and the number who might publish the occasional book runs to a quarter of a million. The simplest way is to trawl the internet for other possibilities. The best sources are Literary Marketplace in North America, www.literarymarketplace.com, and The Writers and Artists Yearbook in the UK, buy online at www.acblack.com. And try the information sheet Getting Published from the Book Trust, www.booktrust.org.uk. There are dozens of other directories, books and online sources. www.bookmarket.com provides a useful summary of “how to get published”-type websites.
I hope we can work together.
John Hunt
ps; we were recently featured as "Publisher of the week" in the Book Depository, the main competition to Amazon in the UK. The questions and answers may give more of an idea where we're coming from;
Book Depository Publisher of the Week questions:
1) What/who do you see as your primary market?
People who broadly think of themselves as “alternative”, “counter-cultural”, “radical”, whether that’s expressed in beliefs, lifestyle or activism. We engage with people who are seeking to better themselves, or the world, or looking for meaning and reasons for behavior. Who see the current recession/depression as an opportunity to re-order private and public priorities rather than a cause for dismay.
2) What are the principal challenges/opportunities you see at the moment in the business of publishing books?
The exponential growth in the number of new titles (helped by POD, which we don’t use), the scale of returns from shops (helped by EPOS, though thinking more of North America here than the UK), related decline in midlist sales and the corresponding difficulty of doing justice marketing-wise to good books which aren’t necessarily going to sell in large numbers. On top of that there’s the often-mentioned raft of new delivery formats (digital) and outlets (online etc.), which all adds up to a perfect storm over the next few years.
But then we see that as our opportunity. The Depression in the 1930s created the current publishing environment (“sale or return” and most of the best known imprints today), and the new one we reckon will end it. So we’ve abandoned the traditional feudal or adversarial author/agent/publisher model and are creating a more co-operative one, which tries to take the publisher cost out of the author-reader equation as far as possible. All our authors are on the same contract, talk to us and each other on a forum, they all have access to our database of marketing contacts, can see all that happens on every title, can add to it, their books are all available worldwide (over half our new authors live in North America), they will soon see monthly sales figures. We focus on getting to the readers rather than the shops (though we use traditional sales teams). We collectively add a few hundred new media or sales contacts to the database every month, several thousand marketing “activities”, and spend 500 hours or so a month on improving the systems behind them.
3) What brings you to the decision to publish a particular title/author?
We don’t spend time looking for authors, the large majority of our new titles come from existing authors recommending others to come to us, We’re not bothered about sales, as such. It’s the last consideration, rather than the first. It needs to be a strong book for its market, however large or small that market is. We’re looking for the right “voice” for reaching it, a willingness to co-operate in promoting it, the ability to work with databases and systems rather than needing meetings and phone calls. It’s not rocket science, and authors either like what we’re doing or they don’t. Most that approach us do, and if we like the book then contracts are usually signed within a day or two of getting the proposal.
4) What books are you most proud of having published?
My own favourites are the ones with an alternative angle on the big questions, acknowledged classics in their area like Is There An Afterlife? by David Fontana, The Fall by Steve Taylor, Back to the Truth by Dennis Waite or The Science of Oneness by Malcolm Hollick. But the ones that sell strongly are more likely to be in the area of changing your life for the better.
5) What books are you working on right now?
It’s hard to pick any out, because of the number. With an average of 10 new titles coming out a month this year, scaling up to double that later in 2010, and maybe doubling again in 2011, there are a few hundred in the pipeline. With good reason. Old publishing divides marketing between x number of books and y number of employees, so the fewer you publish the better you can market them. We’re the other way around. The more authors we have, the stronger the marketing becomes. It’s a virtuous rather than a vicious spiral. If I was to choose one, it would probably be Destination of the Species by Michael Meacher MP, coming in January 2010 (listed on the website), though he breaks most of the rules as far as our authors go - I’m not entirely convinced he’s managed to switch on a computer yet.
John Hunt
04/02/2009