An
author whose latest manuscript I'm working on asked me the question
above. I said I had heard the name before, but I really didn't know. This was about a month ago. He said he got a call from someone claiming
to be from Xlibris Australia (she talked funny, so he believed her) and
started giving him some hard sell about why he should publish with them.
It was the usual: worldwide reach, thousands of copies, etc, etc.'How did they get my number? How do they even know me?" he asked.
The question is easy to answer in these days of Google. The first one stumped me. "Not from us, I said unnecessarily."
"I know that." I thought he sounded a little annoyed that we thought he would even think we'd give his contact to anyone without his permission.
A week ago when we met again, he said that they were hounding him again. "They have called me four times, including two calls to my wife at home." They were all again from Australia and the usual hard sell: why go to a small publisher, we are international; don't you want to sell 50,000 books? We do e-books, too."
I told my author that if they promise him 50,000 copies, ask them for an advance instead of paying for their services. MYR100,000 thousand will be nice, thank you! MYR200,000 thousand, would be better. But, that's not going to happen, is it?
I am surprised at two things. One, how did they get so much information on the author? Do they have commission agents or spies or scouts in Malaysia? In any case, phone calls to someone's house, to me, borders on intrusion and bad ethics. Two, why are they so desperate? Is the self-publishing market that cut-throat? Or are they merely playing the volume game: print thousands of books in the hope of finding the next Fifty Shades? And what better way to do that than getting the authors to absorb publishing costs themselves. As P T Barnum famously said, "There's a sucker born every minute."
I decided to google them. The first entry was their official website. I found a quote on the sponsored link that said, "As of 2000, The New York Times stated it to be the foremost on-demand publisher." Okay. The next link was to their on-line book-store. The third link, a Wikipedia entry, was probably written by them, too. The fourth was the first independent link. It was from GoodReads, from one Mrs D whose basic message was: beware, Xlibris is a POD publisher from hell with bad editing and are unprofessional. The 'comments' section was revealing. I saw one from a Rueben (who appears to work for Xlibris), "I notice that your concern with the poor level of service, and professionalism didn't detrimental you from using them for your other books." Wow! Fantastic! Is he a recent English graduate from a Malaysian university?! Doesn't quite boost you confidence in their editing, does it."
Okay, that's not fair. Maybe, they are not always that bad. They are probably better, although it's scary to think that they could be worse. Whatever it is, beware. POD publishers are on the prowl promising you riches. This Forbes story (August 1, 2013) puts it in perceptive:
"Here’s the problem with self-publishing: no one cares about your book. That’s it in a nutshell. There are somewhere between 600,000 and 1,000,000 books published every year in the US alone, depending on which stats you believe. Many of those – perhaps as many as half or even more – are self-published. On average, they sell less than 250 copies each. Your book won’t stand out. Hilary Clinton’s will. Yours won’t.
So self-publishing is an exercise in futility and obscurity. Of course, there are the stories of the writers who self-publish and magic happens and they sell millions of books, but those are the rare exceptions. How rare? Well, on the order of 1 or 2 per million."
The good news is that the figure was 125 copies (according to the New York Times) in 2003, up 100% in ten years. (The latest figure probably takes Fifty Shades into account.)
Consider this: If an average POD customer pays USD2000.00 to publish a title, and 300,000 of these are published ever year (conservatively), that will make it a USD600,000,000 industry in the US. Is that all? I must have got my sums wrong. The total size of the book industry in the US in 2012 was USD 15 billion.
Oh, by the way, google 'Xlibris complaints' for lots and lots of dirt.
