No, seriously. I’ve never been a publisher before.
Which — to be perfectly honest — is a rather odd professional career choice for an introvert who literally dislikes people as much as I do.
However, while I don’t know the first thing about publishing, I do know a little bit about leading people — PLDC and BNCOC beat the basics of leadership into my thick skull, and various LEO leadership classes polished the idea up a bit.
One of the enduring lessons I learned came from a grizzled sergeant-major, who sighed, glared at me over his coke-bottle glasses and snarled, “Your soldiers can’t soldier until you get your [deleted]-hooks out of the soup. Knock it off. Go get coffee and let them work, [deleted]-head.”
Which was the profane, yet somewhat poetic way of advising me that I was micromanaging that my considerably younger self needed.
I’ve written here about the Sandhurst Flagpole Test before, and I’m fully aware of my predilection for getting waaaay too micro-manager-y, so I’m being really careful not to fall into that trap as CEO of Raconteur Press.
One of the questions that has been popping up now that we’re venturing into novel-publishing territory concerns how we intend to contract for these novels.
Well, I don’t have a clue. I don’t. See “Never done this before”, above.
What I do have, on the other paw is:
1) a staff made up of extremely bright, extremely experienced problem-solvers;
B) authors who trust us; and
iii) contacts in the publishing industry who provided us with copies of their contracts.
The minions are currently working with several long-time authors who have experience — both good and bad — with publishing contracts, and we’re putting together a contract that will be fair and above-board to both our authors and our company.
It’ll take a little while, but we’ll have it done by the time we open up for general manuscript submissions.
So, if you’ve been contacting me or the press about what our contracts will look like — or making enquiries on random web-pages — be patient, we’re getting there.
LawDog
Want a copy of the contract I wrote for “Primal Voices”? Could be a good reference, if you’d like.
Yep. Sergeant, get those book contracts dealt with.
Hey Lawdog
I dropped your name to a fellow blogger who did a novel type of WWII story over a year+ on his blog every day was a continuing storyline and the perspective changed from protagonist to protagonist. It was very well done. So I shamelessly promoted you and your venture.
Law, in your defense, you’ve never been this old before. Day by day, brother baby steps in the right direction keep moving forward, and if somebody tries to block the door breach the damn wall.
Oh, and one last thing index Sabo troops in the open at my command fire!
People know you are working hard to be fair. Maybe not knowing much about publishing is the best thing to happen to publishing in a long time.
What Greg said. Traditional Publishing (TradPub) has turned into a morass for authors and readers. Authors have trouble getting decent contracts with good IP protection*, and readers are struggling to find fun books that don’t preach more than they entertain. Amazon and B&N broke that to an extent with their self publishing options, but John Q Reader still goes into bookstores and has trouble finding fun, non-preachy stories, especially in certain genres. Anything to kick TradPub in the rump and get good tales to readers is a plus, experienced or not.
*Intellectual property, rights to your own stuff.
Dear Sir,
I have no qualms about you as a publisher (of course the fact I don’t have a book I’ve written might have something to do with that). You can’t possibly screw things ip as badly as the trad-pubs have by going Woke.
Hope you didn’t pay for the Ratel and Squeaks illustrations because apart from the covers, they are truly awful.
Hello LawDog, recently discovered your work in Kindle (The LawDog Files) and love it to bits. Good to know old school community policing is still alive and well in Texas. I’ve had a similar conversation as your Sgt Major – but mine was from my company commander. Wish more civvies learned that lesson. If you have anyone looking for a good proof reader who knows the difference between rein, rain and reign go ahead and send them my way. Free to other veterans 🙂