WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT WHAT WE DO AS YOUR PUBLISHER

I get extremely tired of authors, potential and otherwise, always coming to us asking about what we do and why it's worth 60% of their sales. I wouldn't mind so much if they didn't come off as sounding completely arrogant and at times even vindictive. I recently had an inquiry from a potential author that highly ruffled my feathers and to be quite honest, it's hard for me at times, because I long to ask them, "why do you waste your time submitting a manuscript to me, if you cannot understand just how hard GMTA works for you and the fact that we are taking a chance even signing you? We won't have any idea if your book will become a bestseller or if it will be stagnant and sell hardly any copies per month. Until the book is finished with the editing process and formatting along with cover art and finally released for sales, we will not know any of this."



I will be the first to say, that when an author signs with GMTA, I never tell them that we are going to make them a bestseller and that their books are going to make them rich. To be honest, anyone that knows anything about publishing already realizes that with so many books out there on the market, there's absolutely no telling if they will make it or not. It's all about COMPETITION & MARKETING, the ability to make your book stand out over virtually billions of titles that are saturating the market on a daily basis. Below are some statements made by a potential author that really got my hackles up, followed by my responses.

First Statement That Really Steamed Me: 

POTENTIAL AUTHOR: First of all, I understand you use createspace, which is an essentially free service used by many self-publishers. According to the contract, the author is responsible for editing costs and GMTA produces cover art from stock (very inexpensive). 

GMTA RESPONSE: Creating cover art from stock is not as inexpensive as some may think. I pay over $100 per month to have an account with a highly preferred stock company in order to get the images necessary to create a cover. 

It also takes valuable time to create a cover as we do not simply buy stock and slap a name and title on it. 

My artist does very high quality manipulation and placement to create the covers we use and they are done with the highest professional standards in mind. We do research to ensure covers are done on a level of those that are created by larger publishing companies. 

POTENTIAL AUTHOR: The language regarding any promotional assistance you give the author is vague, including "may" and might".

GMTA RESPONSE: The promotions we do for you are invaluable, as we tend to take care of all your social media needs and even spend money ourselves by putting ads out for your book on various e-magazines and other outlets. We help you get quality reviews that do not come from family and friends but from reviewers that give honest opinions of your work. 

To be quite honest I handle all promotions for over 50 authors and I work from the time I awake in the morning until sometimes the following morning. That alone is well worth the 60% we ask for. If you were to go with any other company, Independent or not, you would only receive 10% to 20% of your royalties and you would not get near the help with promotions that you get from us. 

The “may” and “might” is based on the fact that, as a small company, we are not certain that we can always pull money from the company to pay for certain things we would like to do for you, but we never ask the author for a dime. 

In fact, most other companies do not promote their authors at all, they actually expect you hire someone to do that for you or do it yourself.  

POTENTIAL AUTHOR: Please forgive me if I'm misunderstanding, but it sounds like the only thing GMTA is committing to pay for is creating inexpensive cover art, yet I'm being asked to surrender 60% of the royalties.

GMTA RESPONSE: I do believe that you are misunderstanding as we also format your book for both print and and e-book, that is another extremely expensive process, as you can see via research online, that this service alone would cost you anywhere from $100 to $1000 if you were to hire someone to do it. The time it takes to format a novel could be an entire day to a few hours, it depends and varies of course, on the length of the manuscript and how it was previously formatted by the author or their editor. 

POTENTIAL AUTHOR: I'm also not understanding how it works with print copies of the novel. How many print copies are produced and who pays for this?

GMTA RESPONSE: Print copies are done with Createspace POD because that is the best option for us. We do not have the ability to stock copies of your books, as we do not have warehouses to do so.  We buy your ISBN’s, so the print copies are not free because we are not just slapping a free ISBN from Createspace on your book. We do this so that your print book does not show as being published by Createspace on the Amazon site, but instead by the imprint that your book is under with our company. 

After doing research on other companies online we are one of the highest paying as far as royalties to the authors. 

The fact is that you do not pay any fees for anything we do for you.  We get paid by royalties, which means that we are taking a chance on you as an author and on your book, in the hope that it will sell. To be quite honest there are some books that don't sell. So when you think about it in those terms, taking the chance we do alone means that we could be getting paid well (if your book does sell), or not at all. 

Being a publishing business, we have to make money just like the authors do. We push your book to the utmost to try and get it to sell. Bottom line… just because we get 60% of your royalties does not mean that we are making out like ‘fat cats’ here because we are ‘TAKING A CHANCE ON YOU AND YOUR BOOK.’ I don’t really know how else I can put this into layman’s terms, where it will be clear enough for everyone to understand. I can only hope this post will shed some light on those that want to assume we are out here just to prey on authors… seriously? If we were doing that, we’d be charging authors like Xlibris or other companies do and they’d be paying us thousands of dollars up front to even start the process.