Dear Author analyses Triskelion bankruptcy filing

[julesjones]

More from the romance blog Dear Author about the Triskelion bankruptcy. If you're a Triskelion author, you need to read this. But it's also worth your time simply as a case study if you're involved in small press, especially epublishing. Jane analyses the bankruptcy filing, and digs out some interesting information. The comments are worth reading as well, particularly the description of a publisher behaving badly towards authors who decided that they wanted out.

The Triskelion mess is an excellent example of why you should do your homework before submitting to a publisher. It won't guarantee you don't get caught up in something like this, but it will improve your chances of avoiding a publisher with trouble brewing. December Quinn has an excellent series of blog posts about finding the right publisher:

http://decemberquinn.blogspot.com/2007/06/find-right-publisher-part-one.html
http://decemberquinn.blogspot.com/2007/06/find-right-publisher-part-two.html
http://decemberquinn.blogspot.com/2007/06/find-right-publisher-part-three.html
http://decemberquinn.blogspot.com/2007/07/find-right-publisher-part-four.html
http://decemberquinn.blogspot.com/2007/07/find-right-publisher-part-five.html

You also want to check out Emily Veinglory's guest post at Dionne Galace's blog, about the wide range of sales figures within epublishing:
http://dionnegalace.com/wordpress/2007/07/30/guest-author-emily-veinglory/

Comments

[julesjones]

It's more than epublishing -- there are a lot of print vanity presses as well in there. But epublishing *looks* cheap and easy, so attracts a lot of people who mean well but don't know what they're doing. Which is why it's so important to do the homework. :-(

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

It's like any other business, and probably worse in many ways _because_ you're competing with so many other market segments.

First there are established publishers. Why should I give money to ElCheapoBooks when I could get a book from Tor for the same amount? Unless ElCheapo fills a niche I can't find elsewhere, with a book from an established publisher/epublisher I have a better chance of having it well-chosen and well-edited.

Then there are free e-books.

Thirdly, anyone who's halfway websavvy can give away an e-book, or flog it using Paypal from their website. If I was an author with a following who had a name and who had a web presence, I'd much rather do that than use a small-time e-publisher whose readership is probably about the size of mine.

I'm in the market for ebooks to read on the flight right now. I'll download something from Gutenberg and hop over to Baen.

From where I'm sitting, successful e-publishing looks like a really tough game to me. And yet Triskelion appears to have made a goodish bundle. $55K turnover for a startup ain't bad, particularly as the costs will have been negligible - it depends on how much of the work the owners did themselves. The second year looked... pretty good. And then a complete crash. I'm curious to find out what, exactly, went wrong there.

[julesjones]

A *good* epublisher is worth going with. I sell far more books and thus make far more money through Loose Id than I would through self-publishing. But there's a huge gap between the top tier of epubs and the wannabes, and you're quite right about successful epublishing being a tough game. Emily Veinglory set up the EREC site in part from frustration at the lack of information out there about the difference between the good, the bad and the ugly in epublishing. My backlist books can sell more in a single month, after a couple of years out, than some of the bottom-feeders manage in their entire first year.

There's an interview with one of the Loose Id owners here:
http://fogcitydivas.typepad.com/dishing_with_the_divas/2007/04/today_i_am_very.html
She talks about how much planning and investment went into setting up the company, and it gives you some idea of why they were successful when so many others crashed and burned. They could still crash, of course, but they've been very canny and not expanded faster than they could handle. In particular, they didn't rush into print and its associated high risks. They had a small pilot programme to get a feel for the market, and have been very cautious about putting out more titles. Triskelion may well have been burned by the costs associated with going to print, as they had a much bigger print programme. Even Ellora's Cave, the 900 pound gorilla of epublishing, has had trouble with the print books being a financial drain in the wake of the Borders shakeup -- the difference there is that EC has the cash reserves to ride it out, and the business nous to understand they have a problem and deal with it. They didn't over-extend themselves to go to print.