Or Ten Things Your Publisher Will Forget to Tell You.

Disclaimer:  The following conclusions are based on a specific experience of one first-time author with one particular publisher.  Marina Guzik does not infer that any other writer of professional books, working on her first or n-th opus for any other, or even the very same, publisher would encounter the same disappointments. 

1.  There will be no color inside your book.  Color printing is expensive and the publisher's intent is to keep the production cost to a bare minimum.  So, all your colorful charts and graphs will be in fifty shades of gray (pun is always intended). The good news is that many people read eBooks now and those are full of color.

2.  As I found out after the signing of the contract, publishers of professional literature utilize a practice of technical reviewing.  Regardless of your credentials, depth of knowledge, experience and professional stature, the publishers will need to hire someone for 2 cent per page to serve as a technical reviewer for your book.  This person's job is to verify that you did not make any errors in definitions, calculations, etc.

3.  Amazingly, this technical reviewer will get his bio printed prominently in the Front Matter right after your own, the author's.  Moreover, the publisher's production department will not have enough common sense to at least make it shorter than the one provided by the humble author, who thought it was unnecessary to list all her accomplishments.

4. Speaking of production.  Somehow their compiler squashes words together, cuts out letters in the illustrations, and does other weird things to the final book layout.  So, after everything is done, you will still need to reread your book in its entirety, fishing out this stupid shit, before giving your final-draft approval.  

5.  As you get closer to the finish line, the publisher will randomly move the book's release date back and forth, due to some internal considerations (like printing arrangements), without letting you know.  So, don't book that wrap party for yourself (did you think for a second that the publishers will do it?) until the book is actually out. 

6.  If the publisher includes a Promotion clause in your contract, which states: "We’ll promote the Work, using Our reasonable judgment about the methods and amount of promotion," you should understand that it means they will not spend a penny on promoting your book – there will be no advertising, no sales tables at the professional conferences, and stuff like that.  There will be nothing, except their "wonderful PR team's" campaign.  

7.  There are Publishers and there are publishers.  If your book is with Wiley, for example, it will be handled by a stronger public relation team.  On the other hand, smaller, less known publishers are staffed with people who didn't make it into the world of the big-time PR influence.  They don't have connections and their rolodexes are skimpy.  They don't have a pull to call on, let's say, a reviewer at Financial Times and recommend your book.  So, their entire "promotional campaign" amounts to posting a public release on PRWeb.com and, allegedly, mass-emailing it to their undisclosed distribution list. 

8.  That single promotional tool, the public release, will be written in a wooden, cumbersome language.  Moreover, it will misrepresent some crucial aspects of your book.   And when you rewrite it yourself to make it snappier and smarter, they will completely ignore your version and post their own anyway.  They will add insult to injury by misspelling your name under your quote.    

9.  If you dare to express your frustration with all this bullshit on the pages of your blog, which is specifically designed as a venting outlet, they will lash out at you and then shut you out: they will not even list your book among their featured titles.

10. Last, but not least, the various eBook versions (Nook, Kindle, ePub, PDF, MOBI) will not be protected by any resellers.  They will be ripped off every legitimate site, including that of your publishers', and offered for free on the Internet.  Thus, your copyrights will be brutally infringed and your meager ability to earn any royalty off of your own work will be drastically diminished.  The publishers will not do anything about it.  They will not even reply to your emails on the subject.  

You have to appreciate, though, what they do tell you in advance:

1.  Even though there are 6 million companies with less than 100 employees in this country and you wrote a book that can help them to survive, you can consider yourself lucky if a few thousand copies will be sold in several years.  How many small-business owners and their downtrodden senior financial managers have you seen improving their organizations by the book?   

2. Hence, there is no fame or fortune in writing professional books; 

3. It's not the book itself, but what you do with it.

Knowing this keeps you real.  If you are not going to promote the book at your own expense, or utilize it to enhance your professional exposure, accept the fact that seeing it published simply massages your ego.  Nothing more.