HEY THERE, HI THERE, HYBRID, YOU’RE AS WELCOME AS CAN BE!
Fact. Over four million new books were published in 2022. They were self-published, commercially published and hybrid published. What’s that you ask? Hybrid publishing is where an author pays a publishing company a set amount of money to publish their book. In exchange for the fees they pay, authors get higher royalties than they would with a traditional publishing company. My latest novel, Attachment Patterns, was released by a hybrid publisher.
A little background. My first two novels, The Tragic Age, and The Practical Navigator, were published by a traditional publisher in 2015 and 2017 respectively. I was given a nice advance on both novels and was led to believe that literary success was just around the corner. It wasn’t. Though both novels were well reviewed, they pretty much tanked at the box office (movie term). It goes without saying, peddling a third novel can prove a difficult task when the first two haven’t attracted a reading audience. (To coin another movie term – “what have you done lately?”) My agent submitted an early draft of Attachment Patterns to perhaps half a dozen different publishing houses and the reaction was pretty much the same – hmm, good, but not for us. It was the fall of 2019, and you can imagine what was around the corner. A pandemic. No, not just in publishing, but in the world in general. Batten down the hatches time, everyone working from home alone. Still, a writer pretty much lives in isolation anyway and when I wasn’t the family chauffeur, camp counsellor and bottle washer, I kept working and revising AP. There were things happening in the news daily, and they affected my story. I cut and trimmed (always good). Most importantly, I changed the narrative voice of the book. It became a story told by the protagonists’ aspiring author daughter. It helped lighten the tone on a serious subject – mental health. When I gave the new draft to my lit agent in early 2021, she had wonderful news. She was retiring. And no, as much as she liked the changes, she would not be resubmitting the novel. Thank you. Thank you so very much.
So began the Oedipal journey of trying to find a new agent. You send out queries – “Dear so and so — my name is — I’ve done — I now have a new – ” One might have thought that because of a modest history of success, there might have been someone out there who’d want to take a look, but no, out of I don’t know how many queries sent, some with the recommendation of other professionals, I received next to no replies and those I did receive were “thank you but no thank you”. It was like breathing dead air.
My one-time, long-time film agent, now an industry bigwig, had told me some years ago that “just like in baseball, all-stars eventually have to take the bench, but managers keep going to the world series”. I thought that was horse manure when I heard it, but I was starting to wonder if he was right.
I considered self-publishing. It seemed very do-able, but it also seemed that at the end of the day I’d have a book read only by the people on my email list. (See previous post – Promotion) And then, out of the blue, a writer-friend came out with a novel, a wonderful, entertaining read, that he published through – what are they called again? – yes, a hybrid publisher. The book was well designed, seemingly well marketed, he even optioned the TV rights to an LA production company. Hmmm. Perhaps this was the way to go. I went online, did a search, and found immediate results. I made a short list and submitted. Replies started coming back, most of them positive. It was jump off the pot time and so I chose one. They seemed discerning and legitimate. They had offices in New York City and London, they seemingly didn’t accept just anything, and they promised a “personalized approach to books and authors”. Did I think to look for reviews of the company? At the time, as ill-informed as I was, I didn’t know such things existed, so no, I did not. However, later, in the spring of 2022 I did happen upon some online reviews, and they were mixed, tending towards negative. I also read about publishers who claim to be hybrid publishers but are in fact vanity publishers. Vanity publishers accept any book submitted to them, they publish in as elementary a way as possible and often don’t have any distribution or marketing services. It made me nervous, but there was nothing to be done, I was already in. And I was already nervous. Work had begun on the book and so far, all contact had been by email. There seemed to be no one specific person to contact about the process, no one who was trying to “personalize” the approach. After about six months, the “edited” manuscript finally arrived for me to “proof”. Translation? Read each word and punctuation mark slowly and carefully while looking for errors. Now I have to say that as a writer one can become so inured to looking at your words on a page/screen, you become oblivious to your own mistakes. That’s why you have someone else do it. Still, I went through the manuscript, trying not to “read” it, and instead, as asked, looked for errors. Much to my surprise, I found quite a few. I also found that a nameless “someone” – an editor perhaps? – had taken some of my dialogue and written it “correctly”. Only people don’t always speak correctly, at least my characters don’t. I rewrote the dialogue “incorrectly” again and sent it back. There still seemed to be no one to talk to. Perhaps a month later I was sent a copy of what was to be the cover. (See a previous post – The Cover) It was the title of the novel – Attachment Patterns – set against a red background. I thought we could do a little bit better than that.
To make a long story short. (Literary term!) The novel was released in late May 23’ – yes, it took more than a year – and the first review said this – “Attachment Patterns by Stephen Metcalfe is a fantastic book that deserves a rating of 4 out of 5 stars. I must note that the book was not professionally edited, if it were, it could potentially earn a complete 5-star rating because it truly is a wonderful read.”
Another review said this – “This book is well-written, emotionally charged, and a really good read…. However, the cover is an absolute insult.”
Back to square one and what’s most important. Four million books published in 2022. Four million! How do any of them find readers? Because at the end of the day that’s what a writer is looking for. If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one around to hear, does it make a sound? If you put words on a page and no one ever reads them, do the words truly exist? You can forgive editing mistakes. You can overlook a less than creative cover. At the end of the day what you really want from a publisher is help in finding readers.
Going to the company website now, I do pick up a different message than I did two years ago. “Send us anything you have and if you pay us, we’ll turn it into something that resembles a book.” They’re not the only ones. Hybrid should now be called hydra – it’s a huge online beast with multiple heads. There are also editing websites, ghostwriting websites, publicity websites, book review websites, book club websites. The one thing they all seem to have in common is they’re trying to make a buck.
I now have a book I’m very proud of that will only be read by the people on my email list.
