Who Are the Big Six? What Does “Indie” Really Mean? Answers to Not-So-Dumb Questions You Were Afraid to Ask

There’s much talk on the Interwebz about “Big Six, “small presses” and “indie publishing.”  But a lot of newer writers aren’t quite sure what these terms really mean.

None of us wants to sound dumb, so we usually don’t ask.

So I’ll pretend you did. (And thanks, Yumi, for asking about the word “indie” in the comments last week.)

Here’s a quick guide:

The Big Six

These are the six multi-national corporations that control most of the Western world’s publishing.

1.     Simon and Schuster

2.     HarperCollins

3.     Random House

4.     Macmillan

5.     The Penguin Group

6.     Hachette 

Two are American: Simon and Schuster and HarperCollins, (although Harper is a division of Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp, so it’s pretty international.)

Two are German: Random House is owned by Bertelsmann and Macmillan is owned by Holzbrinck.

One (Penguin) is British

One (Hachette) is French.

Some people include the Canadian Romance giant Harlequin when they’re talking about “big publishing” (which I guess would make them the “Big Seven.”)

Most books you see in stores come from the Big Six/Seven. They have hundreds of imprints with familiar names like Little Brown, Knopf, Viking, NAL, Pocket, Scribner, St. Martins, Dutton, Avon, William Morrow, Crown, Tor, Zondervan, Grand Central, Dell, etc. but they’re all owned by one of those six corporations.

In almost all cases, you need an agent to query the Big Six. There are a few exceptions, like Tor/Forge/Tom Doherty—which is a division of MacMillan—and some children’s divisions of the big houses.

Five of the Big Six—all but Random House—have recently run afoul of the US Department of Justice because of their attempts to keep the price of ebooks artificially high. A lot of people think this means the Big Six are doomed.

I’m not so sure about that. Multinational conglomerates tend to be rather good at hanging onto their trousers in a crisis.

But there’s no doubt the ebook revolution is changing the face of publishing. Most of the changes the Big Six has come up with recently have NOT been author-friendly, but maybe they’ll learn from their mistakes. (We can hope.)

Mid-Sized publishers (sometimes called “small” just to confuse you)

This covers a lot of territory, from university presses to big international operations like Canada’s Harlequin(see above) and the UK’s Bloomsbury (which has branches in London, New York, Berlin, and Sydney.)  

When mid-sizers are successful, they tend to be bought up by the Big Six. (Thomas Nelson, the largest independent Christian publisher, was bought by HarperCollins in 2011.)

There are many dozens of mid-sized houses. They often address particular niche markets. Here’s a sample list—by no means comprehensive

• Kensington: Most genres except sci-fi and fantasy 
• Llewellyn: New Age nonfiction and mysteries (under their Midnight Ink imprint)
• Chronicle Books: Art, food, pop culture (and some illustrated fiction like Griffin and Sabine.)
• Perseus Books: Travel and other nonfiction genres. 
• Workman Publishing: Tends toward the literary. Imprints are Algonquin, Black Dog & Leventhal, Storey Publishing, Timber Press, Artisan Books, HighBridge Audio, Fearless Critic.
• Sourcebooks: Formerly a publisher of financial guidebooks, it’s grown to include fiction in all genres in the last decade. 
• Sunset: Gardening, cookbooks and how-to
• Poisoned Pen: (Maybe on the cusp of small and mid-sized.) One of the largest mystery publishers.
• F + W Media/Writer’s Digest Books: How-to 
• Dorchester: Genre fiction. Now in bankruptcy. It was the premier mid-sized independent publisher of mass market paperbacks until 2010, when it suspended most paper operations and went to ebooks only (see below.) Its financial difficulties have given it a “not recommended” stamp from most writers’ organization. 
• Titan Books: UK publisher of movie and TV tie-ins as well as graphic novels. Took on Dorchester’s crime fiction imprint, Hard Case Crime
• Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: Textbook publishers (merged with the Irish company Riverdeep in 2008)

Most mid-sized publishers want agented submissions, but not all. Kensington still accepts unagented queries for all their lines (snail mail only.) Check websites for submission guidelines. Midnight Ink no longer accepts unagented queries, but some Harlequin lines do. Right now, they include Harlequin Heartwarming, Kimani Press, Harlequin Historical Undone, and Nocturne Cravings .

Here’s a database of midsized and small publishers compiled by Canadian thriller author Jack King .

NOTE: Mid-sizers tend to pay smaller advances and lower royalties (that includes Harlequin.) They also tend to be the most financially precarious. So expect some of these to go the way of Dorchester if they don’t keep up with the times.

Retailer/publishers

Amazon is a bookstore that has become a book publisher. It has a number of lines in different genres:

·       Amazon Encore: Reprints of self-published and out of print books

·       Amazon Crossing: Books in translation

·       Thomas and Mercer:  Thrillers

·       Montlake: Romance

·       47 North: SciFi

·       New Harvest: General Fiction—which will be published in conjunction with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (see how convoluted this all gets?)

You need great sales as a self-pubber to be approached by Amazon’s publishing wing, but agents are also selling directly to Amazon.

Amazon has some of the most author-friendly deals around, BUT other bookstores are reluctant to carry their products because of the obvious conflict of interest.

Other online retailers like iTunes/Apple may follow suit.

Brick and mortar bookstores are also producing their own books. This isn’t new. City Lights in San Francisco has had its own publishing wing since 1955, but with POD technology, this may become a trend that will help bookstores stay alive.

Independent Ebook Publishers

These are new publishers like Ellora’s Cave and Samhain Press (with more start-ups all the time.) They publish primarily ebooks and usually appeal to a particular niche.

Expect to see more and more of these.

Because ebooks have low overhead, they can be more author friendly and often provide some marketing help for their authors. (Samhain is branching into print, although the bulk of their titles are ebooks.)

These generally do not require an agent for submissions. But because this is a new industry, check them out thoroughly and try to get referrals from satisfied clients.

Small Presses

These are sometimes called “indie presses.” (Ten years ago, this is what people meant by “indie” publishing, but now self-pubbers have kind of taken over the word.)

There are thousands of them. It’s hard to find useful listings because the number is never stable. They spring up and get knocked down like a literary version of Whac-A-Mole.

Some, like Beacon Press, GrayWolf, and Copper Canyon Press are prestigious and have been around for decades.

Some are regional and publish books specific to one area--like guidebooks and local history.

Others address niche genres, like Canada’s SciFi publisher Edge , and noir mystery publisher BleakHouseBooks, or New England Cozy specialist Mainly Murder Press.

They tend to focus on poetry and literary fiction, so if you're a literary writer, you may find your home here. Poets and Writers has a great database of literary small presses. For more general list of small publishers, check the Writer's Resource Directory, curated by author (& friend of this blog) T.K. Richardson. It's a great resource for publishing info in general. 

Small presses are usually labors of love and nobody gets rich, but they’re often a good way to break in to print and lots of authors are very happy to stay with a small press where there is a more personal interaction with editors.

Authors are responsible for their own marketing and there’s generally no advance, but higher royalties.

These publishers generally don’t want to deal with agents—writers should query the editors directly. (Remember to check for submission guidelines on their websites.)

But beware: Check them out thoroughly with sites like Writer Beware and Preditors and Editors and if they’re not well-established, contact other clients before you sign. And always have a lawyer or publishing professional look at the contract before you sign.

Micropresses

These are a tiny version of the small press—usually one or two-person operations, generally oriented toward the literary. They often publish chapbooks of poetry. They operate on a shoestring, and are usually run as a hobby.

Often these are run by authors who are essentially self-publishers who also take on a few colleagues and friends. A micropress can be a friendly, supportive place for a writer to start out. But beware: they can also be clueless and unprofessional. There’sa horror story at Writer Beware this week about a writer who had her book rewritten without her permission by a “publisher” of this type.

Some of these can be a great first step into publishing, but look for red flags. Grandiosity, unrealistic promises, negativity about the industry, and bad spelling/grammar on the website are tell-tale signs.

Vanity Presses

These are publishers who make their money from services to authors rather from sales of books.

Before ebooks and POD (print on demand) technology, vanity presses were mostly pricey self-indulgences—although every so often a vanity-published book like 1990s phenomenon The Celestine Prophecy made it to mainstream readers.

Two of the best known of the traditional vanity presses are Vantage and Dorrance.

But as prices came down and self-publishing took off, the line between real publishers, printing services, and vanity presses has blurred. A lot of authors are taken in by vanity publishers posing as real publishers.

But others successfully use vanity presses as printers for self-publishing and--with a lot of promotion--make the bestseller lists with books like The Christmas Box and Legally Blonde. 
               The problem is, most vanity publishers overcharge for services so their books are too pricey to be profitable for the author. And there can be other problems. For instance, PublishAmerica ties up the author’s copyright for seven years. 
              But vanity publishers are not all scammers, and they can be useful for books that aren't produced to be profitable, like family histories and recipes, memoirs and poetry collections.

Here are some of the best known vanity publishers

·       PublishAmerica (aka Independence Books)

·       Tate Publishing

·       AuthorHouse (which has many imprints)

·       XLibris

·       iUniverse

·       Ivy House

·       Trafford Publishing

·       Poetry.com

Indie Publishing

True DIY publishing. You do everything yourself or hire somebody to do it for you. You can do this several ways:

·       Get help from a publishing facilitator like Smashwords or BookBaby, who for a flat fee will code your ebook and upload to different retail platforms and keep track of royalties. They also offer inexpensive cover design and other services.

·       Get shepherded through the process by an agent. A number of agents are actually helping authors become indie publishers these days—usually existing clients. Some industry purists consider this a conflict of interest, but the agented authors I know who have published through their agents have nothing but good things to say about this.

·       Hire your own private editor, cover designer, and coder and keep complete control.

NOTE: “Complete control” does not extend to Amazon. Author-friendly as it is, the ’Zon has glitches that can’t be controlled by anybody, apparently. Ruth Harris has been trying to get Amazon to post the correct book cover art on her Amazon author page for six months now, to no avail, and Saffina Desforges had her bestselling thriller Sugar and Spicedisappear from Amazon.co.uk for over a month with no explanation—when you’re selling an average of 10,000 books a month, that’s a hefty price for some glitch.

If you’re an indie publisher who wants your books printed in hard copy as well as electronic form, you’ll need the services of—

P.O. D. Publishing Service Providers

These are printer/distributors who use print on demand technology. This means that instead of having a huge print run for your book that has to be stored in a warehouse, the book is only printed when it is ordered.

Most small presses use these providers, too.

The primary POD providers are:

• CreateSpace: Owned by Amazon. Printing with them gets you on Amazon, which owns a huge share of the book market
• LightningSource: Owned by Ingram, the biggest book distributor in the US. Ingram supplies bookstores, so if you want to see your book in your local bookstore window, LS has the advantage.
• Lulu.com: The only printer I know of that doesn’t charge upfront fees. So even though they keep 20%, I’m putting them in the service provider category rather than with vanity presses. They'll sell your books on their own site (not terribly customer-friendly) and post them to Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other online retailers worldwide.

For a great comparison between Lightning Source and CreateSpace, small press owner Robin Sullivan has a great analysis on her blog Write to Publish. 

***

The ebook revolution is rapidly shifting the old publishing paradigm, and nobody’s quite sure what’s coming next. Much of what I’ve written here will probably be obsolete by next year.

But that doesn’t mean we should ignore the old guard. They may have life in them yet.. I think educating yourself about the industry as it is now will help you make decisions about what path might work best for you in the future. One of the best ways to learn about the industry is to subscribe to Publishers Lunch, a free newsletter from Publishers Marketplace.

Yes, publishing companies do seem to merge and change partners like square dancers on speed, but they’re still very much with us. And they're learning to adapt with the changing times. (Some are learning faster than others, and I have no doubt some will fall to the e-revolution.)

As I said last week, learn everything you can and don’t let anybody bully you into making a choice you’re not comfortable with. 

We live in an age when authors have more choices than ever before, and if you don’t like the choices you’re being offered right now, wait a few weeks and something new is bound to pop up!

What about you, scriveners? Did you know the names of the Big Six? How many mid-sized publishers can you name? (Let’s add some to my list. I hardly scratched the surface here.) And if you know of a great small publisher or ebook publisher, do leave that name, as well. If you’ve had experience with them, good or bad, we'd like to hear about it. Any additions, subtractions or caveats welcome. 

Indie, Big Six, or Small Press Publishing: Why Not Try All Three?

Today’s guest post is from Kim Wright, a versatile author who is taking all three publishing routes: Big Six, small press and indie. She’s blessed with a smart, supportive agent who is encouraging her in all the paths she’s choosing. The paperback edition of her literary novel, Love in Mid Air debuts this month.

Hedging Bets: Three Paths to Publication

by Kim Wright

In an eighteen month time frame I will have brought three books to market, all via totally different routes.

• My novel, Love in Mid Air, was represented by an agent and sold to Grand Central, a division of Hachette and a major house.
• My nonfiction how-to book for writers, The Path to Publication, will be published by a small press, Press 53, in September.
• During that same month a friend and I will be self-publishing a chick-lit fantasy genre book called The Wish Granters on Amazon.

I assure you I’m not schizophrenic, or even indecisive. But, in this wacky world of modern publishing, I am trying to hedge my bets. In fact, I’m laying roulette chips all over the table.

You know the old saw about the Chinese symbol for crisis being the same one for opportunity? It seems to me that publishing right now, in the Year of our Lord 2011, is in so much flux that it’s almost impossible to tell where the market is going—and that this uncertainty is actually opening up venues for writers.

It used to be that the only route to publication was to get an agent and to have that agent in turn sell your book to a major publisher. If you couldn’t get an agent or the agent couldn’t sell the book, then sorry, you’d missed your chance.

Small presses existed but didn’t have access to wide distribution and if you wanted to self-publish you had to pay a vanity press a hefty up-front fee to print hundreds of copies of your book, money you were unlikely to recoup in sales.

We tend to romanticize the days when publishing was a gentleman’s game and writers were only required to attend a three-martini lunch, sign their contracts, and then skedaddle back to their snowy cabins in Maine to begin their next book. 

But in truth those were the bad old days. All the power was in the hands of the few.

Enter the Internet and online book sales: suddenly small presses have a completely viable way to reach a national audience. Enter print on demand and ebooks: suddenly self-publishing no longer requires a large up-front investment from the writer and he too can use the Internet to reach potential readers. And where there was once only one way to sell your book, now you have three.

Each of the routes has its own set of advantages and pitfalls. I’m happy to have brought Love in Mid Air out via a big house. I got a nice advance. They sold foreign rights to eight different countries. It got reviewed in places like Publisher’s Weekly and People Magazine, and—I’d be lying if I didn’t count this as an advantage—it feels good to sit at the popular kid’s table. Even in an age where few people read at all, much less literary fiction, publishing a book with a major house buys you a sort of cachet which never entirely disappears.

But, that said, publishing with a big house is hardly a utopian experience. First of all, it’s not that easy to get past the rows of gatekeepers and even sell the book. The rejections, which go on for years for many writers, take an emotional toll. Once you do manage to sell the book you lose control over the process, from the cover to the marketing to even, in some cases, the edits.

If you’re an unknown, first time writer, they probably won’t pay that much attention to you - what’s a life-changing event for you is only a blip on the screen to your publisher, who’s bringing out dozens of books each year. You only pocket about 15% of the profits from your book and it will take years for you to see your royalties, if indeed they ever come at all.

Your publisher isn’t particularly loyal to you or committed to your long-term career: you’re constantly reminded that your book only has a three-month window to establish itself in the bookstores before it’s shipped back and the focus of your publicist switches to the next season’s list.

If you don’t earn out your advance, don’t receive good reviews, and don’t find your audience, you’re toast. Selling the second book will be twice as hard as the first.

All of this kind of takes the shine off of sitting at the cool kids’ table.

Okay, so then there’s the small press method. Since I already have an agent and a publisher, why did I opt to go small press with my nonfiction book? The biggest reason is that I didn’t want to be pressured to soften my message. As you can probably gather from the paragraph above, my book is often critical of conventional publishing, and, as Audre Lorde so wisely said “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

Besides, there are a lot of advantages to a small press. They’ll look at unagented material. They also often run contests specifically designed to bring new writers to their attention. Where the big houses won’t touch a book they don’t believe will see at least 40,000 copies—they’re looking for blockbusters and best sellers—you can be a rock star at a small press if you sell 5000 copies. For this reason, small presses will look at more experimental fiction, and are more open to poetry, short stories, and graphic novels. And if they take you on, it’s far more of a partnership. I was consulted about covers, titles, edits, and publicity plans. Small presses also keep books in print far longer than big presses and in general maintain a more sustained relationship with their writers. It’s not the “one strike and you’re out” mentality of some big presses, it’s more of “here’s your chance to publish several books and build an audience over time.”

But don’t start singing kum-ba-yah just yet. The disadvantages of a small press are that you probably won’t be offered an advance at all, and if you do, it will be miniscule. (Sometimes they compensate by offering a writer a bigger percentage of the royalties than they’d get at a big press.)

A lot of small presses don’t bother with the hassles of bookstore distribution, so you may be selling your book entirely on the internet. You probably won’t have a publicist at a small press, you’ll be doing a lot of the publicity work yourself. And while you sometimes hear of small press breakouts like Tinkers, which came out of nowhere to win the Pulitzer Prize, the truth of the matter is that small press publishing is unlikely to make your either rich or famous.

And then there’s self-publishing. Laura (L.B Gschwandtner) and I are bringing out our genre book on Amazon because it’s the first of a series and we believe that if we can entice readers to try the first one at a low 99-cent price point, they may go on to read others and this will develop into an income stream. A stream that can go on as long as ebooks continue to gain market share and a stream that we only have to split with each other. 

Compared to my other books, The Wish Granters was a snap to write. Laura and I bandied it back and forth, making the writing fun and ensuring we didn’t get bogged down in the story. We plan to finish the entire thing, complete with revisions, within three months. Another month for line edits and the cover design and then the book can be uploaded to Amazon where we will begin seeing royalty statements within two months. In the world of publishing, that’s a nanosecond.

The downside?

Everything, but everything, has to be done by Laura and me and it can be hard to find a market for an unknown genre series online. Publicity won’t be a three or four month push but an ongoing task and we know from past experience—this will be the fourth book Laura’s self-pubbed—that the minute you stop pushing, the sales and Amazon ranking plummet. Being an indie author is like starting your own business; the work never stops.

The whole thing is sometimes enough to make you want to curl into a fetal position and whimper, but there’s something exciting about this market too. You not only have three routes to choose from, but you can even take all three at once.

I have this pathetic little joke I tell my workshop students. I say they don’t call the process by which writers get published “submission” for nothing. Yeah, like I said, the joke isn’t that funny, and it’s also not nearly as accurate as it used to be. Because with three options to chose from, writers can take more control over their publishing process than ever before. 


What about you, scriveners? Instead of engaging in the either/or battle that’s waging in the bookish areas of Cyberia, have you considered taking a multiple route approach?  

Kim Wright has been writing about travel, food, and wine for more than 25 years and is a two-time recipient of the Lowell Thomas Award for Travel Writing. There’s a great interview with her at the Chick Lit is Not Dead Blog. She's just finishing up her latest book--a historical mystery set in Victorian London.

Next week I'll be exploring some more of the realities of "sitting at the cool kid's table" and landing that Big-Six Holy-Grail book contract.