Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney bartered speaking fees for guaranteed purchase of his book, according to Gawker.

Though it’s not uncommon for speakers to ask their host schools and organizations to buy copies of their books, Politico’s Ben Smith shared with Gawker a document confirming Romney’s willingness to waive speaking fees of between $25,000 and $50,000 in exchange for book purchases that would drive his book onto the New York Times bestseller list.

The ploy worked. The book hit #1 on the NYT hardcover nonfiction list in March 2010.

Romney is by no means the only political figure to game the bestseller list – Sarah Palin’s political action committee spent $63,000 to bulk-purchase her memoir Going Rogue, for instance – the brazenness of Romney’s deal takes bestseller list manipulation to a new low. What does Romney have to say about it? Nothing, and that should come as no surprise given the title of his book: No Apology.

Is it reasonable to ask Romney’s publisher St. Martins Press to state where this deal stands on a moral scale of 1 to 100? Probably not. That’s too much to ask of publishers, whose job is to make money, not to look gift horses in the eye. But it is worth observing that many publishers now make it a contractual condition that prominent politicians, business people and other celebrities guarantee purchase of a minimum number of copies.

Where we come from that is called subsidy publishing, and it used to be a term of derision. But in this era of self-publication, the moral turf has tilted toward a Do What You Gotta Do attitude. (See You Got That Right, Ecclesiastes!)

Well, okay, but maybe we should consider a new category for the bestseller list called Books That Made It On Their Own. We might actually see some honest authors on it.

Meanwhile, we should not be surprised to find No Apology become required reading at the colleges that took Romney’s devil’s bargain. What else are they going to do with them?

Read details in Gawker’s Mitt Romney’s Mischievous Plot To Conquer the Times’ Bestseller List

Richard Curtis

“All is vanity.”
Ecclesiastes
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Last November we surveyed the subsidized book business and lamented that we’re in the wrong racket. There are fortunes to be made in vanity but we’re too high-minded to thrust our ladle into the pork barrel.

Our smugness took another beating with Publishers Weekly‘s tally of self-published titles for 2009: more than 764,000.  Couldn’t we have abandoned our scruples for just five or ten thousand of those books and raked in enough money to buy that second home in the Hamptons?

PW’s Jim Milliot cites Bowker statistics stating that titles issued by self-publishers and micro-niche publishers exceeded traditional books by almost half a million in ’09.

“The largest producer of nontraditional books last year was BiblioBazaar which produced 272,930 titles,” writes Milliot, “followed by Books LLC and Kessinger Publishing LLC which produced 224,460 and 190,175 titles, respectively. The Amazon subsidiary CreateSpace produced 21,819 books in 2009, while Lulu.com released 10,386. Xlibris and AuthorHouse, two imprints of AuthorSolutions, produced 10,161 and 9,445, title respectively.”

Our insufferable self-righteousness is a form of vanity too, we realize, but it’s not nearly as easy to monetize as the good old-fashioned Ecclesiastic variety. So, we’re thinking about spurning the rewards that supposedly await us in the life to come and dedicating ourselves to becoming worse persons in the here and now.

RC

BookSurge is a quiet little outfit that has made a lot of noise – some of it strident – since its modest beginnings as a print on demand press. An article by Jim Milliot in Publishers Weekly indicates that BookSurge’s voice will be absorbed into the roar of a self-publication factory. Both are owned by Amazon.

Amazon’s acquisition of BookSurge a few years ago prompted me to speculate on just what the book retail giant could want with a little POD company. In a guest editorial in Publishers Weekly, I wrote, “It’s hard to say for sure what is behind amazon.com’s acquisition of BookSurge, the on-demand book-printer. But any move the Nine Gazillion Pound Gorilla makes is worthy of serious consideration. Indeed, the implications of the deal, especially combined with amazon’s purchase of e-book company MobiPocket, are profound.”

In time our questions were answered when Amazon began leaning on publishers to shift their print on demand business to BookSurge, occasioning a blog (The Nine Gazillion Pound Gorilla Bares Its Fangs) describing the alarm that many publishers felt at the prospect of being pressured to give up their relationship with BookSurge’s competitors.

The glare of publicity (plus an antitrust lawsuit by a company called BookLocker that remains pending as of October) seems to have checked BookSurge’s conquistadorial ambitions. And now the firm is to be integrated into CreateSpace, an Amazon division providing tools to self-publishers. “The move will make CreateSpace the single platform for all BookSurge and CreateSpace authors and publishers,” writes Milliot, who goes on to cite CreateSpace’s website: “During the coming months we will be transitioning all BookSurge accounts to CreateSpace, after which the BookSurge brand will be retired.”

A lot of e-ink has been spilled of late about self-publication, which some of us prefer to call vanity (see You Got That Right, Ecclesiastes) and we are going to see a lot more as a clash of vanity titans shapes up, with Author Solutions (AuthorHouse, iUniverse, Trafford, Xlibris, Inkubook etc.) in one corner and CreateSpace in the other. And if you cast your eyes on the ringside seat behind CreateSpace you’ll see our quiet little friend BookSurge.

Richard Curtis

Eva Ullian, who describes herself as an impressionist painter, translator, historical researcher and retired teacher, has left an interesting comment on our blog about vanity publishing, You Got That Right, Ecclesiastes!

We thought her viewpoint was worth reprinting in full.
RC
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I am not going to defend Harlequin or Thomas Nelson but just describe what these new imprints are about. They are not Vanity Publishers because such would mean they send you thousands of unwanted books to your garage and you sell them even though they keep 50% or so of royalty. They are not Self-Publishers because that would mean you do everything, and I mean everything yourself but you get to keep, obviously, 100% of the royalty. People have tagged them as Self-Pub for convenience. But they are ASSISTED publishing, which means you ask them, in the basic package, to publish your book, exactly the way you want it, or seek advice if you want a second opinion. They then have a distribution system in which you as the author like in traditional publishing, if you have any sense, will aid to sponsor your own book since putting a book on a shelf doesn’t mean it sells. You get 20% of the royalty for soft copies. With traditional publishers you get more or less 5% of which 15% is given to your agent- who has done what? Given you access to a publisher, changed your book round so much because obviously you are not the expert that an ASSISTED publishing author is otherwise you would take the responsibility of investing in your book with real money.

The way I see it is that such publishers cannot publish in the traditional manner, give out advances that are not earned out and survive. The problem is indeed that traditional authors expect to have their book published, get a big advance, and if it doesn’t earn out hard luck for the publisher- they have to take risks. Well not anymore- you pay, and it’s only a partial amount, for the cost involved so your book is published and what replaces your advance is the increased royalty percentage, so no one loses out. I don’t see any unfairness in that at all, it’s what they have been doing in most countries, except the UK, for decades.

You pay, only a partial amount, for the cost involved for publication in Assisted Publishing. The Agent Rachelle Gardner has given a detailed breakdown of cost involved in the publication of a book in Trade Paper which comes to $58,000 and Hard Back is $90,000. See her blog here: http://cba-ramblings.blogspot.com/2009/11/is-your-book-worth-it.html As you probably know, Harlequin asks for $600 and CrossBow $1,000 for a basic package. So, perhaps now you can appreciate why I don’t think it is possible that Assisted Publishing is there to make money off writers. They are there to give an unprecedented, excellent opportunity to writers who have no access to publishers because agents have denied them that access as judging such authors not fit for publication. Finally, publishing houses are opening up the doors to us, as most agents define us, SECOND CLASS authors. And I for one, thank them.