Warning: This is pretty tl;dr. Feel free to skip to the second section. Spread the word, because this community needs a little common sense sometimes.
Today there was a suspect-at-best post in the literature forums where someone who claims to have published nine anthologies and fifteen issues of a lit-mag was seeking submissions for a new anthology based around a short story that was, in his opinion, being rejected by other magazines because he's too "edgy" in his writing style (read: it was shitty so he had to self-publish it to have it read).
The poster was extremely homophobic, making comments about male-on-male anal sex and lesbians having cunnilingus, right in the body of his submission calls, and prattled on about how his publishing credits included the software program Open Office. I was pretty immediately off-put, so did some minor googling and found his "press", a lulu.com page, which was off-putting to begin with; he claimed it was a token-paying press, both for mag and for his anthologies of short stories, so I was particularly intrigued. However, the second google result was over 9000 pages of negative review, including the publisher refusing to pay his authors their contracted fees/royalties, threatening to castrate/kidnap/rape/kill anyone who spoke against him, lying about libraries indexing his works, being kicked out of a writer's union for aggressive actions toward other members, and (most interestingly) including at least one short story of his own in each anthology/magazine he publishes, usually as the "foundation piece" around which the collection is curated, and one of which was a rewrite of a book that his "bitch of a baby's-mama" stole from him when she left him.
Long story short, here, kids, this is an example of a BAD PUBLISHER. If you get stuff like this when you google the publisher you're considering working with, DON'T WORK WITH THEM. SERIOUSLY. That name, that level of bat-shit craziness is not the type of thing you want associated with your name, especially if you're just starting out. This leads me to:
Tips for Avoiding This Shit
[4:11:41 PM] Trevor (ikazon): Step 1: don't be a dumbass [4:11:55 PM] Trevor (wreckling): Step 2: refer to Step 1
[4:12:05 PM] Trevor (wreckling): this will help you avoid a majority of the scams you may encounter
Right there, you have the basic tip. None of the below is to say that a first-time publisher or editor isn't worth taking a gamble with, I do it all the time - I love getting my name in places that people are going to buzz about. However, especially if they're not first-timers, heed the following advice:
If they're a mag, do they have an ISSN registered? If they're an anthology, do they plan to have an ISBN (or do their previous anthologies have non-lulu.com ISBNs)? That shit's free/cheap respectively, so they should - it's expected if they intend to market your work at all, particularly anthologies.
Is their publishing-house name registered as a company in their area, if they're not running it as a proprietorship under their own name? If it isn't, and their releases are under their press's name, there's a serious problem there, but you could have a really fun fraud suit if they are taking a rake off the anthology/mag sales.
Can you talk to other people they're publishing? Does the editorial board/publisher have good social media presence, where they're being pretty innocuous and not starting holy wars or trying to kill people of different creeds? Does their previous editorial work have good reviews on the internet? WHEN YOU GOOGLE THEM, DOES GOOGLE TELL YOU TO HIDE IN FEAR FROM THEIR CRAY?
Don't be afraid to ask a publisher, before submitting, what kind of distribution they have if they don't state where their publications are sold/marketed (unless they're a big-name). If a publisher is using print-on-demand and only has ten sales on each issue so far, you can do better, even if your work is horse-shit. Hell, self-publishing it on a site like dA will get you more exposure if you've been on here networking at all.
Anyone else have any good ones? Sound off in the comments. Collectively, let's help this site's young'uns from getting into some of the pitfalls of beginning publishing that I'm sure many of us went through ourselves.
Some People's Kids, Take II
So, I have to add some additional information because now this Nickolaus Pacione guy is flinging enough feces all over the internet that I'm actually gaining twitter followers at an exponential rate, and they're coming to read this. It turns out he is a very well-known psychotic, with a chunk of the publishing world keeping very close tabs on him. He's running his mouth all over the internet about how he got banned from this site for hurting my feelings or some shit, but I'd like to stress that deviantART has a pretty damn cut-and-dry etiquette policy. I didn't file a report about harassment or hate speech, he just dug his own hole by saying things like the comments on my userpage, which I quoted verbatim to staff member when asking her if there was a back-end way to prevent him from contacting me (there is a 48-hour period after unblocking someone after which you cannot reblock them and I'd blocked him for about ten seconds yesterday before commenting on his forum thread yesterday morning). My message to the staff was, "I don't want him to escalate this to violence, I don't want him to get banned for losing it on me worse than he already has." He was banned for violating the site's policies, not because I complained and whined and pitched a fit about him - hell, I wasn't even the person who reported his submission call in the forum, it was reported before I commented. Also, little bit of misinformation he's spreading around the internet, I'm not an administrator of this website and did not ban him myself, nor did anyone who's been interacting with him on twitter. He's taking the name of the person who first spoke against him and running with it for all it's worth.
He's also sent death threats to both myself and
DorianHarper via twitter ("I will bury you" and so on), and has prattled on nonstop with homophobic slurs and slander to the effect of the fact that we both own publishing houses that went under because of low sales, or some equally ludicrous shit, I don't even know. It's kind of pleasant to have someone who claims to be a professional, within an industry in which I can throw a tiny bit of weight around, threatening to kill me via social media and blogs. I've been getting a non-stop barrage of both harassment from him and support from other people in the industry who he's treated like this for the last day and it's ... well, frankly, hilarious that someone thinks that, in the internet age, you can act even remotely like that when you want to run a web-based creative business.
Again, for anyone who isn't familiar with publishing, this is the kind of publisher who - even if he'd only done this the once, and not all the damn time for the last nine years - would be a stain on your CV/biography. You do not want your name associated with that person if you ever intend to have a writing career, and you never want to publish that person's work if you want your publishing-project to be taken seriously. Believe it or not, writers thinking of submitting to you and publishers thinking of running your work are going to try to find you on the internet nine times out of ten. No serious publisher will publish you if they find someone like this in your past; no serious writer will submit to your magazine if you have a track record of [showing yourself to have/publishing people at] this level of insanity.
