"Oh, Sweet Myster(ies) of Life, at Last We've Found You..."

By:  Kimberly Hitchens is the founder and owner of Booknook.biz, an ebook production company that has produced books for over 500 authors and imprints. 

I don’t know about you, but I’m ecstatic about Penguin Group’s decision to relaunch Dutton Guilt-Edged mysteries as a digital imprint. Sure, in a way, they’re competition for us here at Booknook; but at the end of the day, anything that signals a Noir comeback is okay with me. Penguin eSpecials, launching this summer, will specialize in original crime shorts and novellas. For one, I’ve missed the days of Black Mask and other great platforms from which budding mystery novelists could springboard their careers—and you know what? I’m just bloody EXCITED.

Some of you may also recall those tedious blog posts and newsletters in which I’ve nagged you to put freebie teaser fiction on sites such as Scribd, Wattpad etc . Well, now (yes, I’m sure you hear that “I told you so” coming, loud and clear), Brittany Geragotelis has inked a deal with Simon & Schuster to re-launch her (serialized) Wattpad-published title, Life’s a Witch, which commanded a very respectable 18million readers (yes: Eighteen MILLION). In addition to relaunching the original book (which was also released as a Createspace title via POD), she’s agreed to publish both a sequel and a prequel to this popular YA book.

This Week's Things That Make You Go..."Hunh?"

Lastly, this week’s query, which always makes me scratch my head in ponderment: invariably, at least 1-2x per week, I get an potential authosher (it is my new work for Author-publishers—remember, you read it here first) asking me—in ever-so-polite, disingenuously couched terms, "…if I send my manuscript to you, how do I know that you won’t steal it?"  It’s always crafted a bit less bluntly than that—but that’s the gist.

Now, here’s my question: firstly, even if I wanted to respond cheerfully and robustly, (without taking offense, which frankly is a lot to ask), how the hell does one prove a negative? And secondly—and far more amusing to me than my initial question-- if someone’s a thief, why do you think that they’d be honest enough to tell you? My working hypothesis is that if someone’s a thief (ahem, rather, “copyright infringer,”) they’re probably also a liar, as a lack of morals in one aspect tends to make me presume similar deficiencies in other facets of their personality—but I could, of course, just be caving to baseless bias.  Do these folks really expect me to respond, “[w]ell, yes, of COURSE I’ll steal it, put it under my own name and put it up on pirate sites as soon as it hits my servers?” Would a real pirate say that? Can we all agree that the likelihood is slim? Then, logically—what’s the point of asking?   Of all the choices (an honest person, a dishonest person), who's going to respond that they'll steal the book? 

I understand that people get nervous about sending their “children” into the unknown of cyberspace—I do. But a large number of these questions come from the same people who’ll, without a worry in their minds, send hundreds of digital copies of their manuscript, willy-nilly, to any Tom, Dick or Harriet that hangs out a shingle on the Internet that says “Literary Agent,” with no credentialing whatsoever. If you’re sending your manuscript to anybody on Planet Earth who’ll set up a blogsite claiming to be an agent (or, for that matter, a new publisher)—for the love of heavens, folks, why would you ask the book converters for promises of security? If your book gets stolen, will you automatically think of the 100 agents you contacted, the 50 people in your online critique group—or will you instantly blame the conversion house which, of ALL the people mentioned in this paragraph, are the only ones who DON’T take the time to read it?

I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve read on various writer’s groups that it’s a “deadly sin” to send a manuscript with a copyright notification on it to an Agent, because it will insult her integrity. The next time you’re tempted to ask some poor conversion house for proof that they’re not thieves—try to keep that in mind. If you've blithely sent your manuscript to 100 strangers you don’t know, simply because they claim to be agents or publishers—that “piracy” train has already left the station.

On a bright note, however, despite all the doom and gloom, statistically (as depressing as this is to many writers' egos), you are indeed more likely to be struck by lightning then to have your book pirated (unless your book is Playboy or Hustler, or Excel macros or video-game cheat tips).  So cheer up!

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This week's chuckle, from Reader's Digest:  ""I just read a great book on my Kindle. It was a real button-pusher!"