Considering DORRANCE Publishing, Inc.?
Considering subsidy publishing?
Read this before you do.
Subsidy publishing essentiallly means that the author pays for the entire publishing process out of their own pocket.
In addition to the agreed upon amount of money, I am currently paying Dorrance $1,050 more to fix THEIR mistake. And the final amount has yet to be determinted.
I submitted my manuscript to Dorrance publishing in 1999. Dorrance's author representative at that time was very friendly. I paid them in full the enormous fee that I was expected to pay. When the books finally arrived in July of 2001 I was horrified. The interior artwork of my book did not match the page proofs which I had approved. They had shrunk my drawings more than 50% and rotated them 90 degrees. They placed the artwork at the very top of the page, leaving more than the entire bottom half of the page blank. This looked very unprofessional. The illustrations were designed to fit the page perfectly. They appeared properly in the page proofs. I was upset, but I was very kind in my phone call and letter of complaint. I was willing to work with them to fix it. I recommended several options that did not require reprinting the book. I thought that they could put in inserts of the correctly printed artwork or that they could reduce the price of the book and sell them as "defective." They said that they would forward my complaint to the production department and that any future reprints (assuming all the defective copies sold out) would be corrected. And so I waited. I expected the production department to contact me. They never did. At last I tried to contact them. I left messages on voicemails, emails, and letters. I never got a response until October 2001, FOUR MONTHS LATER. They apparently had not even read my original complaint. They continued to dismiss me, assuming that I would give up. At last I pressured them into giving me a straight answer, pointing out that the page proofs did not match what was printed. Their response was that it DID INDEED match in their opinion. I couldn't believe it! The pages were completely different! And yet in July they had told me that future printings would be corrected. How could they have been corrected if they did not even recognize what my complaint was? Apparently they had never even bothered to look at my original complaint in July 2001, and no one had looked at it since. I finally hired a lawyer. The agreed to pay half the cost of reprinting. Currently I am paying $1,050 more than I originally agreed to pay. I am paying this to fix THEIR mistake. Because they ignored the problem for so long there are many out there who purchased the defective copies. At this time, even after they agreed to throw away the defective copies, people are still receiving the defective books. There is still no agreement on if these people will receive free copies of the correctly printed books. The odds are that I will end up paying the total cost of replacing customer’s defective books as well. The books of customers who bought something because they saw my name on it. Can you imagine my embarrassment?
My advice for those considering subsidy publishing is:
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