I have a lot of feelings about the “we need them” argument about CZP.

Because...

This press paid $500 advances
Only printed 1000-1500 books
Didn’t even pay royalties
(At least within 1-2 years)
And had no formal marketing team

While ALSO abusing people.

That’s what we NEED?!

A “nice deal” in publishing is the lowest deal you can get. It is $10-49,999.

That means that those who got $500 got 1 PERCENT of the high end of the lowest tier of publishing advances.

It means you can make more with a pro short than selling your novel.

Say you make 10% off cover price. Say it’s $20.00. That’s about $2.00 per book.

If your publisher prints 1000 copies, you could make $2000 on top of the $500. So a total of $2500, or 5% of the top end of a nice deal.

Unless royalties are against advance. Then it’s $2000 total.

But that would require a few things.

Your publisher would need to know where the books sell.
They’d need to market it into the right hands.
They’d need to PAY YOU your royalties.

And we know the full runs weren’t being sold based on employee accounts.

So say they’ve sold 60% of the run. That’s 600 books, or $1200 on your pocket.

But you never know. You never see the numbers. You have no idea how well they’ve sold.

So suddenly you think you’ve sold nothing, because otherwise you would have heard, right?

All of a sudden you are anxious and gaslit over a sum that is less than one month’s rent in Toronto. It’s not nothing. For some it’s a lot.

But in publishing, and in the grand scheme of what authors are worth, it isn’t much.

And since there was no formal marketing team (there was a “consultant”?) it was mainly interns running marketing campaigns and review asks for your book. They worked hard. They did their best.

But they also had another 15 books to market with 0 experience.

So despite having gone to market, you’ve made $500, because you haven’t seen your royalty statements.

And worse, fewer than 600 people are reading your novel. Because not everyone who buys a book reads it. (We all have TBRs, after all)

What are your goals, as an author? To have your book be well loved? To go full time? To have a tidy sum for a vacation, or to just make sure the lights are on? To have a wonderful working relationship with a team that supports you and your book?

But what about awards!!

I was in there for ten months, but I saw how authors were treated. There were “geniuses” who were treated incredibly and nommed for awards. And everyone else who was a bitch or cunt and lucky CZP deigned to pub them.

You’re more likely to be the latter.

Yes, books went up for awards. But the people editing those award-worthy books were often the EDITORS. @SMBeiko, @sekisetsu, @AGAWilmot, @KelsiGrammar. The exact people who have TAKEN A STAND and shared their experiences or validated one another’s stories.

So even if you are an award-worthy writer at CZP who gets every glory and compliment and nomination.

Do you want that to come at the expense of knowing the talented and careful editor you worked with was paid $200 and abused emotionally and potentially sexually?

Do you REALLY?

At the end of this process, there are two options. Here’s the first.

1. You publish with ChiZine. Get $500. A nice cover. Talked about behind your back. Not nominated for any awards. You don’t know how your book sells. You don’t get royalties, or get them rarely.

Sounds great.

The second option...

2. You get the glory treatment. Work with a great editor. Lauded. Treated like your ass is made of gold. Nommed everywhere. Maybe even know how you’ve sold?? But it’s at the expense of the interns and editors being abused behind the scenes.

Cool cool cool.

These two choices mean you either slowly become a victim, or profit off victims.

Even if your primary editor was B&S, they had that time bc of under/unpaid team labour & not spending the time managing the business side of things. (Since “time” is why royalties weren’t sent?)

I don’t love self pub as an end all solution, because it’s a heckin lot of work. But honestly... other than awards, you’d be better off.

Hire an ex-CZP editor freelance
Learn intern level marketing
Know all your numbers
No name calling/abuse
Make probably more than $500

Do we NEED the publishers who are held accountable for being untrustworthy and abusive?

Do Canadian spec authors NEED to profit (and barely) off the labour of abuses and under/unpaid staff?

Do we NEED a space that pays less for a novel than pro markets pay for short fiction?

I think we deserve better. Authors deserve better. Editors deserve better. Canadian and Indigenous speculative fiction deserves better.

We deserve structures that honour the worlds and stories and wonder and magic and adventure here, from start to finish.

Do we need spaces? Absolutely. And there’s a reason there aren’t many. It’s hard fucking work.

My mag comes out 3 times a year and sometimes I drown under it. The part where creating products and community is tough? Absolutely true.

So everyone needs to contribute to better.

That is what we need. A community that holds our spaces accountable. That validates and honours volunteer labour—because we haven’t figured out how to cut it from pub here. We need integrity and care. We need to lift one another up. We need to support the other spaces we do have.

The rest of it? You can take it or leave it, but I would recommend leaving it.

And if you don’t, remember that you are always responsible for the communities you contribute to. You are what you eat, so to speak.

Addendum: take all this math and make it less money. https://twitter.com/thekaufmann/status/1194448898393329664?s=21

Also read: @sekisetsu’s recent blog post https://michaelmatheson.wordpress.com/2019/11/12/on-chizine-publications-and-putting-people-first/

Another addition: sometimes you didn’t even get the whole advance in advance.

So take that number down to $250. https://twitter.com/smbeiko/status/1194457255279763456?s=21

And then there were times when it was even lower. https://twitter.com/sekisetsu/status/1194461626528866305?s=21