Time Alone Press, or, How to Spot the Time Wasters

 "How can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?"

John McClane, Die Hard 2: Die Harder

I wrote a post here, not much over a year ago, about the dreadful experiences I had with an outfit by the name of Eldritch Press, who accepted my story Br(other) and then proceeded to muck me around for a very long time indeed, before finally admitting that they wouldn't be publishing my work - and had no intention of paying me a single cent for the months in which they'd tied up the rights while purposefully obfuscating the fact that they knew damn well the book would likely never happen.

What a rubbish experience that was!  And thank goodness these things happen almost never!  I mean, the odds of then selling that same story to another supposedly pro-rate anthology, and the editors again going suspiciously silent for months on end, with the occasional burst of self-aggrandizing nonsense, only to finally admit - in a narcissistic e-mail that suggested they were largely blind to the harm they'd done - that said anthology wouldn't be happening, while ignoring any suggestion that they might compensate writers, are, what?  One in a zillion?

Well, in this case they were precisely one in one, since that's just what happened with Time Alone Press, and their now defunct Let Us In anthology.

Now, my first thought was that there's nothing much you can do in these instances except name and shame: to wit, given that all traces of Time Alone have vanished, all I can say is that, if you should ever come across the improbably-monickered Karl Hexean Sumner, you'd do well to have your lying cat handy.  But then I realised that, since I got a suspicious vibe off of this guy pretty much right from the off, here was a useful opportunity to share some thoughts on how to spot the time wasters early.  And while this probably won't materially help anyone, since there's not a great deal you can do in these situations except hope for the best, at least it might save a little heartbreak when the letdowns finally come.

You Have To Think Anyway, So Why Not Think Big?

Ambition is great, right?  Everyone loves ambition.  Only, ambitious people tend to be ambitious in all directions at once, and hard-working people tend to leave no stones unturned in their pursuit of excellence, and ... look ... if a publisher is espousing their wildly optimistic plans but not doing a whole lot of anything that you can see then maybe they're the sorts of people that are better at daydreaming than doing.  For Time Alone that meant one anthology that turned into a three volume series that turned into a three volume series plus a magazine that turned into a whole boatload of nothing.

Show Me the Money

This one can actually double as a general life lesson: if someone is promising you money then take a moment to wonder where that money might be coming from.  I mean, I'm not saying you should start investigating their investments or anything, but - well, look, we're using Time Alone as an example, aren't we?  Time Alone had publicly promised to publish three anthologies of short fiction, to a total of some sixty or so stories, meaning an up-front investment of somewhere around the fifteen thousand dollar mark.  And yet their website looked like they persuaded a toddler to make it on the promise of a trip to the park.  The point being: does the amount you're being promised align with the sort of money the publisher is spending elsewhere?  Or is there a general air that their funding plans involve a significant lottery win?

It's. Oh. So Quiet

Short story publishing is, admittedly, not a business that requires constant communication; sometimes months may pass in which you'll hear nothing, especially if a market buys well in advance.  Still, there are certain definite circumstances where silence becomes suspicious.  Having had an acceptance, have you had a contract?  Having had a contract, have you had payment?  If the answer's no on either front and more than a month has gone by then something's likely amiss.  And when that gets to Time Alone levels, with websites and Facebook pages left for weeks on end without updates, it's safe to assume that something's going majorly wrong behind the scenes.

What Does God Need With a Starship?

Following on from all the earlier points: real publishers have plans about how they're going to achieve their goals.  That may mean Kickstarters or subscriber programs or being millionaires from the off, but there should generally be at least some sense of how those goals will become ends.  If a publisher's business plan appears to be along the lines of "make a book and then poof! magic, and also there will be unicorns" then there's a reasonable chance that they do not, in fact, know what they're doing.  By the same measure, you might want to look and see if they've previously published any books, and if so, how well they've managed them.  Lots of pending projects and few or no actual projects are another good warning sign, as are half-built websites staying half-built for months on end.

It's Not You, It's Me

Good publishers are enthusiastic about publishing.  Holy crap, that sounds so obvious when you say it like that!  And those good publishers tend to devote their energies to talking about their writers, their writers' stories, their projects, rather than - you know - themselves.  If every e-mail you get, and every Facebook post, and everything on the website, screams of a publisher that's terribly excited about their own existence and at best mildly interested in the writers they should be promoting then that right there is another flashing red light.

Needless to say, none of these warning signs mean a great deal in isolation; no-one's perfect, after all.  It's when you see two or three of them together that you should start readying for bad news - and when you see all five then you should assume that it's pretty much guaranteed.

And, hey, on a concluding note - if anyone wants to buy a horror story of just under 6000 words that is very clearly cursed then do please let me know.

Eldritch Press - Some Words of Warning

You get good experiences and bad experiences in this trade, just as in any other.  Yet still the bad experiences always surprise me a little.  Stupid I know, but there's always a naive part of me that insists that people get into publishing - be they writers, editors or whatever - because it's something they basically love, an even more naive part determined to believe that because of that fact people will be more inclined to behave with a degree of decency and respect.  No matter how often I'm proved wrong on this front - and this year, I've been proved wrong a lot - I still find myself feeling shocked.

The minor bad experiences, the rude e-mails, late payments and such, I invariably let slide.  When people behave in a spectacularly crappy fashion, however, that I try to flag up here.  Because it's safe to assume that a publisher that's acted unprofessionally towards me will do so to other people too, and as writers we have little enough defense against that sort of thing.

Which brings us around to Eldritch Press.

In late June of last year, I submitted a story called Br(other) to an anthology Eldritch had opened for, Our World of Horror, and to my immense surprise it was accepted that same day.  This seemed like hugely good news, since Eldritch were paying good money, and things only looked more positive when the contract came through a prompt four days later.  That was tarnished ever so slightly when the table of contents went up the month after and I noticed they'd managed to misspell the one-word title of my story but, hey, no biggie, and they got it fixed quickly enough.

Four or so months went by.  2014 rolled on into 2015.  With no recent news and half of the twelve month contract period elapsed, it seemed like a good time to check on progress.  I was told that edits were in progress and that they were "waiting on a couple of high profile authors" to send stories.

Five more months passed.  In that time, Eldritch had revamped their website and Our World of Horror had vanished from it.  I wrote again pointing this out and got a form acknowledgement but no reply.  May became June, the last month of the contact exclusivity period, and I had little doubt that something had gone badly wrong.  I wrote once more, highlighting the fact that my story would soon be out of contract and this time got an apology.  I was told I was welcome to withdraw my work but that the book would definitely be out in July.  I suggested a three month contract extension to cover the additional delay and was advised that it would be along shortly.  It never materialized, but about a week later I did get copied in on a mass e-mail announcing the addition of a story by a 'big name' author to the collection.  It was late July by this point, and I was gobsmacked that Eldritch would use the one and only mass e-mail they'd sent out to point out that they were still adding material mere days before their promised release date.  Had they really kept eighteen authors waiting for over a year, just for this?

Apparently not, since things then went quiet once again.  Finally, a few days ago, I got a second mass e-mail, this one announcing that Eldritch were pulling the plug on Our World of Horror.  It didn't come as much of a shock.  Despite the protestations to the contrary, I'd been confident for about six months that the anthology would never see the light of day.  The tone of that e-mail did, however, annoy me to no end.  There was a deal of self-pity in there, yet no apparent awareness that they'd just screwed twenty or so authors around for well over a year and failed to honour payments that surely totaled somewhere in the thousands of dollars.  (I'd illustrate with quotes here, but wouldn't you know, they stuck a confidentiality clause on it.)  I wrote back and pointed out that no part of that e-mail contained an apology of any kind; I further suggested that, having tied up the work of so many writers for well over a year they should probably be thinking about some compensation.  Needless to say, I didn't get a reply.

Now this is hardly an atypical story, and it's not the first sale I've had collapse from under me.  There's no question but that the quality of communication was atrocious, but if it had been that alone then I wouldn't have taken the time to write it up here.  What bothers me particularly is the suspicion that Eldritch tied up stories for this book for a period of months when they had a fairly good idea that it wasn't going to happen.  I mean, why else do you disappear a project from your website?  Why hold off on the edits, except because the contract stipulated payment on their completion?  Why else keep authors so in the dark?  My impression is that they thoughtlessly jerked a bunch of writers around because it suited them and they could get away with it, and - having had my work purchased and sat on for fifteen months and having seen not a dime for the privilege - I consider that reason enough to warn other writers to be careful around these guys.

Though frankly, I doubt that any of this will be an issue.  Reading between the lines of that last e-mail, it seems likely that Eldritch are in the process of folding.  If this is how they do business then, frankly, it's difficult to imagine any other scenario.  Still, I would personally much rather see them get their problems resolved and learn from their mistakes, because the world surely does need more small presses willing to pay decent money.  And if anyone else has had experiences with Eldritch, whether positive or negative, then in the interests of fairness please do take a minute to share them in the comments.

Short Fiction News, Mid-2014

I'm currently on the train back from Nine Worlds, which was for the most part a lot of fun, but which I'm at this precise moment too tired, hungover, and not-quite-sure-of-exactly-what-I-thought to try and blog about.  So here's one I prepared earlier...

I remember writing quite a grumbly post when I got my first short story acceptance of 2014, that being Twitcher to the fine folks at Pseudopod, thanks to the fact that it came in goddamn May and four and a bit months is a fair while to go without a sale.  (In fact it had been quite a bit more than that because the tail end of 2013 hadn't been exactly brilliant either.)  Well, it's August now and I'm grumbling substantially less.  In fact if things were to keep on like the last couple of months then I'd be happy indeed ... which of course they probably won't, so I'd better get my positivism in while I can:

- First up I sold Twilight For the Nightingale, the story I'd been unhelpfully referring to as my homoerotic supervillain story, to Resurrection House's forthcoming XIII anthology.  I'm hopeful that this will be one of those rare perfect pairings of story and market, because it sounds like it's going to be a terrifically bonkers book.  I mean, you know when editors normally say they want something a bit like Neil Gaiman or whatever?  Mark Teppo name-checked Kafka, Gene Wolfe, Darren Aronofsky and David Lynch.  I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on this one.

- Out of the blue I got some good news, not to mention a little unexpected cash, when Kat Rocha of 01 Publishing got in touch to say that the previously e-book only Whispers From the Abyss collection, which includes my My Friend Fishfinger By Daisy, Age 7, had done well enough to warrant a print edition.  As I've noted before now, this was a terrific little collection and deserves to do well.  I've since discovered that 01 have run a Kickstarter for the project, which has finished now but remains well worth checking out for its fantastic trailer.  If I wasn't due two copies as a contributor then I suspect this would have been the first Kickstarter I got actively involved with, because I want me a Star Spawn poster something bad.

- Soon after that I got my quickest ever acceptance, when relatively new outfit Eldritch Press got back to me within four hours to say that they'd like to take my story Br(other) for their upcoming Our World of Horror anthology.  I genuinely assumed this was some sort of mistake until the contract came through, because four hours.  That's barely even a real amount of time.  I mean, I've spent that long in the shower before now.  Anyway, if the cover art is anything to go by then this one is going by both great and seriously warped. 

- I realised that I might as well send one of the short comic scripts I've been sitting on for years to Futurequake, who published a couple of my early efforts in that department a few years back.  The one I opted for was a story called Conservationists,which I'm hopeful may be the only occasion of anyone telling an alien invasion story through the eyes of an urban fox.  It's a frankly insane, completely dialogue-free bit of work, and I can't wait to see what an artist makes of it.

- Last but not least, and unusually up to the minute in that I only found out three hours ago, but Jonathan Green, official Nicest Man in Fantasy (and yet, paradoxically, the world's meanest Just a Minute player), let me know that he'll be using my The Shark in the Heart for his forthcoming-next-year-from-Snow Books anthology Sharkpunk. 

Because yes, apparently, now that's a thing.

So there we go.  I'm still way behind on my target for this year, which should theoretically be going really well due to all the additional time I have and in fact is going worse than last year, when I had hardly any time at all.  But a couple of good months surely does take the edge off, and who knows?  There may yet come another surge of goodnewsery before the year is out.