President of Outskirts Press

These complaints will not be presented in order from “greatest number of complaints received” to “least number of complaints received” because that implies the #1 complaint receives more than the #5 complaint. That’s not necessarily true. In fact, the total number of all of these complaints is statistically low.

But even with a 99% author satisfaction rate, you are bound to get 1-2 complaints a month, statistically, when you publish roughly 150 different books a month, as we do at Outskirts Press.  So 99 of our authors are ecstatic, and 1 of them finds himself or herself caught off guard by one of these 5 circumstances I have covered over the past week or so.

So I thought I would address the Top 5 “Outskirts Press Complaints” that arise, along with what leads to those complaints and what Outskirts Press does–and is doing–to mitigate similar complaints in the future.

It is my hope that by addressing these issues here that future Outskirts Press authors will be more familiar with issues that have caught an author off-guard in the past.  After all, that is what leads to a complaint — being caught “off guard.”

I’ve numbered them 1-5 for the purposes of identifying them in the blog headline, and I will discuss each of these Outskirts Press complaints alphabetically.

Outskirts Press Complaint #5: Proofreading/editing

When an author submits a book to an agent or a traditional publisher, editing and proofreading that book is part of the publication process if the manuscript has been accepted.   The author doesn’t pay up front for this service; instead, the cost of the editing is included either within the agent’s commission and/or the royalty split being offered by the traditional publisher.   In fact, if one were to do the actual math, they would discover that such editing fees through traditional agents and publishers were in the many thousands of dollars.  That fee is just hard to identify because it is “included” within a 15% agent commission and/or a 90%-10% traditional royalty split. <– That’s 10% to the traditional-publishing author, by the way.

So, the source of confusion surrounding an author’s expectations when it comes to editing and proofreading is easy to identify.  In a writer’s mind, the publisher is responsible for editing the book.  “That’s how it has always been.”

Well, that is how it has always been for traditional publication, where the publisher is taking all the rights to the book and paying the author a 5%-10% royalty.   But it has never been that way when an author independently self-publishes his or her own book.  I do not believe an author would expect the printer in China to correct the manuscript before printing it.

So the confusion arises in the mind of a small number of authors when they work with “self-publishing firms” because these companies bridge the gap between traditional publication and independent self-publication. As a result, a small percentage of authors still believe that the publisher’s job is to edit and correct the manuscript as part of the publishing process, regardless of whether the publisher is a “traditional” publisher, “independent” publisher or “self-publisher.”

This is offset by the majority of authors who either understand this is not going to happen with a self-publishing firm or, even more passionately, do NOT want the publisher touching or modifying their document.  After all, for many authors, that is part of the reason they chose Outskirts Press — they keep 100% control of their work.

But even though the former group is in the minority, they are still poised to be surprised, or “caught off guard” when they review their online proofs and/or their final publication and discover that proofreading and editing was not included.   Perhaps they did not read the large bold red warning signs advising them of this.  Perhaps when their Publishing Consultant reiterated it, they either didn’t understand the advice or didn’t believe it.  For whatever reason, this small percentage of authors expect their books to be edited for free before the book is published.  When such free editing services are not delivered, this can lead to a complaint.

This issue is universal across all self-publishing firms.  Editing is either optional for an additional price, or included within a “package” which itself has a fee high enough to cover the cost of editing.

I’ve already mentioned many of the tactics Outskirts Press takes to mitigate complaints about proofreading or editing.  We have large “warnings” throughout the process and particularly at the online galley review process that the author must “check-off” on having read and agreed to. All members of our production teams tell our authors that they are responsible for editing and proofing their own work.  When our manuscript evaluators review the manuscripts, they will make specific comments on the need for additional copyediting. In fact, many of our authors receive a complimentary “spec edit” on the first 1,000 words of their manuscript so they can see first-hand what a paid copyeditor could do to improve their entire book.  This exercise is performed as a courtesy in an effort to introduce our authors to the importance of copyediting services.  By introducing the availability of our optional copyediting services, most reasonable authors realize that only through the purchase of such a service will their book be edited or proofread.

Outskirts Press Kudos #5

To offset the tone of these postings about Outskirts Press complaints, I figured I would also include a comment from one of our published authors at the bottom of each posting. We receive so many positive comments each month that we never have a “place” to put them all, so by adding some to my blog, we’ll create another opportunity for our authors’ wonderful success stories to be shared.  We post many more testimonials on our website here every month.

“My experience with Outskirts Press was outstanding.  As a first time writer, seeking a publisher seemed overwhelming.  Then I heard about Outskirts Press, and the dream of publishing my book, Surviving the Terror…Ike, became a reality.  From the very first step, I was guided through this process with ease.

Support was available to me from the point of submitting my manuscript until post publication and continues even now. I would have never imagined that my book would be published at such a reasonable cost and that it has been done exactly as I wanted.  The book cover is better than I anticipated.  This entire experience has been one of professionalism and has truly exceeded my expectations!   I encourage anyone who has a story to tell, whether fiction or non-fiction to pursue their dream with the help of Outskirts Press!” – Carole Hamadey

With a 99% author satisfaction rate, Outskirts Press statistically faces 1 or 2 complaints a month from our published authors since we publish roughly 150 different authors a month. This number of complaints is statistically low in an industry with such artistic fervor. Some complaints are more valid than others, of course, but I’m a writer and I love helping other writers, so I hate receiving any kind of complaint. Therefore we take steps to receive as few Outskirts Press complaints as possible, regardless of their “validity.” It is my hope that by discussing these complaints here that future Outskirts Press authors will be more familiar with issues that have caught an author off-guard in the past.  Because, ultimately, that is what a “complaint” is — catching a client/customer off-guard.  

Over the past few posts, I have addressed three of the “Outskirts Press Complaints” that our authors have brought to our attention over the past eight years of business, along with what led to those complaints and what Outskirts Press does–and is doing–to mitigate similar complaints in the future. Below is # 4.

 These complaints are not presented in order from “greatest number of complaints received” to “least number of complaints received” because that implies that the #1 complaint received five times as many as the #5 complaint. That is not the case, and I actually had to stretch to come up with 5, but who’s ever heard of a “Top 4” list?

Outskirts Press Complaint #4: Phones

Having a scalable customer service operation with 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week telephone support is difficult.  Well, I shouldn’t say it’s difficult. It’s expensive. Anything can be solved with money (or nearly anything).  But the reality of running a successful company includes balancing the needs of a customer/client against the realities of running a profitable business. Businesses have to be profitable, otherwise they don’t remain in business for very long.  I always feel like I’m saying something that some authors consider surprising here — but, publishing is a business.   

Phone customer service issues become exacerbated by growth. When Outskirts Press was relatively small in 2003-2004, we didn’t experience nearly the volume of phone calls that we experience today. Therefore, our authors were happy because they could always reach someone by phone.  As a company grows past a certain size — typically considered one million in gross revenue or more — it becomes necessary to create scalability to accommodate the needs of a larger customer/client base.

For financial reasons, many companies choose to solve this problem by off-shoring their customer service – that is, having customer service agents in India, China, Mexico, the Philippines, etc.   The logic for the company is that customer service agents in these countries are “less expensive” than agents in America.  Some of our competitors do this; and, frankly, this has been a solution we have considered ourselves from time to time.

But I am not willing to offshore phone customer service for our valuable Outskirts Press clients.   I want that service to remain based in America. I also feel, perhaps from personal experience, that customer service agents in other countries are… well… “difficult” to understand.  It often leads to communication issues.  When dealing with a complicated service like book publishing and marketing, the last thing you need is an additional hurdle like a language barrier.

But, that decision doesn’t come without sacrifice.  As a result, we cannot afford to house a 40-person call center, with 40 agents waiting by the phones for them to ring, twenty-four hours a day. The margins simply aren’t that high. In fact, our margins are lower than many of our competitors because we offer a greater value. Sure, you can pay $13,999 for a publishing package and rightfully expect to talk to an American-speaking human being at three in the morning.  The question becomes, was that worth it to you?  Sounds like a very expensive phone call. For 1% of the self-publishing authors out there, perhaps it is a price they are willing to pay (or perhaps they haven’t thought enough about what they are paying for).   Our services target the remaining 99%, who would rather pay less than $1000 and perhaps have to deal with the temporary inconvenience of scheduling a phone appointment in advance.

The other side of the fence is to clearly state that your business does not offer phone support at all. Some of our competitors have taken this approach, too.  From a business perspective, I can understand this approach.  Some competitors who do this even claim that they can offer equally high customer service via email.  Authors simply don’t buy that.  The quality of the customer service isn’t what the company claims it is; it’s what the client/customer/author believes it is.  And some of them want to talk to a human being before they make an investment in publishing their book. Understandable.

So, as with many of the other topics I’ve discussed, Outskirts Press finds its niche in the middle of these two extremes.  We have a toll free number posted on our website, but we strongly encourage authors to communicate via email whenever possible.  Nevertheless, our phones are extremely busy, and this leads me to the Outskirts Press complaints regarding phones.  When an author, either a current author, future author, or published author, calls us on the phone, they have an expectation to have their issue resolved by a proficient, capable, human being right that second, regardless of how long it takes.   We’ve already discussed the business realities preventing us from running a 40-person call center, so sometimes these authors do not reach the appropriate department right away (those agents are busy helping others) and therefore the authors are sometimes asked to leave a message for a call back.  That’s not fulfilling their expectations (reasonable or not), and therefore, a complaint.

At Outskirts Press, we’ve taken a number of steps to address this issue as we continue to grow quickly.  Up until the migration to our Version 4.0 website, we relied quite heavily on an automated voice mail system that asked the caller to choose from a number of choices to reach the appropriate department.   We found that this led to frustration, along with long wait times in the holding queue, because callers rarely knew what specific department they were seeking. Therefore, the majority of them were winding up in the “catch-all” funnel anyway… defeating the whole point of the tiered voice mail system. Lose-lose.

So with the migration to Version 4, we added a human being reception to help direct the caller to the appropriate department manually.  This has already shown vast improvements and increased author satisfaction.  But when you publish 150 new authors a month, have over 1000 in the pipeline at any given time, and over 6000 published authors with periodic marketing/royalty questions, that still equates to an unmanageable number of calls. So, we’ve recently added even more people to facilitate the phones, including our publishing consultants, who are well-versed on answering potential authors’ questions immediately.  If all our phone support personnel are on the phone, the receptionist is instructed to take a message so a call back consultation can be scheduled.

Is the system perfect? No. But is paying $1000 and receiving 100% of your profits with Outskirts Press better than shelling out $13,999 and receiving about 50% of your profits for the life of your book elsewhere?  Well, in my opinion, yes.  Every decision is based upon weighing the pros and cons of the available options.

Outskirts Press Kudos #4

To offset the tone of these 5 postings about Outskirts Press complaints, I figured I would also include a comment from one of our published authors at the bottom of each posting. We receive so many positive comments each month that we rarely have a “place” to put them all, so by adding some to my blog, we’ll create another opportunity for our authors’ wonderful success stories to be shared.  We post many more testimonials on our website here every month.

“My experience with Outskirts Press was awesome. My Author Rep was very professional and resourceful in making my book come into existence. She gave me excellent advise and made my publishing dreams come true in the blink of an eye!” – Shavonna D. Jordan

Even with a 99% author satisfaction rate, Outskirts Press faces 1 or 2 complaints a month from our published authors. That’s bound to happen, statistically, when you publish books by roughly 150 different authors a month.  So I thought over the next few posts, I would address the Top 5 “Outskirts Press Complaints” that arise, along with what leads to those complaints and what Outskirts Press does–and is doing–to mitigate similar complaints in the future. These complaints will not be presented in order from “greatest number of complaints received” to “least number of complaints received” because that implies that the #3 complaint I discuss today has received more complaints than the complaint I will discuss next time. That’s not necessarily true.  

It is my hope that by discussing these complaints with transparency that future Outskirts Press authors will be more familiar with issues that have caught an author off-guard in the past. 

I’ve numbered them 1-5 for the purposes of identifying them in the blog headline, and I will discuss each of these Outskirts Press complaints alphabetically.

Outskirts Press Complaint #3: Interior Formatting

I’ll admit that we’ve probably created our own problem here. We are perhaps too flexible with meeting an author’s interior formatting requests because we want them to have exactly the book they want.  Many of our competitors fall into two categories as it relates to interior formatting:

1) They either require the author to submit their own interior print-ready file

or

2) They disregard all the author’s formatting requests and create an interior based upon the genre of the book

The problem with the first scenario is that, like it or not, many authors lack the technical proficiency to aesthetically design the interior of a high-quality book.  So they produce something in Word at 8.5 x 11 and then submit it to a DIY publisher, which artificially resizes it to 6×9.  It’s no wonder those books from those publishers don’t win any awards.  And it’s also no wonder that this leads to the continued stigma of “self-published books.” 

The problem with the second scenario is that it prevents the author from having any say in the matter whatsoever. Sometimes that’s good. But usually it’s better if the author can participate. After all, it’s their book.

So that leads me to the “Outskirts Press complaints” regarding interior formatting. In a particular case, for example, when the author reviewed his digital proofs before authorizing publication, the interior formatting did not meet his expectations.  The formatting might have been fine; in fact, in our professional judgment it was probably even better than what the author wanted, but none of that was important.   What mattered was that the author was expecting one thing and received something else.   I don’t like our authors to be surprised. Ah, it would be so much easier if Outskirts Press fell into scenario #1 above because every author would simply submit their own print-ready file. Sure, many of the books we published might look unprofessional.  Sure, our books would win far fewer awards. Sure, the author might need to hire a designer separately for substantial additional cost.  But it would avoid this complaint.   

Since I’m a writer, I know how important book interiors are to authors. So I wanted to offer our authors a choice.  Therefore, we offer 4 different interior options:

	We offer a standard interior formatting option which delivers a custom formatting job based upon industry best practices for the genre of the book. This is included with every package.
	We also accept print-ready files submission with some of our packages.
	We also offer an optional formatting option for a nominal fee (less than one hundred bucks) which allows the author and designer to collaborate on a mutually accepted “style sheet” that defines all the aesthetic elements of the formatting in advance.
	Lastly, we offer a page-by-page custom formatting option for a per-page price.

With so many options comes some confusion.  For example, one author submitted her manuscript formatted at 8.5 x 11 in Word and then was surprised that it had to be reformatted in order to be published at 5 x 8.  Our production team should have done a better job bringing this inevitability to her attention in advance, and we’ve improved those publishing communications. Ultimately, this becomes a process of education and disseminating information about formatting on our website.  Our publishing consultants also reiterate the process and the things to be aware of at the beginning and throughout the process.

Our “style sheet” option that I referred to above has been perhaps the most successful step we’ve taken to mitigate this particular complaint.  Not only does this option give the author a very affordable method for customizing the look of the book, but it establishes in no uncertain terms that only with this option does some customization become available.  Yes, we still custom format every book manually and individually, but there is a business difference between doing that with the involvement of an author and doing it according to industry best practices regarding fonts, margins, headings, etc. 

I feel, ultimately, that we’ve taken the best path for our authors, by granting them the most flexibility. And if that leads to a complaint by an author who didn’t read the website, I guess we must deal with that .01%  in the interest of the greater good — publishing high-quality books for award-winning authors.

Outskirts Press Kudos #3

To offset the tone of these postings about Outskirts Press complaints, I figured I would also include a comment from one of our published authors at the bottom of each posting. We receive so many positive comments each month that we never have a “place” to put them all, so by adding some to my blog, we’ll create another opportunity for our authors’ wonderful success stories to be shared.  We post many more testimonials on our website here every month.

“I think that Outskirts Press is very professional, and covers all aspects of publishing thoroughly. I was quite impressed at how promptly both my publishing consultant and author representative always responded to my questions. I would recommend Outskirts Press to anyone that wants to self-publish a book.” – Michael Kovacevich