The power of self-publishing or how not to be treated by your publisher

Recently I fell out with my US publisher (Eloquent Books aka SBPRA), who I have been working with closely for a great many years. While I understand that times are hard for publishers of printed books, I expect as a minimum that my publisher sticks to our contract whatever the financial circumstances.

As it turned out, and to my big surprise, SBPRA wrote to me and told me that because I had not sold a minimum of 100 books in the last 12 months, they would be putting my book 'on hold'. On hold mend that they would no longer be selling or listing my book, though they expected our contract to remain in place!

Taking legal advice on the matter, it turned out that SBPRA was in breach of contract as the contract did not stipulate that I had to sell 100+ books per year or that they were able to place my book on hold.

So I cancelled both my contracts with SBPRA (which has now lost the sale of almost 200 books per year of my two books) because I quite frankly found their behaviour unprofessional. Why should they allowed to treat me like that - making up rules and financial claims as they see fit.

I am pleased to note that the rest is history. 'Evolution for Young Minds', one of the two titles SBPRA recently has lost the right to publish, has today been released on the Kindle Platform.

Kindle Edition on Amazon.com

As I have written about before, the Kindle publishing process is easy and cheap to use, and I am now, which is extremely important to me as an author, in complete control of my own works.

There is in my view no longer a need for authors to pay publishers a lot of money to help publish their work whatever that be in print or as an ebook.

Power to the author and Hurray for self-publishing!