Since I posted RWA’s statement regarding qualified publishers, I want you all to see this too. The emphasis on one sentence is by me, not by Helen A. Rosburg. (following Medallion’s statement is a rebuttal.)

From Helen A. Rosburg, President,CEO, and Editor-in-Chief, Medallion:

Please feel free to post this letter wherever you see chatter concerning Medallion Press’s RWA designation.

August 12, 2005

Tara Taylor Quinn – President
Gayle Wilson – President-Elect
Kathy Carmichael – Secretary
Connie Newman – Treasurer
Allison Kelley – Executive Director
Nicole Kennedy – Public Relations Coordinator
Romance Writers of America, Inc.
16000 Stuebner Airline Rd Suite 140
Spring, Texas 77379

To the Board of Directors of the Romance Writers of America:

It has been brought to our attention, by several of our romance authors, that your organization no longer considers Medallion Press, Inc. a legitimate publisher according to your guidelines. We were surprised we did not receive official notification directly, but instead discovered it was posted on several RWA internet loops. Accordingly, we request this letter be published in its entirety in the RWR Report so all members may understand the nature of the process that eliminated Medallion as an RWA approved publisher. We will also send copies of this letter to all our own RWA member authors.

We are dismayed you declared Medallion Press no longer a legitimate publisher. In July of 2004 we met all of your qualifications without incident by showing sales of 5000+ copies of USA Today Bestselling author Nan Ryan’s The Last Dance.

Several months prior to Book Expo America 2005, we received a call from your office alerting us to the fact that you would be sending out a letter asking us to re-qualify for RWA approval. We were also told at that time that we had done nothing to warrant the re-qualification, but that your organization was having trouble with a particular publisher and chose not to single them out. Therefore, we would have to go through the laborious process of re-qualifying.

We object strongly to this action for a number of reasons. First and foremost, the rules you use for qualification seem arbitrary. How does selling 5000 copies of a single title justify a publishing house’s legitimacy? While in theory it may indicate the publisher has standing in the industry, showing orders and proof of payment means nothing at the end of the day when within a few months many or possibly all copies of said title could be returned to the publisher, meaning the author does not then receive royalties on those returns. The average return rate for fiction books is now at 40%.

Secondly, our small staff is devoted to running this company at top speed. We have come a long way in a relatively short time and we continue to keep our eye on the prize. It is extraordinarily time consuming to go through reams of orders to add up 5000 sold copies of a specific title; it is equally time consuming, and expensive, to have our accountants spend time locating copies of checks as proof of payment for those 5000 copies. We are an independent publisher and we do not sell 5000 copies of a single title to just one source, but to a wide variety of sources. We would not have to produce a single piece of paper, but mountains of it.

Instead of asking for confidential documentation showing 5000 mass market books of a single title have been sold, you might be better off asking for proof that the publisher is a “vendor of record” at a traditional brick-and-mortar chain bookseller such as Barnes & Noble, Borders, Books-A-Million, or through national distributors such as Ingram or Baker & Taylor. This means far more to an author’s career than selling 5000 books.

We are extremely proud of our authors and the books they have written. We have a diverse and dynamic talent pool at Medallion and we know every one of our authors, be they romance or horror writers, are well on their way to having successful writing careers. Their mass market novels can be found in bookstores across the country, and the world, and many of them are selling more than 5000 books prior to their book’s date of publication.

To punish authors because of the way RWA views a publisher’s legitimacy is an unfair practice. The burden of proof should be on the author, not the publisher. It is the author who receives the benefits of membership in RWA, not the publisher. Let the authors prove they were paid an advance. It should not matter how large or small the advance, and they should provide evidence of a contract that shows they will be paid royalties. At that point an author should be considered published. It should not matter that the publisher seeks membership with your organization or not.

In recent years publishing has exploded. There are many new publishers, small presses, e-book publishers, and independent publishers all holding their own. As long as they publish romance and do not charge their authors to publish their books, it should be good enough for RWA.

Medallion Press will not re-apply for membership. However, we urge you to reconsider the penalties you impose on our authors simply because we choose not to belong to ANY writers’ organizations. RWA is an organization of its members and we believe it is time to let your members determine how they evaluate publishers. You know we are a legitimate publisher and know the lengths we go to for our authors. We respectfully request you evaluate your policies so they work for your membership and not against it.

Sincerely,

Helen A. Rosburg – President/CEO & Editor-in-Chief
Leslie Burbank – Vice President
Medallion Press, Inc.

Bad, bad. :naughty: Where is RWA’s balls? Having trouble with one publisher, but forcing a bunch more to jump through hoops to cover up the desire to boot out one?

Read Rebuttal Below

FROM DEBRA DIXON, ChapLink Advisor

Permission to forward granted.

Guidelines for publishers are not new in the industry.

Ingram, the largest wholesaler in the country, routinely makes decisions about which publishers it will continue to service and stock in its warehouses. *Ingram* decides who’s big enough, who’s selling enough books per title, how many titles signal a serious player, whose business terms they like, etc. And believe me, when the word goes out that Ingram is raising the bar again, small presses worry about their sales, their marketing efforts, etc. For a while it seemed like Ingram was purging publishers every few months.

Qualifying for services and inclusion in business networks is a fact of life in this world. Ingram does not consider the authors when making a decision to drop a publisher from its vendor pool. The publishing industry is a business.

RWA publisher recognition helps RWA answer the following *business* questions about a publisher:

Does the publisher have a current romance title/program?
Does the publisher require any investment by the author?
Does the publisher distribute on a national basis?
In sufficient quantity to generate nominal income and build an audience for the *career-focused* author?

These are reasonable questions of great interest to our members.

RWA’s recognized publisher policy offers multiple methods of documenting each part of the recognition criteria. As a previous RWA board member and business person, I helped created the list of documentation that would satisfy RWA’s publisher recognition policy. Is it difficult to pull the necessary paperwork? No. Remember that I’m a small business consultant and have been for 20 years. I know business operation.

Ingram’s I-Page, their web-based inventory, purchasing & ordering system, allows Publishers to print a record of a book’s total orders for the current year and previous year. That’s pretty simple–one page totaling multiple orders, all neatly arranged in a little Ingram table from Ingram’s website.
That info is free to the publisher and takes about a minute to gather, including logging into Ingram. Not every publisher will sell heavy through Ingram or B&T but there are still methods of gathering information that are fairly easy.

Last time I checked, the author was able to provide documentation in the form of royalty statements and copies of cancelled royalty checks to help nail down the sales figures. I think that’s in conjunction with printing invoices to confirm actual stock existed, etc. Believe me, there are choices available to the publisher who would like to become RWA recognized.

RWA’s concern is to advance the professional interests of CAREER-FOCUSED ROMANCE writers. Maintaining the RWA Publisher Recognition Program provides answers to important business questions that individual career-focused authors would not be able to obtain. Think of Publisher Recognition as the “USDA inspected” stamp. Not every publisher cares about applying for RWA recognition. That says nothing about their legitimacy. It simply means that the individual author must look for other ways to evaluate the publisher’s performance because RWA does not have the information.

I can drag out the historical ChapLink posts regarding publisher recognition if we have new presidents who haven’t been down that road and need some backstory. Holler if you’d like to see those loooong posts from me.

–Debra Dixon

UPDATE – I’ve since learned, and seen proof, that RWA did make every effort to get Medallion on board. In the end, Medallion did not produce the needed paperwork.