Ok, here's the deal. When most of us pick up a book, it's usually via the internet these days. Read this as - we sit at the computer and browse through Amazon, unless we're looking for something very specific, either the next bestseller or our favourite author. We don't actually ask ourselves anything about how the book came to be a book (ooooo-k, apart from what we get to read on it in any and every trivia section also on internet), and we most definitely don't generally search by publisher.
Or do we?
Well, some people do, to some extent, already. And it's not the ones you'd imagine, like big names (Bloomsbury, or Pan Macmillan, etc.), even though some of them have given us the biggest books of the last few decades, if not the century (Bloomsbury, for instance, published Harry Potter).
Those names exist on the back of covers, and in the details of the sales' pages we don't read. Really. We don't. But some people who read erotica (read that as a LOT of people who read erotica) kind of do.
And here's the reason why.
Namely, the publisher has become a someone to them – not just a name at the back of the cover, but a place you go to for quality product.
You're more likely to make this association to anything else but books, but books can do it too. Ellora's Cave and Siren have, to a certain extent, pioneered this – Ellora's Cave (and don't you just love the name??!!) was the first online publisher that made erotica their speciality. They went as far as to invent their own term for a specific type of erotica (you will find that romantica as a term belongs to them by copyright, and that it means romantic erotica, or, in translation, romance with strong elements of erotica, or erotica with strong elements of romance, however you want to see it). By now, both Ellora's Cave and Siren have become well established and fairly well known (at least in certain circles) publishers. In terms of a reader, this means that the readers know that they'll like a book by Ellora's Cave or Siren, and have made it their thing to come back again and again – much like you might have a trusted brand for perfumes, or cosmetics, or jogging shoes.
There is power in being a brand that is not to be underestimated, something that these two publishers know very well – with an estimated number of books sold by Ellora (200 000 books/month) and the estimated amount of advanced royalties per author being between $1000 and $25 000 per month from Siren, they may be small, but they are most definitely not that small and are holding their ground well and firmly.
And this brings us to the story of Gold Orchid Publishing, a remarkable publisher with a remarkable agenda.
A publisher for people
"Gold Orchid is more than just a publisher, and that's what we'd like it to be," says Carole Reid, the owner, manager and founder of the (still) tiny publisher. "It's never just about money to us, despite the fact that obviously, you can't function without money, everything turns around money. But that's not the only thing we are, and I'm proud that we are this way unique. With us, it's more about books – we want to be the people you go to because you have realised that we are someone you can trust. Other publishers try to control what gets out there, by forcing people to change their stories, good stories, which, in many cases, have already had a huge following, because these days, plenty of authors put their works to test by presenting it to internet readership via sites such as Fiction Press. This is not only very short-sighted, because you are risking losing a lot of your potential readership and disappointing another lot, who may have heard of the story already as it once was (and never underestimate the word of mouth!), but also quite insulting to the readers and writers both. It's practically impossible these days to get to a publisher without having your material solicited first, and getting an agent is equally hard… and who is to say that you are going to be published then? The truth is that there is no guarantee, just like there is no guarantee that you will be sold well. Of course, no one can really control that part, we can all just try our best, but the point is that, while there is readership, however small, for your book, always, most publishers will not back you the same way they do a potential bestseller, whether or not the bestseller is actually one (mind you, it's easier to artificially make a bestseller, because money is power, and so is commercial!) and whether or not your book could be made a bestseller, but no one will bother to help you."
Carole Reid is the life and heart of Gold Orchid Publishing. At the moment, she is the only constant person there – all others are friends and volunteers, because Gold Orchid is such a small business.
But even though she sometimes ends up working for over fifteen hours a day, she is proud of what Gold Orchid does.
"Of course we have rules," she says. "You can't just send us your manuscript and expect to get in without a question. We've had people send us (and, horribly, proudly so!) stories that made crimes against humanity and paedophilia great, for instance. That's why the rules are there, and they are strict, even though we are always ready for debate. If you don't respect the rules, however, you will be blacklisted, and we will never work with you."
One of the cornerstones of Gold Orchid is its great care for human rights.
"We don't want to see stories that say, rape is great, or acceptable, or ok under certain circumstances," Reid says. "All too many stories do that, and for what? Why do publishers accept stuff that makes women think, oh, it's ok if it's done by a nice guy… how does that still keep him a nice guy? Consent is a very questionable thing in a lot of stories, especially in the genres of romance and fantasy… which is a pity, because they're great genres, with a great many readers and good stories."
Rape is just one of the things Gold Orchid Publishing will not accept, unless under very special circumstances – such as a simple fact of life. Among other things, they will not publish religious texts or any story that hopes to present a hidden or not so well hidden religious meaning.
"Religion is among the most widely spread reasons of hatred in the world and has a history of starting wars and inciting hate crimes," Reid says. "If you're religious, and if you manage to avoid that, that's fine and great for you, but we don't want to see religion in our books. Religion is a private thing, even when it manages to skirt around hate crimes and all the mess it creates. We don't mind you having religious beliefs as a private person, just please, keep it out of the fiction. Others have a right to have their beliefs (or not!) too."
It's the devotion to the human rights that makes Gold Orchid a champion of equality rights, too.
They are an LGBT-friendly publisher and support LGBT movement staunchly. Rights are for everyone, according to Reid. And it doesn't end only with humans.
The first ever event that Gold Orchid Publishing ever did was Scooter's Month.
A cat mama herself, Reid followed the story of a kitten named Scooter, who has a birth defect known as Manx syndrome, and therefore had greatly deformed hind legs, which had to be amputated. Scooter is in good hands, but even good hands need help with care, and that is how Scooter's Month was born.
I consulted pro bono, as an anthropologist, on that occasion, which is what my connection with Gold Orchid is; the idea was to gain as much interest as quickly as possible and sell books in Scooter's name. The profit, apart from the authors' share and a small amount that, being such a small business, Gold Orchid simply cannot do without, went all to Scooter. Reid, for instance, completely abandoned her share of the profits to the kitten.
"I know what it's like not to have money for the vet, or to struggle with bills," Reid commented on this. "Honestly, I wish I was an owner of a huge multi-national company… that way, a lot more money could be devoted to causes such as Scooter's."
Scooter's month was a success, even if it was small – and even though Gold Orchid met with a lot of strangeness along the way.
Some people boycotted the event because Gold Orchid, like practically every other publisher out there, publishes erotica as well; also, plenty of people simply did not care enough to help.
But Reid is hopeful.
"Scooter's Month was a sudden decision," she says on the matter. "Next year, it will be better, because we will have more time to prepare."
Next year – because Gold Orchid wishes to make it an annual event. There are many more animals out there with health problems, and people who care about them, and if Scooter's Month becomes a regular event, it will be able to help both.
Gold Orchid is also interested in expanding their philanthropy to others.
"There is never enough vaccine for the children in the Third World," Reid says. "Doctors Without Borders, that's someone to go to with such an event. Then there are endangered animals… there's a lot of good to do in the world, even for a very small business."
Scooter's Month attracted the attention and had some minor help from names such as ASPCA, Jackson Galaxy and Paws for Princess, while a lot of others never even answered the emails sent them. Whether that is due to the unfortunate habit of people and organisations to simply have emails they don't know end in their junk mail or because of hardened hearts, that's a good question. I will not mention who the people who didn't respond were – they know who they are, insofar as Gold Orchid's appeal to their humanity wasn't just junk-mailed, and it's down to them to reason with their hearts on this. But Reid is immensely thankful to all those who did help.
"Every little bit helps," she tells me. "Every little bit. I've been in situations when a cent meant I could eat – I don't wish it on anyone else, and as long as you have that one cent spare, you can help someone else too."
But their huge hearts and ready minds aren't the only thing that makes Gold Orchid so special.
They are very special people when it comes to the books they publish and their approach to authors.
There are publishers out there!
Yes, there really are. The publishers are actually out there, no matter how badly like the next zombie film this sounds. But, like I said, unless you like specialised books, or if you are a budding author, you won't really know it, because they exist in the background. And for budding authors, one of the biggest, tallest mountains to climb is how to even get to a publisher.
Very few publishers accept, in any way, unsolicited material; as mentioned before, that means that whatever you do, you have to get past an agent first.
Not all agents even work with all publishers, that's one problem. Another is that most of the time, agents don't give a damn about your book, or wish that you change it into something completely different… whether or not they even want to represent you. So you change your book about a million times, and then, if you get a publisher, the publisher makes you change your baby about a million times, and then, if it doesn't sell well enough, they just may have the rights revert back to you – in other words, you are let go.
Yes. You can, so to speak, get fired as an author.
But Gold Orchid not only takes on unsolicited material (so agent-less material that hasn't been chewed over a dozen times and that your fans will actually still recognise), they also recognise the potential of every book.
"There is readership for every single book on the planet," says Reid, who is an avid reader herself and has always loved books. "It might mean that you'll make only a thousand bucks, but if you make a thousand bucks, it's your thousand bucks, you created them with your work, and you deserve to have them."
That is why Gold Orchid approaches the matter this way – their share, or at least that part that remains to the publishing business itself, goes for the commercials. True, they will put more money into a book people have had a lot of interest in, but…
"What happens is that we try to find the perfect readership for every novel or collection of poems," Reid explains (yes, these people take poetry too). "And the more the book sells, the more money there is for commercials. A book that sells well is gaining on recognition, so it needs relatively less help, which is why some of the profit goes into it, again, while the rest goes to boost other books, the ones that may need a bit more help."
Not that this is easy. With Gold Orchid being very new, and with very little funding, which, at this point, is difficult to get for any and every small new business, a lot of what they do relies on word of mouth. And of course, like all other tiny to middle-sized businesses out there, the Facebook policy of trying to make sure people aren't "bothered" by all those sites they have liked and are now interacting with them, meaning that the posts are hidden and not transmitted very far (unless you pay them a lot of money, of course… just so that you know, because Facebook is really not about commercials, of course… even though it gets a LOT of money from them, possibly why it's still free and doing very well… and one does ask oneself, if you're bothered by sites you have liked sending you stuff, have you ever thought of just not liking things, or merely following, or, perhaps, making a few interest lists, so that your friends' messages are in one, and all your other things elsewhere…?), Gold Orchid has suffered a lot by that.
But Reid is still positive.
"We just need time," she says. "We don't need anything else. We've got some fantastic books out there already, and we're currently talking to several authors about approximately 100 or so new titles. And we've made a move to Amazon now, so our titles are even more readily available."
Yes, now you are able to simply get Gold Orchid books via Amazon… unless you want to still go via their little store, which is currently undergoing changes behind the scenes to make it even more user friendly.
Apart from being big on supporting causes as much as possible, now and in the future, and being good to new authors, Gold Orchid also stands for new artists.
"There are a lot of artists out there who are yet to get recognition," Reid says. "Unfortunately, at present, because of tight finances, we can only offer a contract to artists – 10% of each sale with their art as the cover. Hopefully, we'll soon be able to offer two options – the contractual agreement or a one-time upfront payment that a lot of artists think is better."
Gold Orchid wants to target students and graduates when it comes to any aspect of their business barring the sales.
Fact is that it's still young people who are without jobs and who have it the hardest to gain experience to even try to appeal to picky and often unfair employers. That's why it's so important to Reid to offer artist and author options to them first – you never know when something might work and you'll be the next big thing out there.
"It took Harry Potter a few years to make it into a bestseller," she says. "Look at it now. Similarly, Tolkien had almost a rebirth with the LOTR and Hobbit mania that started in the last decade or so, even though we can easily say that Tolkien pretty much shaped the world of fantasy as we know it. It may have gained a lot of very different faces since, but he was the father of the fantasy genre."
Same is true of the "A Song of Fire and Ice" series – which wasn't nearly as popular as it is now. The first book, A Game of Thrones, came out in 1996 and was relatively obscure, but it did gain a loyal fandom then and that has since expanded.
Despite that popularity, plenty of publishers look down on fantasy as a genre and will not publish or even consider it. Gold Orchid does.
"We have, at present, a very small amount of books, because we haven't been around that long yet," Reid explains. "But we are proud to have The Raven's Wing… that book has a huge potential in the realms of fantasy, and the story is just so much better than a lot of fantasy can be. I'm a huge fan of fantasy myself, but I'm very picky… it's not easy to impress me, and a lot of usual fantasy with gratuitous rape, murder, bloodshed and mayhem puts me off. That's true of a lot of readers in general. We simply aren't that kind of people. The Raven's Wing, however, has all that struggle and all that danger of being different… but it manages to remain amazingly positive in so many ways, it really shows that our tomorrow is in our hands, and that we are responsible for our actions, which is more than a lot of fantasy actually manages to do right now, at the very least without trying to be moralistic, which The Raven's Wing avoids. It's just a story of people, their struggle and their becoming better for it, without the pointless weight of dubious lessons."
Like all other books published by Gold Orchid, The Raven's Wing is available via their store and is also available via Amazon. The books will also expand from just e-books to more traditional physical books.
One reason for Gold Orchid to be mainly an online publisher is the cost. With the credit crunch and its ramifications, more and more people opt for buying online (creating an astounding $878 million for the US industry in 2010 according to Rüdiger Wischenbart's report on The Global eBook Market), because there is no postage, and because the e-books are cheaper to make – there is no paper and print cost, there is no cost of packaging and sending, and you don't even need a Kindle, because you can read them via your PC or laptop with the use of a freebie that is easily downloaded from Amazon. Also, you can have (and take travelling with you) a lot more books than you could before, something that I can definitely agree on, because I have experienced travelling with a lot of books (physical books) in my luggage, and have despaired of it.
It's also incredibly easy to buy a book, and that at any time, anywhere. But for those who still love that unique smell of the printed book, or who love to hold the physical copy, Gold Orchid is considering Amazon's print-on-demand section.
That way, even the traditionalist bookworms will be able to enjoy Gold Orchid books.
So what future does Reid consider for Gold Orchid?
"Hopefully, many, many decades at least of success," she says with a smile. "Many amazing books, many happy readers, and many more new authors and artists."
And, of course, the hope of the philanthropy to move to yet higher levels, with a lot more zeros to the amount raised, and a lot more causes to help.
"We want to always keep in mind what motivates us," Reid says. "We want to keep an open mind about books, we want to be able to keep our humanity and share and spread it far, because without that, dystopianism is possibly not as unavoidable as one might like… I like to think that it's not just the really cool books we publish that makes us what we are – it's what we choose to support, whether it's disabled kittens like Scooter, or vaccine for children and Doctors Without Borders, or the equality battle, or a lot of other causes. I want this to be our legacy… I want Gold Orchid to be and remain a special publisher who thinks and acts differently. In many ways, I want it to become a brand. I want you to see a book and say: I know I will like it, I have always found only good stuff with Gold Orchid."
A very different publisher indeed.
About the Author - Helidth Ravenholm is a freelancer anthropologist and owns her own small consultation business, while conducting research on terrain. When not too busy, she does all sorts of things, including placing with her nine cat companions and one canine, chatting about random matters with the love of her life and discovering the world in general.
To contact Helidth, here's how - email her or visit her on any of these sites - Culture Contact or her LinkedIn.
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