Interview with Publisher Sheri Gormley

Today on Salad Bowl Saturday we welcome Sheri Gormley, Barking Rain Press publisher. She has taken time in the middle of one of BRP's reading periods to answer a few questions we had from her publisher's perspective.

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Why did you form a publishing company?

I got my start in publishing as the Marketing Director at Virtual Tales. After that closed down, a few of the authors approached me about helping them self-publish their books, and it really drove home how tough it is for authors to get published. I had gotten to know Ti Locke during my time at Virtual Tales, and in addition to being a great editor, she also has a lot of non-profit experience, and so we decided to take the plunge together.

Why choose a not-for-profit incorporation?

One of the lessons I learned from Virtual Tales is that making money isn't the most important consideration for me. I really enjoyed the work I had been doing for Virtual Tales, and I'm at the point in my life where I'm able to start giving back. By forming as a non-profit, we can focus most of our time and resources towards achieving our mission statement (which is to help new and mid-list authors grow and develop). The paperwork and filing burden for a non-profit is a lot less than a for-profit business (once you get your 501(c)3 status, which we're working on now), and that lets us spend more time working on actual publishing activities.

What is your biggest frustration as a publisher?

I think our biggest pain-point right now is with our open submissions. We have a fair number of new authors who just can't (or won't) follow instructions. We clearly list what we want on our website, but we've actually had authors write to us and explain why they should be an exception (I give them points for chutzpah, but the answer is always “no”). We say electronic submissions only, but we still get paper manuscripts in the mail (which we always mark as "Return to Sender" and never open).

And it's disappointing to review a submission, and then request and review the full manuscript, and then make an offer only to find out that the author has already signed with another publisher weeks ago. We ask for exclusive submissions, and we do turn them around fairly quickly (about two months). To have all the editors spend time reading and scoring submissions, only to find that the manuscript has already been signed, is a total waste of our time. I know authors complain about how discouraging rejection letters are, but publishers are just as frustrated by multiple submissions. And most of the time, the authors never bother to withdraw a manuscript from consideration. We only find out when we make an offer for the manuscript, and then they tell us it's already been signed. It's totally unprofessional.

What is the best things authors can do (other than writing a great book) to be attractive to BRP?

Follow the submission instructions. Contact us if you have any questions. And if you sign a contract for a manuscript you've sent to us, please withdraw your manuscript from further consideration.

What percentage of authors don't follow your guidelines?

Almost half of all submissions are missing requested information, unfortunately. We do contact authors to let them know if we didn't receive a file (it is possible for files to get lost in cyberspace, and we realize that), but only about a third of authors respond to our request and send us the missing information. In some respects, it helps expedite the rejection process, because if a submission is incomplete, it is rejected without further consideration.

Best unsolicited advice you'd like to offer?

Run spell check on your manuscript before you send it to us. Please! You'd be surprised at how many people forget to do this before they send it out. Also, we have an FAQ on the website about what we're looking for, which can be accessed here: http://www.barkingrainpress.org/faq/suggestions

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SHERI GORMLEY is the President & Executive Director of the BRP Publishing Group, a Washington State non-profit corporation. Ms. Gormley has been actively involved in fiction publishing since 2004, where she developed the website for KeepItComing.net, an eSerial publisher. In 2006, Sheri became one of the founding general partners of Virtual Tales, which published dozens of books and eBooks before it was reorganized as one of the imprints of the BRP Publishing Group in September 2011.