What happened:
The celebrated M/M erotic romance publisher Dreamspinner Press appears to be heading for a rocky end or a catastrophic re-org. Right now, submit there at your own risk.
I’ve been holding off this particular post for over a year. I don’t have any books with Dreamspinner, and I wanted to give both the publisher & its authors time to work things out. I also have a fair number of great Dreamspinner books from more stable times.
The basic complaint is that Dreamspinner isn’t paying its authors on time. Some authors are waiting on four and five-figure checks from sales more than a year earlier. The publisher has apparently been using royalties from earlier quarters to pay current debts, with less and less chance to catch up. The publisher has gone from extremely detailed royalty statements to very vague ones, obscuring date and amount of many sales. Many authors are demanding their rights back and working with lawyers.
You can learn more from this post on Writer Beware, and this compilation of Dreamspinner-related tweets and author posts from the ‘Sorcerer of Tea’ blogger Xanthuss Marduk.
As with earlier publishing meltdowns from Silver Publishing and Ellora’s Cave, some authors are either getting paid on time or they’ve swallowed their concerns in favor of cheerleading for the publisher…right down to bullying or gaslighting authors who spoke out.
Why? They may be afraid that if they rock the boat, they lower their own chances of getting paid. Or they are cynically treating the situation like a Ponzi scheme, counting on drawing in new authors to help pay down the publisher’s debts. (This almost never works in the long-term.)
Why it happened:
We may never completely understand Dreamspinner’s particular problems. From an outside vantage point, a few key issues are partly responsible.
Right now, commercial sales are down throughout the e-pub romance industry. Amazon has an outsized thumb on the commercial scales. When they change advertising algorithms, small publishers can find advertising no longer works or is too expensive.
Informed self-publishing has taken a big bite out of both vanity and small-press publishing. Great authors are leaving their small publishers and striking out on their own…or are never even approaching those publishers.
Conventional heterosexual romance as a genre is soldiering on, but not as much in the commercial Big 5 realm. There, publishers seem to be scaling down their heterosexual romance lines. Judging by Manuscript Wish List and Publisher’s Market announcements, literary agents are seeking fewer romance manuscripts. (Crossovers with other genres are a brighter exception.)
Erotic romance and LGBTQIA variants, as commercial sub-genres, are having an identity problem. Many of their writers (and readers) seem to be aging out. Following other demographic shifts, younger writers and readers may focusing on less overtly-sexualized content, with stronger emphasis on relationships and emotions.
The need for diversity has caused clashes between younger and more-diverse writers and readers, and ‘gatekeeper’ writers’ organizations like the Romance Writers of America (RWA). The RWA is infamous for being largely heterosexual, mostly older, and mostly white. There are welcome signs it’s changing, but the information and networking it offers have been mostly replaced by more-open online platforms.
Even the big romance convention gatherings are trimming membership or stopping altogether. Millennial and Gen-Z writers often simply can’t afford conventions that can regularly cost over $1500 to attend. Framing them as taxable expenses isn’t effective when writers are not making enough to take advantage of tax refunds months down the line.
The rise of self-publishing and prime fanfiction sources like Archive Of Our Own give readers cheaper or free outlets for erotic romance content.
This is the ‘bust’ end of a boom-or-bust cycle in romance and other genre publishing. It’s probably just a pause before the industry morphs again. Unfortunately, that pause is devouring small publishers and their authors.
A little history:
Erotic romance’s 2000 – 2015 industry success may have come down to filling a niche at the right time. Conventional romance sex scenes were still largely fade-to-black or hilariously euphemized. SFF genre romance and romance-adjacent books were scarcely more open (after the Big 5 mostly erased a female-led Renaissance in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s).
Paranormal Romance exploded in the late 1990s. It offered crossover potential with science-fiction, fantasy, and mystery genres. PNR broke many of the old category romance taboos, boosting the bottom lines of many Big 5 commercial publishers with openly graphic heterosexual intimacy between characters.
Early 2000s erotic romance e-pubs like Ellora’s Cave not only pushed for open sexual content in all these genres, they wanted *a lot* of it. Well before E. L. James rewrote Twilight fanfiction into a contemporary adult BDSM phenomenon, these publishers allowed writers and readers to experiment with all kinds of sexual variations between characters. Because of the new emphasis on sex and voracious readership demand, many of these books were written very quickly, with specific tropes, and at the expense of deeper plots or characters. (Not all! There are some stunning gems out there. Check the Look Inside option on any such Kindle book, and the first few pages will tell you which are which.)
On Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited platform, more algorithm tweaks allowed the rise of shady practices like plagiarism, plot-mirroring (authors retell their own stories with different characters), book-stuffing (huge books filled with fake content to trick Amazon’s Pages Read algorithm), bogus book collections, and traded/sold reviews…mostly in the erotic romance genre, where lower prices and big catalogs enticed readers.
As the erotic publishing revolution grew, commercial publishers took notice. They courted small-press erotic authors, and developed their own ‘spicier’ books and lines.
The Big 5 commercial romance & SFF publishers have now discovered that diversity sells, so they’re tentatively adding POC and/or LGBTQIA books to their normal roster.
Back to Dreamspinner:
All of these issues can spell doom for a small-press erotic romance publisher.
Follow the math. To paraphrase a recent Twitter thread, an e-publisher usually pays a 40% royalty on every book sale. That means they hold 60% of that sale to pay overhead and bank for profit. The 40% should always be sequestered from general funds. In small-press reality, it often mingles with the general fund, and might be siphoned off on other expenses.
If the publisher overdraws their 60% and pulls from what should be the authors’ cut, that can lead to a dangerous and potentially illegal downward spiral. Without serious financial intervention, the company can never catch up to its ongoing debts.
Paying editors on royalties-only is another danger sign, which can lead to equal damage to a publisher, but that needs its own blog post.
Can Dreamspinner recover at this stage? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t risk one of my manuscripts there right now.
What does this mean…to eager new erotic romance authors trying to ‘break in’ to the erotic romance field?
Do serious research on publishers *before you submit anything*.
Understand that the world of small-press erotic romance is a big gamble. Even the best small publisher can have an unexpected meltdown.
In exchange for (at best) a stunning cover and great editing, most small-press writers are going to get an early push of blog marketing and some Advance Reader Copies (usually too late to gather any wide industry notice), and desultory marketing afterward. Most small-press romance books will sell no more than $1000 to $1500 in their first few years of publication. Some have dangerously-strict contracts that leave the author exposed to difficulty in submitting work elsewhere, or getting rights back if the publisher fails to sell their work (or goes out of business.)
Writing more books to build a back-catalog seems to help, as does *responsible* social media marketing and self-promotion.
Writing better books and seeking a capable literary agent (yes, they still exist, and they’re still looking for great cross-genre books) can help springboard you into the bigger commercial publishing world (which has its own pitfalls).
Seriously look into self-publishing at least some of your work.
Train for and keep a decent day-job, if you can. Writers don’t usually get benefits, and most of them earn far below minimum wage at writing. There is absolutely no real stigma in not writing full-time, or taking a break from writing. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either stupid or a classist hypocrite. It’s a dirty not-so-secret that many ‘successful’ creative people have outside funding.
I would tell you ‘Don’t give up’, but every person has their limits. I do hope you don’t give up on sharing your dreams and your voice.
Whatever you do, don’t pay a vanity publisher. If you can use the internet, you can self-publish, instead!