Old Post: Why it pays to get all the information

I’m closing an old blog and moving a few posts of note across to here. Original publication date 2007.

I came across a book recently that I wanted to review for the mag. It was published by…let’s call them Star Press. they had a nice website, with an email contact page. Now, I do as much as I can by email, but I do like to have a postal address. But Star Press didn’t have one. What it did have was a small link to another company – let’s call them Genre Umbrella Publishing (GUP).

Fair enough; after all, several small presses have imprints – Arcadia is a good example.

So what was GUP’s postal address?

There, in very small print on the contact page: Simon and Schuster House. Nowhere else was it mentioned that these were imprints of a major publisher.

So does it matter? Well, it does to me, because I’d look pretty stupid when someone wrote to me saying I’d been conned into printing a review of a Simon and Schuster book in a magazine dedicated to independent presses. It also makes me wonder why they didn’t advertise it as ‘an imprint of S&S’ – after all, since when were major companies coy about advertising themselves? What are they afraid of?

And am I being unnecessarily cynical?

…I’m still not sure.