Why I Got My Rights Back, Part 2: Burned Out

When I signed with City Owl Press, I had a dream of making a career for myself as a traditionally published author. After my botched second book release, I let that dream fade away.

“City Owl Depressed”

I had serious nerves before posting the first part of this story last week. Part of those nerves came from a fear that no one would care to read it, or that they would read it and not understand why it mattered.

I guess part of me had bought into the narrative that City Owl’s business model made sense in the publishing world. Maybe I was just too much of a rube to see the logic, and all of this was normal. Plus, as a small time author with an audience of hundreds (on a good day), it seemed likely my story wouldn’t make much of a splash.

I was wrong about that.

So um, thanks for reading! But more than that, thanks for caring. It meant a lot that so many people reached out, shared my blog, and thanked me for speaking up. I even reconnected with a couple of author friends who had similar experiences with other small presses.

The abysmal editor rates paid by City Owl, a detail I thought might be too inside baseball, seemed to blow a gratifying number of minds. Readers expressed shock and sympathy. And if part one horrified you, well, strap in my lovelies, because…

You ain’t seen nothing yet.

When last we left off, it was May 19, 2022, about two weeks before the launch of my second book. After I expressed concerns about the production schedule, editor in chief Tina Moss reassured me that everything would go according to plan. She even sent an updated “ARCs 2.0” policy.

I was encouraged by what seemed at the time like a commitment to change. At the same time, I started looking a little closer at how my work was handled. On the day before release, I reviewed my Amazon page for book 1 and noticed that it looked…well, bad.

My page likely had a poor resolution graphic displayed for months. The resolution Ms. Moss requested in June 2022 did not match the instructions we originally received, but it seemed to fix the issue.

Meanwhile, on the eve of release, my book was still not up on NetGalley. On May 31, Ms. Moss had informed me that they were “backed up on NetGalley” and it would go up “closer to release day.”

As noted here, I still had no author copies and would not receive them until weeks later. At least Ms. Moss generously offered me the opportunity to pay her for additional copies. (I declined.)

Release day: “no worries”

I was more than ready to put the stress of the short production schedule behind me and make the most of my sophomore publishing experience. But when release day dawned, I woke up to messages from readers across the world telling me they couldn’t buy my book. In fact, the paperback was not available at Barnes & Noble, on Amazon, or any other retailer—it wasn’t even listed on the City Owl Press website.

I finally received word from Ms. Moss at 5:06 PM Pacific on my scheduled release day that my paperbacks were available. That’s 8:06 PM in Staten Island, New York City, where I now understand Ms. Moss runs her business from her home address.

There was an attempt.

At the same time as Ms. Moss was emailing me about my book’s availability, she asked me to send her a “dynamic scene” from Book 1 to use in a Facebook ad test. I sent it the next day. It was June 8, and my book was now available on NetGalley and “approved” on Ingram Spark.

They were running a real ad for me and I was legitimately excited. In fact, I had actually started running my own ad that same day on FB, just to test the waters, with a very modest budget. My ad ran from June 8 through June 15, and did ok, with a lower per link click rate than the one City Owl ran.

Now, the A/B test numbers are actually not terrible. The click through rate is pretty damn good, but I’m not convinced they were as effective as they could have been. They look terrible (what are those images?!) Additionally, I didn’t know exactly how the excerpt would be used, so the scene I provided doesn’t have a great first line hook.

I’m also not sure what the A/B test was testing, because it appears that the image was the only change between the two. Maybe there were targeting differences? But while the cost per click is high, 18% CTR is also higher than anything I have achieved on my end.

On June 8, when Ms. Moss and I started running ads, my book was doing quite well in the Amazon rankings—in fact, possibly its best yet. I was positioned to see some real success, if my publishers and I could capitalize on it.

I find it curious, knowing what I know now, that she asked for bookplates at this juncture, when I had asked to work with them to boost my online ranking. As I understand it, their convention sales would move author copies provided by Amazon at production cost ($4-5 per book plus shipping) at a hefty markup to the list price of $14.99 or so. Authors don’t earn royalties on author copies.

In other words, City Owl would make significant profit selling signed copies, and those sales wouldn’t get tracked in the records I had or have access to. I’m still not sure how City Owl pays out convention sales to authors. This type of sale would also do nothing to help my Amazon ranking. Then again, my ranking was creeping steadily upward.

We received our Q2 statements early that month, on June 19. On June 20, I received an email from Ms. Moss referencing possible statement errors and promising amended statements once her reporting software was fixed.

Ms. Moss was leaving for a scheduled two-week vacation that day, June 20, which is likely why she issued statements early—they normally came around the last day of the quarter. It appears she left my ads running while she was out of the office.

I later learned the press spent $152.54 on this single ad, spending down the rest of their marketing budget for my book. It appears that a small overage may have been taken out of my book 3 budget. I’m not sure why they didn’t budget-limit it, as that’s easy to do with Meta. It bothers me that with such a small budget overall, it was all blown on one A/B test, especially since Ms. Moss had described a more sustained plan.

I think what we’ll do is let one run its course as far as we can, and then when that ad starts to wane, we’ll do a new excerpt.

Tina Moss, June 15, 2022

My best wasn’t good enough.

June 2022 was my high water sales mark for the life of my books with City Owl. Across all platforms and formats, my sales reports show I sold 303 books. Cambion’s Law sold 235 copies. Cambion’s Blood sold 68, 22 of which (32%) were eBook preorders through Amazon. (By comparison, Law sold 217 copies in November 2021, when it debuted.)

On July 2, 2022, despite these encouraging numbers for Cambion’s Law, Ms. Moss ended City Owl’s ad test and emailed me to propose a Kindle Unlimited run.

“So, the facebook [sic] ads worked nicely on Cambion while it was on sale, but not at full price like I suspected. However, I have noticed they seem to do okay on KU titles.”

Email from Tina Moss, July 2, 2022.

I’m not sure exactly when my book was increased to full price, as I was rarely notified of price shifts. To the best of my knowledge, these price promotions normally ran for 2 weeks post-release. I would hazard a guess that the price changed before Ms. Moss went on vacation, around June 19-20.

I agreed to transition to KU on Ms. Moss’s advice, expecting further support based on her statements. According to the expense report I received early this year, no other ads were ever run for my books, contrary to the plan Ms. Moss described to me on June 15 of replacing it with a new FB ad and a fresh excerpt.

In addition, despite representations made to me by Ms. Moss on May 19 that the press planned to run Amazon ads after the release of my second book, the expense reports I receive show no record of any Amazon ads run during this time. Amazon sponsored ads are most effective when a book is doing well, as Cambion’s Law was in mid-June.

Ms. Moss let me know my eBook began delisting from other sites around July 15. My rankings had already begun to drop by then. Based on the reports I later received, my first KU reads occurred in August.

Did I burn out, or did I just get burned?

Around this time, my mental and physical health declined. Between the stress of the second book release and the haphazard production schedule, the messaging that my best sales month did not make my book worth City Owl’s investment, and a sense of overwhelming pressure to do more and more to sell on my own, my motivation began to flag.

Looking back at my blog posts from this period, I can see the progression. On June 6, 2022, the eve of my Book 2 release, I wrote, “In my case, the sophomore slump feels more like a slog…I’ve been warned that second books in a series rarely do as well as the first, so I’m trying to manage my expectations. It helps that the first book didn’t go big enough to set up any unattainable bars now.”

Six weeks later, as my books delisted, I went into more detail about somatic symptoms I experienced in June 2022, including severe joint pain and fatigue with no apparent physical cause.

Was I burning out? I started to recognize the signs creeping in around the edges. I slept poorly despite feeling exhausted, I often had to drag myself to the page to draft, my migraines flared up and had me down for the better part of two weeks.

Erin Fulmer, Make Creative Space: Shifting Gears to Slow My Roll, July 18, 2022.

I also wrote about how I was excited to start a new project. I didn’t mention that the project I was struggling with was the next book in the Cambion series, while the other manuscript was one I didn’t intend to shop to City Owl.

I had pulled back from social media, especially Twitter, but I hadn’t stopped promoting my books. That month, Cambion’s Blood was nominated for Cover Wars and I did a podcast with Sarah Nicholas, where I discussed my writing journey. In August, however, I took a much needed social media hiatus, and I didn’t come back until October.

The impact my break had on my sales was stark. It highlighted that without my own efforts, my books would not sell. It was about then that I realized how very little City Owl did in exchange for 60-75% of my royalties, and it wasn’t sitting well.

In fact, according to my sales reports, I only sold 26 books total between August 1, 2022 and December 31, 2022.

This is the way a dream dies…

In July 2022, I sold 33 books; in August, I sold 7. My books sold zero ebook copies in September 2022, though I sold 2 paperbacks. My KU pages read totaled 7218 in August and 4540 in September, for a total of 11758 read. I earned $51.46 in royalties for Quarter 3 and $19.54 for KU page reads. Quarter 4 went much the same.

After two years of pushing myself creatively with limited downtime, I was running on empty. As soon as I gave myself permission to stop, everything stopped, including my drive to stay productive.

Erin Fulmer, Writer in Motion 2022 Is Here and I’m Baaack (Kind of), October 3, 2022.

Writing had ceased to provide a source of joy for me. Along with that loss of joy, my motivation to get on the social media treadmill and champion my own books waned. In November 2022, I quit Twitter, my primary social channel, ostensibly because of the fresh hell of a toxic waste trash fire it had become under new ownership. It just didn’t feel worth it anymore.

I started some non-writing projects. I reprioritized. I refocused on my day job.

My exhaustion went beyond just the actual creative process to engagement with my creative communities…This was not a judicious hiatus from the writing life. It was not a choice I made with full access to my executive function. When I vanished from my platforms, it was not a deliberate social media cleanse for self improvement purposes.

I’ve done those. They take willpower. This was different: a big nope, a do not want, a tail-turning, browser-closing impulse that was new to me.

Erin Fulmer, Writers, We Need to Talk About Creative Burnout, October 10, 2022.

In December of 2020, when I signed with City Owl Press, I had a dream of making a career for myself as a traditionally published author. After the botched release of Cambion’s Blood, I let that dream fade away.

November 2022: a wild rights grab appears

In May 2022, I had worked with my editor on a story for a holiday charity anthology City Owl had set up, and on November 15, 2022, Ms. Moss sent me a last-minute contract for “Heart Shaped Lockbox,” an expanded version of a romantic piece set in the Cambion universe that I had written the previous year.

Unfortunately, I am not able to sign the contract as is due to a confusing discrepancy between sections XIII and IX. What charity is being referenced in section IX and how would that work with 100% net income split among the authors? Or is this clause included in error? Also, can you clarify the reasoning for backdating the contract to 11/1/2022?

Email to Tina Moss Re: Anthology Contract Questions, November 16, 2022.

Hi! I’m not seeing the discrepancy between those sections. Please clarify. The charity is Girls Write Now. The same charity as last year’s anthology. Split on net income is referenced for film/tv projects, which is why we’re asking for the film/tv rights to the short story. Our film/tv agent had asked for short stories to pitch. The contracted is dated 11/1 as to the start of the term. Signing is still when you sign.

Email from Tina Moss Re: Anthology Contract Questions, November 16, 2022

I hadn’t participated in the previous anthology and I wasn’t familiar with the named charity. I’d never discussed film or tv rights with City Owl Press in relation to the anthology before the contract arrived in my inbox. Ms. Moss’s answers didn’t adequately address my concerns, so I didn’t respond immediately. I wanted to get my agent’s opinion, but she was out on leave. I needed time to think.

The following morning, Ms. Moss emailed me again to ask what I wanted to do about the anthology. In response, I told her I would sign the contract if it were modified to identify the benefiting charity and remove the provisions signing away my subsidiary rights. I further told her I was uncomfortable signing on such a short timeline.

I already started marketing the book to my readers which means I feel pressure to sign so they are not disappointed. However, if the above modifications are not possible, I will have to pull the story. I hope you can see how this puts us authors in what feels like a tight spot.

Email to Tina Moss (re: Anthology Contract Questions), November 17, 2022.

Ms. Moss then updated the contract, sending an apology and explanation which was bcc’d to me; I assume other authors on the contract received this communication as well. I commented in an email to my agent, who was copied on all my communications with the press at this point: “I definitely want to protect my rights from getting extended with them in case I want them back, something I have been considering.”

Our film/tv agent was asking for short stories in a recent hot sheet (that’s the acquisitions reports from studios/producers that comes out weekly to bi-monthly to our agent team), and we thought it would be a great opportunity to be able to pitch more of our authors’ works. You do NOT have to give us these rights, if you are not comfortable doing so, even if you signed the contract.

Email from Tina Moss to City Owl authors, November 17, 2022.

I had no idea that in a little over a year, that nagging doubt over whether the press deserved to hold my rights would become a question of the utmost urgency.

To be continued…

Yes, I know I said this week would be the thrilling conclusion. I was wrong. Once again, I was surprised by just how much there was to dig into during the second half of of 2022. And I only have so much time in a weekend to write up episodes of publishing grimdark.

For one thing, I forgot how terribly my release day went. For another, I hadn’t really dug into the nitty gritty of my sales reports and noticed how steep the rankings cliff actually was in Summer 2022. I hadn’t quite put two and two together about my struggle with burnout and the way my books were handled by my publisher that year. Finally, I had forgotten the weird contract shenanigans around the anthology, and the way Ms. Moss completely dismissed my concerns until I threatened to pull my story.

Anyway, until next time. I’m not going to say that will be the last part, but I sure hope so!

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Read on in Part 3…