Dealing with Gamma Artists

Know when to say enough is enough

2 strikes and you’re out is my customary practice when dealing with artists, many, if not most, of whom are Gamma males. I recently had a run-in with one where the individual simply could not grasp that as the publisher, I am the one who determines what the needs of the project are, not the artist providing the service.

As a publisher, I’m pretty laid back about our cover artwork these days. To be honest, ebook covers don’t matter at all, except to confirm the genre, as a brief perusal of the bestselling ebooks in various categories suffices to demonstrate. Long gone are the days of browsing the bookshelves, and wonderful artists like Michael Whelan and Rowena Morrill being able to charge from 5k to 20k for a single book cover image. This is especially true when you can utilize AI to quickly design perfectly useful covers; for example, here is one I made yesterday for a landmark first-ever translation of a Japanese classic that will be available in a few weeks. The author’s name should probably be in pale yellow instead of white, but whatever, we’ll touch it up prior to release.

So I’m pretty easygoing about letting the author decide on the cover image; the cover of the bestselling HOW TO SLAY A WIZARD is very much not my preferred style, but one can hardly argue with how effective it proved to be. Let aesthetic preferences be silent when sales success gainsays its conclusions.

But sometimes, it’s just not possible to adopt a laissez faire position. Here’s how it started when one author asked me to work with his preferred artist.

I need the KDP template of the cover, so that I’d be able to do the layout. You should be able to generate it here. It should look like this (attached). Tell me if I’m not clear.

To which I responded:

It’s very simple. All we need is an image that is 2560 high and 1600 wide.

Not that simple unfortunately.

Providing me the template is easy on the other hand.

2560x1600px doesn’t tell me the book thickness, for instance.

Anyway, I’ve worked on many KDP books, each time with a template as a working base.

I know that Amazon only accept files based on the template.

What’s wrong with my request?

We only need the front cover for the ebook. We aren't doing the print edition yet, so don't worry about it. It is that simple. Please just follow the directions.

Don’t treat me like subordinate. I don’t work for you, and I’m trying to work in normal conditions: with a template for Amazon.

A logical way to proceed is to conceive the entire book cover, and then to adapt it for the ebook front one.

If we’re gonna print it, then you should have provided this information.

And then you should have downloaded the template.

Why not being kind to me?

It’s going to be printed, so first the entire cover, then the front for web use.

Never mind. I will not work with you.

First you take 11 days to answer an easy and polite request, not saying hello, talking like shit. Then you serve me your « follow the direction » and now this. Are you out of your mind?

I didn’t bother responding.

What’s remarkable is the presumed sense of superiority here, and the inability to understand how the professional hierarchy works. Publisher > author > artist. The Gamma simply doesn’t understand that nobody cares about his opinion. I knew from the very first request exactly what he was thinking because the traditional way to prepare for publication used to require doing the print book first, focused production entirely on on the print edition, and then doing the ebook and the audiobook as afterthoughts following the print release.

I know exactly how it works. My first five books were published that way by major mainstream publishers. Their process is long and slow; the books often didn’t come out for 18 months after I turned in the final draft to the editor. I even got paid three separate times for books that the publishers never released, and in two cases, which I never even had to write. It was incredibly inefficient.

Castalia House and most modern genre publishers don’t work that way anymore. We do the ebook first and release it first, then do the print edition a month or two later, after updating the ebook several times. This allows for a) much faster releases, b) better print editions with fewer typos, and c) starts the revenue flowing sooner. So all we need initially is the single, standard KDP image, which is narrower and easier to produce than the wrap-around print cover for which we don’t even have the necessary page counts or dimensions yet.

But instead of accepting the possibility that he didn’t know what we wanted, the Gamma doubled down on his expertise and appealed to his own sense of logic, which accomplished nothing except to get him fired from the project. Did he really imagine that we were going to change our entire release strategy because some random artist we don’t even know believes it is more logical to proceed in a different way? Does he really think that after telling a potential client how he should operate, insulting him, and resorting to vulgarity, said client would ever even consider working with him again?

Anyhow, this is a useful example of how Gammas behave in the real professional world and why it is absolutely vital to keep them out of your organization. The speed with which I fired him is the right way to handle these things; there is nothing to discuss, nothing to negotiate, and nothing to work out. I never, ever, want to work with any service provider who can’t follow my instructions, or who insists on doing things his way instead of how I require them.