At a recent convention, I was talking with someone about one of my stories, and a man introduced himself as a small-press publisher. He's overheard what I was saying about my stories, and he wanted to review a couple of them for possible publication.

He liked the two stories I sent him (2500 and 3000 words, respectively), and he wants to publish. The offer he's made me is this:

$100 per story advance at publication time, plus 20% of the retail price of books sold (paid quarterly), plus 25 copies of the book for myself.

I'm not really specifically in this for the money, and I know that I'm not going to have piles of cash to roll around in, especially if I go with a small-run publisher like this. But I'm completely new to the idea that someone actually wants to publish my work, and I don't want to end up taking a bad deal just to see my name on the spine of a book.

So does that sound like a fair deal?

-G
 

Check out a few of the semi pro markets on duotrope for comparison if you're concerned.
 

I hate to sound paranoid, but there are just so many scammers out there. Just better to be safe than sorry.
 

I would think that's pretty good the lengths of stories.

These would be stories for a younger set, illustrated, one story per book, so the 20%-per-author thing isn't an issue (thanks, Jennifer, for pointing that out). There might be some royalties for an illustrator, depending on the deal with them, or he may go flat-fee for art; I don't know.

He does have a couple of other books published, but this is a *very* niche market, so we're talking print runs on the order of under a thousand. Probably closer to 500. If he's being honest with me (and I'm going to assume for now that he is), previous titles have sold between 400 and 600 copies.

One of the reasons for that is probably that he's not the most tech-savvy guy in the universe, and he has no skillset to put together something like an online store for the books. As it happens, web development and web hosting is something that I do, so this might develop into a partnership rather than a straight-up rights deal.

We haven't yet gotten to the point where there's a contract on paper; we're talking about ideas right now. When we get to that point, I'll push for selling print rights only, and see about a revert clause. I don't expect that this guy is going to try to screw me on rights; call it a gut feeling. And if it turns out that he does play silly buggers with one of the stories, that's one out of many:

These stories are part of a whole mythological series for pagan youngsters; some of them have been read (by my wife) at Fertile Ground Gathering (a Beltane festival in the Washington DC area) as bedtime stories for the kids, as well as told (by me, from memory) in Bardic Circle at the same Gathering. There are twelve stories in the series so far, but the muse has been talking of late (two new ones in the past two weeks alone), and I don't expect her to slack off any time soon.

Since the pagan paths are growing faster than any other religious sector at the moment, and since that means more kids, I don't see the market for this type of story going anywhere but up.
 

Definitely. On all counts.

These stories were written as a resource for pagan families, but the response from non-pagans who have read them has been very positive, because they're really just myths. As you say, a good myth can be meaningful to anyone.

I've even gotten a number of very positive personal replies from mainstream agents, though none of them have actually wanted to represent me.

With the clout of being the co-founder of one of the larger and more stable pagan groups in the DC area, which (coincidentally) runs the largest Beltane festival in that area, I might actually be able to pull off getting a successful company together that would need a stable of pagan authors.