A New Way To Rob the Poor?

By Andrew E. Kaufman

Simon & Schuster has announced they’re getting into the self-publishing business with a new imprint called Archway Publishing.

Hooray.

Not really. Well, actually, not at all.

Why? Lots of reasons, the biggest of which being cost. The  publishing packages go from $1,599 all the way up to $24,999. How much you get depends on how much you pay--and quite honestly, how much you get doesn’t seem at all commensurate with how much you pay. These are services you can provide for yourself at a fraction of the cost. Besides, I've heard there's a land called Amazon where authors can publish their books free of charge.

And a few of the services themselves seem questionable. For example, the packages don't include editorial assistance; those can be obtained for an additional cost ranging from .035 to .05 per word (So as an example, for a 100,000 word manuscript, you can add an additional $3500-$5,000). They do, however, include what they call an Editorial Assessment, which in reality, amounts to nothing more than a sample edit (typically the first chapter, or about 1,700 words).

Here’s another problem: after paying all that money, authors are also required to hand over a cut of their sales, half, to be exact, for an e-book.

One more interesting (if not misleading) fact: Simon & Schuster will not be hiring new staff to provide these services. Actually, they won’t be providing them at all. The venture will be operated by the folks at Author Solutions (recently bought by Pearson), a vanity press that itself has questionable practices, not to mention a litany of complaints from its customers, not to mention, a statement from an employee, quoted as saying:

 You folks have no idea how deep the deceit runs at Author Solutions.

So really, Simon & Shuster is doing nothing more than lending an air of legitimacy to a company that seems to be lacking any. All this at a substantially higher cost than what Author Solutions normally charges its regular customers.

They do offer the enticement of the “Opportunity For Discovery”.  According to their website, there’s this:

Additionally, we will alert Simon & Schuster to Archway Publishing titles that perform well in the market. Simon & Schuster is always on the lookout for fresh, new voices and they recognize a wealth of potential talent in Archway authors. 

But you don’t have to be an Archway author for that. Simon & Schuster and several of the other Big Six (or soon to be, Big Five) publishers have been grabbing independent titles from Amazon's bestsellers lists for quite some time now. So again, yet another service you can provide for yourself, and again, at a fraction of the cost. 

The short version? This feels like another example of the big publishing houses trying to take advantage of an industry they not only wanted no part of, but also one that came as a direct result of their poor treatment of authors and ones aspiring to be. 

Or even shorter: a new way to rob the poor.

Penguin Solutions? I Don't Think So

by L.J. Sellers, author of provocative mysteries & thrillers
The big news in publishing this week is that Penguin, a major traditional publisher, bought Author Solutions, a major vanity publisher. There are so many things wrong with this deal that I struggled to organize this post.

But I'll start with some terminology and move to revenue sources. I called Author Solutions a vanity publishing company rather than a self-publishing service because it takes control of writers’ publishing endeavors and overcharges them for the experience. In contrast, true self-publishing is when authors retain control of the process and copyright and have an opportunity to make more money than they invest.

Author Solutions (iUniverse, etc.) earns two-thirds of its revenue from charging writers for editorial services, such as copyediting and cover design. (It earns the rest from selling books to the friends and relatives of its authors.) The company supposedly offers marketing services as well, but charging writers $1900 for putting out a press release is about as fraudulent as it gets. A press release takes thirty minutes to write, format, and send—and is practically worthless as a marketing effort.

So what is Penguin saying to writers and readers with this acquisition? We can’t make enough money publishing talented authors, so we’ll squeeze lots of hard-earned cash out of mostly-untalented authors to save our bottom line… rather than implement a business model that supports authors and earns a profit.

I wonder how Penguin authors feel about this. I wonder what this will do to the Penguin brand. Not that readers care about publisher brands.

Penguin is not the first to make this leap. A while back Harlequin partnered with Author Solutions to form Harlequin Horizons, a vanity publishing company. The Romance Writers Association promptly dropped Harlequin from its list of acceptable publishers, and regardless of how it turned out, the publisher suffered from bad PR. 

Penguin probably will experience a similar reaction from other author associations. That will be a blow to new Penguin authors who find themselves unable to join. But author associations have so little value in today’s interconnected world that joining or not joining will make little difference.

But long term, if Penguin and Harlequin are fine with charging some authors for their editorial services, how long will it be before they start charging everyone a reading fee? Then stop paying advances? Then simply move to being an author-funded service provider? 

The lines between traditional publishing, self-publishing, and vanity publishing get blurrier every day. I believe that eventually, it will just called publishing, because all authors will be entrepreneurs who finance their book releases, either through individual contracts for editorial services or from one-stop service providers.

But hopefully writers won’t choose an overpriced shop like Author Solutions, which by then will probably be called Penguin Solutions.

What do you think this means for the future of publishing?