Is the new business model for publishers to be selling overpriced services to writers?
That's the question that needs to be asked as Simon & Schuster (S&S) links with Author Solutions (AS) to run their new self-publishing service, Archway.
And same question to Penguin-Pearson, who kicked off this sorry trend with their purchase of AS for $116m earlier this year. And any other trade publisher thinking of emulating their lead.
Author Solutions is, of course, the controversial company widely distrusted by savvy self-publishers for its exorbitant and problematic service provision, under a variety of names -- AuthorHouse, Xlibris, iUniverse, and Trafford.
As The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi)'s Services Watchdog, Ben Galley, puts it: "Author Solutions [is] the company which owns AuthorHouse and Xlibris, companies which make my blood boil, who sell overpriced packages to unaware authors, to 'help' them publish sub-standard books. S&S have really gone down in my opinion here."
When we started The Alliance last April, companies like Author Solutions loomed large in our minds, companies who had little interest in good writing, in creative excellence or even, in some cases, in decent business practice, whose only interest in publishing or the literary world was to make a handsome profit out of writers' dreams
This was a key motive in establishing a non-profit organisation that would show writers effective ways to self-publish books with excellence and ethics at reasonable cost, in the company of other indie authors who were doing it well...
Continued at: http://selfpublishingadvice.org/blog/is-exploiting-authors-to-be-the-new-publishing-model/
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