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| Nov 2012 |
I had to comment on the deal that Simon & Schuster Archway Publishing is offering to authors. No matter how S&S tries its best to package it as “self-publishing” it is a vanity publishing venture, designed specifically to make profit by taking money from authors, not selling books to readers.
I've created a handy cheat sheet / chart below for you. You can see that S&S's Archway Publishing offers the worst of the both traditional publishing and self-publishing: You'll pay for everything; you'll have no control over anything; and you'll have to split your profit with the publisher.
Do not sign up for it. There's no reason to pay someone $2,000-$25,000 to format and upload your book on Kindle. (Since S&S plans to outsource everything for Archway Publishing, you won't get the kind of editing and cover art that S&S's traditional publishing program offers.)
Furthermore, you do not need to use service providers like S&S's Archway publishing to get noticed by a traditional publisher if that is one of your goals. They are already watching Amazon's Top 100 list. The self-published novelists who got snapped up by traditional publishers did not use vanity publishers.
| Trad Pub | Vanity Pub | Self-Pub | |
| Who pays for editing, cover, formatting, layout and all the other costs related to publication? | Publisher | You | You |
| Who selects the team/people for editing, cover, formatting, layout and all the other activities related to publication? | Publisher | Publisher | You |
| Who controls editing, cover, formatting, layout and all the other activities related to publication? | Publisher | Publisher | You |
| Who controls your book's price? | Publisher | Publisher | You |
| Who gets paid by the retailers? | Publisher | Publisher | You |
| Is the money from retailers split between the publisher and author? | Yes | Yes | No |
November 28th, 2012 at 11:38 am · Link
Thanks for making this very clear. And the new S & S venture is the vainest of vanity publishing.
November 28th, 2012 at 1:21 pm · Link
Don’t farm the land, farm the farmers.
Don’t dig for gold, sell shovels to prospectors.
Don’t sell books to readers, sell bull$hit to authors.
November 28th, 2012 at 7:45 pm · Link
Paying more than $30-50 for a file conversion is daylight robbery. Two grand???
November 28th, 2012 at 8:06 pm · Link
@Anne R. Allen: Yes, it’s very disappointing that a good, reputable publishing company like S&S is doing this.
@Vashtan: Actually it depends on what you get for file conversion. I charge close to $100, but I handcode HTML. Some just give you a Word doc to upload.