Home > Uncategorized > Simon & Schuster Joins Forces With Author Solutions To Rip Off Writers

Simon & Schuster Joins Forces With Author Solutions To Rip Off Writers

November 28, 2012 Leave a comment Go to comments

David Gaughran’s got a great breakdown on a massive dick move by a major publisher, somewhat under the radar. Around $5k to publish, pennies on the dollar on royalties. Wow, such a deal. Writers beware…no seriously, if you’re looking to self-publish and considering a service to assist, PLEASE read his article first.

David Gaughran

Simon & Schuster has launched a self-publishing operation, Archway Publishing, contracting one of the most disreputable players in the business to run the show: Author Solutions.

We’ll get to that distasteful link-up in a second, but first let’s have a look at what Simon & Schuster are offering prospective customers (i.e. writers).

Fiction packages start at $1,999 and go up to $14,999. If you have written a business book, prices are saucier again: $2,999 to $24,999.

While the upper end of the pricing spectrum is obviously shocking, some of you might think that $1,999 isn’t too bad if you are getting a proper edit and a decent cover.

Not so fast.

That price tag doesn’t include any real editing, just an assessment which – according to their own website – is “not a replacement” for editorial services but “a preliminary diagnostic tool.”

But what if you need proper editing?…

View original post 1,108 more words

Advertisements
Categories: Uncategorized
  1. November 28, 2012 at 2:01 pm

    I made the rookie mistake of using Author House when I published my first book, but thankfully, I did not get suckered into any of their expensive add-on options. My experience with them was generally fairly positive (only due to the rep I had). Although, the first galley I received from them was horrendous. Each chapter looked like one continuous paragraph. They also charged ridiculous prices to make revisions (that were my mistakes). I just wish I knew about CreateSpace and Lightning Source back then. Oh, and their sales calls were VERY annoying.

  2. December 1, 2012 at 11:39 am

    OK, if Amazon publishes new authors for FREE–I mean, completely gratis!–what’s the point of these paid packages? Do you know how many books one must sell to cover $1,999 minimum publishing cost? And what kind of self-publishing writer can afford $14,999 to have professional distribution? Most certainly first-time writers (who haven’t made any money with their books yet) can never be published with that kind of ‘opportunity!’ And most certainly only rich writers with lots of inherited money can go for it. BTW, if publishing is not for FREE, then it’s a trap for the writer, who has no other job to pay the bills and support the printing of his/her book. And if they do have another job, then they have no time to write to the fullness of their potential. So, either make it FREE or… you’re shooting yourself in the foot because the majority of authors will publish with someone else, who offers a solution they can afford! Who can compete with “gratis,” right? 2+2=4 is a simple math, guys. Make way for the new talent or free the road!

  1. No trackbacks yet.

Hit me:

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this:
https://steveumstead.wordpress.com/2012/11/28/simon-schuster-joins-forces-with-author-solutions-to-rip-off-writers/
steveumstead.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2019-22
96484
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:JPOZBDFVEZU7AHIWSNUL7ZCI6RGCPXTR
<urn:uuid:60fd1e69-dd20-4979-8c6f-b6fa18d803c9>
2019-05-22T15:17:01Z
192.0.78.12
application/xhtml+xml
sha1:WA7IM2JGVCTXKCHDNC3ZMGJMKG5BS3WW
<urn:uuid:8ca81016-a7a7-46d0-ac18-16a994e3ce55>
https://steveumstead.wordpress.com/2012/11/28/simon-schuster-joins-forces-with-author-solutions-to-rip-off-writers/
response
<urn:uuid:094d7f36-15d3-4404-b780-f873c55419b8>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-22
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for May 2019
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-152-225-239.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.1-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/