I’ve been thinking about this lately, and if there is any way to address it. Is there a central blog for indie folk and information about indies?

Also, I was toying with the idea of an outreach team. Maybe we should go to the source.

In other words, this is all about monetizing the slush pile — just the thing I’ve been accusing them of.

Of course, this creates a direct conflict of interest that can only be detrimental to S&S’s core business —

Old model: S&S earn nothing from a rejected manuscript. Handling submissions is a pure expense, but a necessary one, because only by doing so can they find books to publish. There is no incentive to reject books; only the books they accept can generate revenue and profit for the firm.

New model: S&S earn money from rejections by referring them to their sock-puppet vanity imprint. They now have a positive incentive to reject books. Every book ‘published’ by Archway represents a guaranteed profit, even if nobody ever buys a copy: cost + profit come from the writer up front. If they accept a book, it may lose money; if they get the author to waste the book by consigning it to the hell of an Archway deal, it will certainly make them money. This creates clear and obvious pressure to go for the vanity referral in all dubious cases.

Problem: any writer not fresh off the turnip truck will be outraged at this treatment, and not only will not buy a vanity deal from Archway, but will regard S&S with scorn and contempt thereafter — not submit to them anymore — and talk about it.

I liked Victoria’s article too, except where she rolled her eyes at self-publishers for calling for change, but not liking this. Huh? That was weird and made no sense.

I’m really glad authors are rallying around this. The sad thing is that the authors who most need to read these articles, probably won’t.

I know just enough about video to be dangerous, and I’m struggling to think how I’d hire enough people with that amount of money for them all to have something to do, even if I was padding the price to make a profit for myself.

And as many have pointed out (as evidenced by the posts from those that still rally around agent blogs and shout “hooray” to all the recent “we’re still necessary” posts) writers who still need a stamp on their forhead will line up and shell out to bend over for this.

And all that will serve (because it won’t serve the writer’s) is the profitability of sales venture’s like this, meaning these scam services will only grow in number and scope.