From Blank Slate Press:

This past Thursday and Friday I attended the IBPA (Independent Book Publishers Association) Publishing University in Chicago.

. . . .

1)    “The flaws in the traditional publishing model are everywhere. It is not a viable model.”  This is one of my favorite quotes from Dominique Raccah, founder of Sourcebooks and one of the people busy reinventing the industry.  The telling part of the quote is in its context. Her presentation was not about the industry per se, and that quote was not taken from her presentation, but rather was a response to a question from an attendee who asked why, with all the opportunities available for authors today, she or anyone else should seek to publish traditionally. Raccah responded that she actually had no idea why anyone would want to do that if they are willing and able to take on the tasks necessary to make a book a success according to their own measures and expectations.

. . . .

5)    The Myth of Big 5 Marketing Support. So, this may sound strange coming from a publisher, but I’ve been on the other side as well and I know that, for many (most?) the idea that just because you got a nice advance and you’ve got a publicity team assigned to you, doesn’t mean you’re actually going to get real, sustained—or intelligent!—pr/marketing support. Dori Jones Yang, a successful historical fiction author, told the story about her agent’s response to all the marketing she was doing. The agent was thrilled at her success and said, “As soon as you hit it big, your publisher’s publicist is going to leap into action.”

. . . .

Ingram took the opportunity to formally announce Ingram Spark—a “new and improved” service designed for small publishers that will roll out later this year.  I learned that very small publishers (those with under 1 million in sales…uh, yeah, I fit in that group), makes up 20% of the publishing industry, and Ingram is perfectly positioned to serve that 20%.

As the largest wholesaler in the industry, Ingram serves over 200 ebook retailers in over 150 countries. They have 2500 partners, they handle 11 million titles through 3800 channels, and can output a different book every six seconds. But still they see room for significant growth catering to that 20%–as well as working with many of the major publishers who use their services (including O’Reily Media who just closed their last warehouse).   Ingram Spark will be much easier (according to the Ingram folks) to use than Lightning Source today. It will be “easy, quick, and free” and will provide one interface for POD and ebooks.

Link to the rest at Blank Slate Press and thanks to Lassal for the tip.

And this from Midwest Independent Publishers Association:

Ingram used the IBPA keynote luncheon on Saturday as the platform to introduce “Spark.” This new Ingram service was created to allow independent publishers to deal directly with Ingram in DISTRIBUTING print on demand (POD) books. The quoted costs for the POD service: 1.3 cents a page and 90 cents for the cover (no varnish or embossing). A $49 fee to set up a title is waived if you order 50 books. Ingram will make the books available throughout the US and 38 countries across the world. Spark is scheduled for launch on May 28. By August, Ingram will also offer e-book conversion and e-book DISTRIBUTION for Kindle, Apple, Kobo, Nook, and all LSI partners. Ingram plans to eventually offer the sale of ISBNs (as arranged through Bowker) and add marketing services.

Link to the rest at MIPA

From The Bookseller:

Orange Prize-winner Ann Patchett has warned that authors who decide to shun traditional publishing deals and instead use self-publishing channels to “cut out the middle man” are turning their back on vital publishing services they really need.

. . . .

Patchett told The Bookseller that authors should become more involved in the industry and take greater responsibility as part of a wider ecosystem, just as book-buyers should think twice about purchasing through the cheapest channel, like Amazon, if it means they might lose their local bookshop. She also said authors who shunned traditional publishing deals in favour of self-publishing, thinking they would be able to earn more money, should think carefully about the step.

“If you had asked me two years ago, I would not have thought it was my responsibility. But I do think authors need to get involved with all sort of aspects of publishing and health of the publishing industry,” she said. “This is not every man working for themselves, we need to think and work as a business. Authors have been protected for a long time, we are very well cared for, but we need to think about our other partners, from bookshops to publishing and self-publishing.”

Regarding self-publishing, she added: “There are people who want to put books on Amazon because they cannot get publishing deals and that is understandable. But there are some authors who could get published in the mainstream but because they are trying to make more money, they think the best way is to self publish. They are cutting out the middle man whose services they really need, such as the editor and the publicist.”

Link to the rest at The Bookseller and thanks to David for the tip.

PG has just about decided that the differences between indie publishing and traditional publishing are so great that nearly anyone immersed in traditional publishing has almost nothing useful to say about indie publishing.

One of the most fundamental mistakes someone who is an expert in one field can make is to assume their expertise is transferable to another.

Thus, those who have deep experience with traditional publishing assume indie publishing is the same except without advances or some other such idiocy. Those who have lots of experience with bookstores assume Amazon is the same except with lower prices.

The idea that an indie author pursues his/her path because day-to-day life in indie world is superior in every way to traditional publishing with all its accoutrements and hangers-on is terra incognita for most in traditional publishing.

But, the services! How can we forget the services that traditional publishing offers?

Editors? Indie authors can choose the one they want to work with instead of arguing semi-colons with a fresh-faced and clueless English major who is somebody’s niece.

Publicists? You mean people who order authors around and insist on twenty Tweets per day?

Publishers? Ah, yes,those who present you with medieval contracts, take most of your money, never answer emails and send you disappointing checks with impenetrable royalty statements every six months.

What professionals get paid every six months? Lawyers? Doctors? Accountants? Teachers? Publishers? Editors? Publicists? No, no, no, no, no, no and no. Even sex workers get paid more often (and usually better) than traditional authors.

Even if indie life didn’t pay more, it would be worth it to a lot of authors not to have to deal with so many annoying and largely useless “services” they don’t need from people they didn’t choose.

From All Things D:

The United States Department of Justice has described Apple’s defense against allegations that it conspired to illegally fix e-book prices “unconvincing” and “untethered from both precedent and logic.”

Evidently, Apple feels much the same way about the DOJ’s charges.

In an 81-page April 26 filing that was made public today, Apple pointedly denied federal prosecutors’ accusations, saying the discussions they’ve painted as collusion were simply tough business negotiations and that their end result — an “agency” e-book pricing model where publishers, not retailers, set prices — made the e-book market more competitive, not less.

“Apple did not conspire to fix e-book prices,” the company said in its filing. “The evidence proves that Apple acted independently, to further its own legitimate business goals, in negotiating agency agreements with the publishers to enter the e-book market.”

. . . .

“Amazon at the time sold 9 out of every 10 e-books, and many publishers publicly disagreed with Amazon’s uniform, below-cost pricing strategy for New York Times bestsellers,” Apple said in its filing. “This tumult in the industry inspired the second largest e-retailer, Barnes & Noble, to push for agency agreements with the publishers. And Amazon used an agency-like model for small publishers and self-published authors. In other words, Apple did not introduce agency to the e-book industry; it was simply the first to reach an agency agreement with the industry’s largest publishers.”

And for a new entrant to the e-book market, as Apple was at the time, the agency model was a logical one. The company was looking for a 30 percent commission on every sale; it was hardly going to get that from publishers at the $9.99 price point Amazon had established.

Which is not to say that it was opposed to $9.99. According to its filing, it wasn’t. As long as it was able to collect that 30 percent commission, Apple said it didn’t particularly care what price publishers sold their books at. Yes, it required a “Most Favored Nation” agreement from publishers that gave it the right to lower prices to match low prices offered by competing retailers, but it argues it did this to remain competitive with Amazon, not to influence its business model.

. . . .

And the company insists the facts are on its side:

Average prices for trade e-books have fallen, and output, whether measured in the number of sales, the number of titles, or the types and quality of e-books offered, has increased substantially. These facts are undisputed.

Apple also fundamentally transformed the e-reading experience, leaving rudimentary, black-and-white, and expensive single-purpose e-readers (e.g., the Kindle) in the dust. The e-book world changed dramatically when Apple launched its iBookstore on the iPad in April 2010. At the time, 400,000 e-book titles were available to the consuming public; today, readers can download more than 1.7 million e-books. Apple has also created or spurred a number of the most important e-reading hardware and software innovations, such as full-color, interactive, and vivid digital e-books.

The bottom line, said attorney Orin Snyder of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, is that “Apple should be commended, not sued. Apple injected much-needed competition and innovation into the eBook business. … The DOJ’s case is based on fictions and incomplete quotations. The actual evidence proves that Apple did not conspire to fix prices in the eBook business. We look forward to trial.”

Link to the rest at All Things D

From Cult of Mac:

US authorities have called Apple out for collusion with electronic book publishers, saying that the Cupertino-based company conspired with publishers to raise eBook prices when negotiating iBooks by playing them all against each other and against rival eBook retailer, Amazon.

. . . .

Apple’s filing, released today but dated April 26, says that the major publishers were battling Amazon over the Mountain View-based retailer’s practice of selling eBooks at a much lower price than the publishers wanted. Apple claims that the publishers had already decided to stop Amazon by eliminating wholesale discounts on eBooks and to sell hardcover books in physical book stores first (a practice called windowing).

According to the filing, when Apple approached publishers to set up what would eventually become iBooks, the publishers weren’t pleased with terms that included a 30 percent commission, a guarantee of not underselling Apple, and that publishers stop windowing. Each publisher, says Apple, had a different counterproposal.

“Early — and constant — points of negotiation and contention were over Apple’s price caps and 30 percent commission. After Apple sent draft agency agreements to each publisher CEO on January 11, each immediately opposed Apple’s price tiers and caps,” Apple said in an proposed filing with the court, a document that runs to 81 pages.

Link to the rest at Cult of Mac and thanks to Joshua for the tip.

From The New York Times:

The e-mail, from Steve Jobs of Apple to James Murdoch of News Corporation, reads as if one old sport were trying to cajole another into joining a caper: “Throw in with Apple and see if we can all make a go of this to create a real mainstream e-books market at $12.99 and $14.99.”

According to the Justice Department, that e-mail is part of the evidence that Apple was the “ringmaster” in a price-fixing conspiracy in the market for e-books, a more direct leadership role than originally portrayed in the department’s April 2012 antitrust lawsuit against Apple and five publishing companies.

In its suit, the government said that Apple and the publishers conspired to fix e-book prices as part of a scheme to force Amazon to raise its e-book price from a uniform $9.99 to the higher level noted by Mr. Jobs in the e-mail, which publishers wanted. That, the department said, resulted in higher prices to consumers and ill-gotten profits for Apple and its partners.

. . . .

Tom Neumayr, a spokesman for Apple, said the company did not conspire to fix prices on e-books.

“We helped transform the e-book market with the introduction of the iBookstore in 2010, bringing consumers an expanded selection of e-books and delivering innovative new features,” Mr. Neumayr said. “The market has been thriving and innovating since Apple’s entry, and we look forward to going to trial to defend ourselves and move forward.”

. . . .

In July 2010, Mr. Jobs, Apple’s former chief executive, told the chief executive of Random House, Markus Dohle, that the publisher would suffer a loss of support from Apple if it held out much longer, according to an account of the conversation provided by Mr. Dohle in the filing. Two months later, Apple threatened to block an e-book application by Random House from appearing in Apple’s App Store because it had not agreed to a deal with Apple, the filing said.

After Random House finally agreed to a contract on Jan. 18, 2011, Eddy Cue, the Apple executive in charge of its e-books deals, sent an e-mail to Mr. Jobs attributing the publisher’s capitulation, in part, to “the fact that I prevented an app from Random House from going live in the app store,” the filing reads.

The newly released documents also quote David Shanks, chief executive of Penguin, as saying that Apple was the “facilitator and go-between” for the publishing companies in arranging the agreement.

Link to the rest at The New York Times and thanks to Matthew for the tip.

All the big publishers who were included in this suit have settled. It is not unusual for one of the conditions of settlement to include an obligation to assist the Justice Department in pursuing its suit against the remaining defendants.

It looks like the publishers are keeping their end of the bargain.

From Publishing Perspectives:

[D]ue to the decline in library purchases and the closing of bookstores over the last few years, publishers have devoted more of their marketing budget towards building a direct relationship with their customers. The creation of online communities has been central to this.

With the recent sale of the social networking site GoodReads to Amazon for a reported $150 million, it is clear that an online community around books and storytelling is a valuable commodity that could help publishers react better to reader interests. But, is it worth publishers investing in the creation of their own branded online community?

Publishers think so. According to our study, conducted by Bowker Market Research, the number of publisher-owned online communities is set to more than double over the next two years. The study, which focused on US and UK publishers in both the trade and academic markets, found that two-thirds of responding publishers currently host reader communities, and that this number is set to rise to over 90% over the next two years.

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

Passive Guy predicts that participating in the publisher’s online community will be added to traditionally-published authors’ homework assignments at some time in the future if it’s not there already.

This post caused PG to think about the significance of the location of an author’s online brand. If it’s on a publisher’s site or even on Goodreads, it’s not entirely under the author’s control and changes to the site can have an adverse impact on the author’s visibility.

Unlike many, PG is not a fan of Goodreads and hopes Amazon completely rebuilds it. If an author has a big presence on present-day Goodreads, it’s lost on PG and those like him.

How valuable is a community of readers an author builds on a publisher’s community site if the author switches to a new publisher or goes indie? Publisher A isn’t likely to allow much promotion of an author’s books from Publisher B.

If the author builds her own community around her blog or newsletter or Twitter stream or Pinterest board, she can take it wherever she wants to go.

From author Catherine Ryan Howard:

We all know I love publishers. I still hope, should I ever finish The Novel, to be published by one of them. Say silly things like legacy or gatekeepers, or use something as serious and tragic as the Irish potato famine—or rape or Stockholm Syndrome, for that matter—to describe the relationship between the author and the business that has risked its money to get that author’s book to market, and you go straight onto my Naughty List.

(Well, there isn’t actually a Naughty List. Who has the time? I will roll my eyes at you though.)

I don’t believe for a second, for instance, what is pretty much an accepted ‘fact’ by the majority of the self-publishing community: that traditional publishers don’t publicize and/or care about the books they publish. I’ve seen for myself that this is simply not true. The bad publishers might not, but it’s up to you not to sign contracts with them. (Or at least not sign contracts with them twice, or tarnish all publishers with the same brush just because of one experience.) Even if I took away what I’ve seen firsthand, there would still be the evidence of logic: publishing is a business, and any business that isn’t run by morons wants to recoup their investment, i.e. any advance paid, printing and staff costs. They market and publicize and support their product as much as they can because it’s in their interests for it to sell.

. . . .

Anyway, I tell you this because I want to make it clear that despite my self-publishing background, I ain’t a publisher-basher. But there is one area where some of them do need a stern talking to, and that’s their attitude towards using social media to promote their books. The Big Ones are all over it (that’s probably why they’re The Big Ones) but others aren’t even making an effort, which is crazy as they’re the ones who stand to benefit the most on the internet’s level playing field.

. . . .

Do any of these statements sound at all familiar?

• ‘But does Twitter really sell books? So-and-so has 10,000 followers and he only sold 500 books…’
• ‘Ugh. I can’t be bothered with Facebook and all that silly stuff.’
• ‘Why waste your time on that when books have sold fine without all this rubbish until now?’
• ‘There’s no evidence social media does anything except suck away time.’
• ‘I have NEVER bought a book because someone on Goodreads recommended it to me. NEVAAAH!’
• ‘Is this over yet? Call me when Twitter is gone.’
• (From the writer) ‘But I want just to WRITE!’

. . . .

But Wait… Does It REALLY Sell Books?

Yes, it does. It sold mine, it sells the books of my self-published friends, and it’s worked wonders for countless traditionally published titles. But most of the time, we can’t prove it. No one listens to self-publishers because for some reason self-published success is still treated like a total fluke. Even when the author says ‘Well, I did this and then I did this and then sales really picked up when I started doing this’, no one listens. They just think wasn’t he lucky?! And publishing houses use lots of different methods to sell books, so they can’t reallysay for sure why a certain book was a bestseller, only that, as a whole, the campaign worked. The other problem is that it doesn’t sell all the books, and the skeptics latch on to each Twitter-flavored failure and hold it up as high as they can. If it fails, it means they don’t have to worry about it.

Link to the rest at Catherine Caffeinated and thanks to J.M. for the tip.

From Publishers Weekly:

The Borders bankruptcy is one issue that the book industry may have wanted to put behind it. But although there were less than six months between the mid-February 2011 filing for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection to the liquidation of the remaining stores, the bankruptcy is far from over.

. . . .

Despite the closure of hundreds of stores one and a half years ago, it’s still not clear how much publishers will be paid on the dollar even with Manhattan District Court Judge Martin Glenn’s approval last October of the BGI Creditors’ Liquidating Trust’s request to claw back payments made during the 90-day period before bankruptcy papers were filed.

. . . .

Top 20 Largest Unsecured Publishing Creditors & Amount of Claim

1. Penguin Putnam $41,118,914
2. Hachette Book Group $36,879,656
3. Simon & Schuster $33,757,445
4. Random House $33,461,062
5. HarperCollins $25,793,451
6. Macmillan/MPS $11,434,306
7. John Wiley & Sons $11,191,435
8. Perseus Distribution Services $7,776,292
9. Source Interlink Companies $6,879,906
10. F&W Media $4,546,275
11. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt $4,400,756
12. Workman Publishing $4,003,126
13. Diamond Comic Distributors $3,906,550
14. McGraw-Hill $3,093,871
15. Pearson Education $2,784,766
16. Rosetta Stone $2,226,553
17. National Book Network $1,956,713
18. W.W. Norton & Company $1,940,826
19. Zondervan $1,886,752
20. Hay House $1,886,752

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly and thanks to Abel for the tip.

So here’s a question PG hasn’t seen discussed in any of the Borders bankruptcy stories he’s read – What’s happened to authors’ royalties?

If Penguin Putnam was owed over $40 million at the time the bankruptcy was filed, presumably most of that sum was for paper books that Borders had purchased from Penguin. $4-6 million of that amount would have been paid to authors if Penguin had received received such payment.

So, did Penguin, et al, pay the royalties to authors or not? Were these royalties (paid or unpaid) reflected on royalty reports in any way?

Off the top of his head, PG doesn’t remember seeing any provision in a Big Publishing publishing agreement that addresses what happens to royalties if a bookstore files for bankruptcy.

If print royalties are calculated based on the list price of a book, are they due to an author regardless of whether the bookstore pays for the book or not so long as the book has been sold by the publisher and not returned by Borders?

A royalty provision based on net revenue received by the publisher as is typical for ebooks would seem to let publishers off the hook for those unpaid royalties.

Some contract provisions describing royalty reports call for a statement of the “sales” of a hardcover or paperback Work without expressly requiring that a publisher actually be paid for those sales. If Borders didn’t return any books, a publisher probably couldn’t handle royalties accruing from unpaid book bills under a reserve for return clause.

Does anyone know if any of the publishers listed as creditors of Borders communicated with authors regarding the status of royalties for paper books sold to Borders?

Interesting questions.

From veteran publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin:

The overarching theme of our upcoming Publishers Launch Conference at BookExpo America on May 29 is “scale”.

. . . .

We’re covering “scale” from many angles on May 29.

The program will kick off with a presentation from Pete McCarthy, formerly a digital marketing strategist at Random House, about moving beyond our standard understanding of “industry data” — what we learn about the industry in the aggregate from BookStats and Bowker and others — to mining and analyzing the massive amounts of public data about readers: who they are and where they are. The data we care about, and that can really help us, isn’t labeled “book publishing data” but is far more useful and actionable than much of what we try to decipher meaning from that is tagged that way.

The requirements of scale threaten to really change the business of literary agents. Since the rise of agents as intermediaries between publishers and authors in the 1950s and 1960s, it has always been possible for agents to operate as very tiny operations. Single-agent offices have never been terribly unusual, and agents could run a successful business with a handful of prosperous clients, or even just one!

. . . .

But those times are changing. The opportunities for self-publishing and the requirements for authors to be self-promoters have placed new demands on literary agency offices. It is often no longer sufficient to have knowledge of acquiring editors and what they want and a network of foreign co-agents who can help place projects in other languages and territories. Agencies large and small are adding self-publishing services, which can include capabilities as mundane as getting cover art designed and as sophisticated as distribution to a global network of ebook retailers. This adds the potential for “conflict” for the agents. In some cases, agencies have chosen a course that might present a choice for an author between a publisher’s deal and their agent’s deal.

. . . .

The ebook bestseller lists have been the evidence of strong challenges to the publishers who operate with scale on their side, as an increasing number of self-published authors have seen their work rise to the very top of the charts.

. . . .

Frankly, our view is that very few of the outside disruptors, often tech- and private equity-centric start-ups providing “solutions” to the problems as they perceive them, have gained much traction or added much value. We’ll get more perspective on that from our “business development” panel, who are the ones in their companies charged with interacting with the aspirants, but we stick to the belief that there is more to be gained by watching what the established publishing players and the biggest companies in technology are doing than in tracking the theories spawned by industry outsiders who think their insights will change our world.

But we recognize a weakness to our approach. There are some things the established players just can’t discuss. We can’t expect Random House and Penguin — or their biggest competitors — to talk about what the merger of the two biggest publishers will mean to the marketplace. We can’t expect publishers who must trade with Amazon and Barnes & Noble to discuss the impact of their unique marketplace power — one in online sales and one in brick-and-mortar — on publishers’ margins. We can’t expect agents and publishers to talk candidly about when and whether established authors might be willing to eschew their bookstore sales in favor of higher margins on their online sales through a direct tie to Amazon.

Link to the rest at The Shatzkin Files

“[W]e stick to the belief that there is more to be gained by watching what the established publishing players and the biggest companies in technology are doing than in tracking the theories spawned by industry outsiders who think their insights will change our world.”

PG says this is an interesting contrast to the tech world where smart established companies and tech investors are constantly watching what small startups are doing. You’ll recall that Facebook bought Instagram when Instagram had only a handful of employees and no revenues. Then Facebook scaled Instagram immensely.

Instagram was launched in October, 2010

Acquired by Facebook in September, 2012

When Facebook acquired Instagram, it had 30 million total users. That has grown to over 100 million active (post at least once per month) Instagram subscribers who have posted more than 4 billion photos. 40 million new photos are posted each day.

59 of the world’s top 100 brands are now on Instagram. (PG says expect them to start paying Instagram for this visibility.)

In February, 2013, Instagram’s mobile app had 3.5 million more daily users than Twitter’s official app on iPhone and Android, according to ComScore.

As of April, 2013, after being acquired by Facebook, Instagram was handling this growth with about 25 staff members.

That’s how you scale.

From David Gaughran:

Writing is a glamorous occupation – at least from the outside. Popular depictions of our profession tend to leave out all the other stuff that comes with the territory: carpal tunnel syndrome, liver failure, penury, and madness.

. . . .

Publishing is a screwed up business. The often labyrinthine path to success makes it much easier for those with nefarious intentions to scam the unsuspecting. But it doesn’t help that so many organizations who claim to help writers, to respect them, to assist them along the path to publication are actually screwing them over.

Before the digital revolution made self-publishing viable on a wide scale, the dividing lines were easier to spot. Traditional publishers paid you if they wanted to buy the rights to your novel. Self-publishers were people who filled their garages with books and tried to hawk them at events. And vanity presses were the scammers, luring the unsuspecting with false promises and roundly condemned by self-publishers and traditional publishers alike.

Today it’s very different. The scammy vanity presses are owned by traditional publishers who are marketing them as the “easy” way to self-publish – when it’s nothing more than a horrifically expensive and terribly ineffective way to publish your work, guaranteed to kill your book’s chance of success stone dead, while emptying your bank account in the process.

. . . .

I’m not surprised people get scammed. When you want something so badly, and you can’t seem to make progress towards that goal – no matter how hard you work – you start to go crazy. You get desperate.

And it’s much harder to tell the scammers from the legitimate organizations when they are owned by the same people.

Take Penguin-owned Author Solutions, one of the worst vanity presses out there. Here’s how they hoodwink inexperienced writers into using their horribly expensive service.

. . . .

[T]he only companies recommended are Trafford, AuthorHouse, Xlibris, and iUniverse – all of which are scammy vanity presses, all owned by Author Solutions. And, fitting with the rest of the pattern, FindYourPublisher.com is just one of many (many!) such sites owned and operated by Author Solutions, purporting to make independent recommendations, but only recommending Author Solutions companies.

. . . .

Penguin has been looking under the Author Solutions hood for 10 months now. Its conclusion was this: we can make this bigger. We can take this scam on the road and start exploiting writers all over the planet.

And Penguin is still getting a pass for this crap.

. . . .

The Publishers Weekly piece on Penguin’s aggressive expansion plans for Author Solutionsmakes no mention of the company being a universally reviled vanity press that has cheated 150,000 writers out of their savings.

This is something I’ve been noticing for a while, and Publishers Weekly isn’t alone. The pieces in The Bookseller, GalleyCat, and Digital Book World also make no mention of the widespread criticism that Author Solutions has attracted, nor do they mention that the company is currently the subject of a class action suit for their deceptive practices.

More disturbingly, my comment pointing this out appears to have been scrubbed from The Bookseller, is stuck in the moderation queue on Digital Book World’s piece.

. . . .

1. Simon & Schuster hired Author Solutions to run their own scammy vanity press – Archway Publishing. If that wasn’t enough, they then offered a bounty to bloggers to lie about the company.

2. Harper Collins-owned Thomas Nelson have their own crappy vanity operation called West Bow Press – also “powered” by Author Solutions.

3. Harlequin, never afraid to turn down a penny, jumped in the game a few years ago. Author Solutions provided the white-label vanity operation for them.

4. Showing that it’s not just the larger publishers, Hay House contracted Author Solutions to set up Balboa Press – another scammy, crappy, overpriced vanity press.

Link to the rest at Let’s Get Digital

Some might wonder if there is really all that much difference between Big Publishing and Vanity Publishing with regard to how each treats authors.