Penguin Takes Underperforming Authors to Court

[Kevin O. McLaughlin]

I did know about Penguin buying Author Solutions. I'm not sure what was behind the decision. My previous and current experience working in large corporations would tell me that it was the decision motivated by the profits they were seeing. They'll take several months to decide how to connect it to Penguin in a meaningful way. You won't see any changes in the near future.

And several months have gone by. And we've seen where they've taken the company. Now Simon&Shuster has contracted with Penguin/Author Solutions to have Author Solutions manage their OWN "self publishing" imprint.

Called Archway Publishing, this new venture is the most egregious of all existing "self publishing" scam operations, costing writers $5-20k to produce an edited, published work through them.

So, I think we now have a decent idea where Penguin is planning to take this. I don't see any indication that they are planning to tone down or make more reasonable the existing Author Solutions scams. They gave the Author Solutions CEO a seat on the Penguin board, and they're using the company to spin off new "publishers" worse (for writers) than the ones which already existed.

Good article on the topic here:
Simon & Schuster Joins Forces With Author Solutions To Rip Off Writers | David Gaughran

[Chilari]

That's just shocking. I can't believe they can get away with that. But I guess if people don't go looking for alternatives, or believe that a traditional publisher owning the company makes it legitimate and trustworthy, then they'll get caught out by this scam. And it is a scam: $5,000 to publish not including editing, then charging $0.035 per word for editing? That's $35 or about £22 per thousand words - what, about twice the going rate?

Still, if people are aware of alternatives but still chose that route - one comment mentioned a friend of the commenter who said that $5,000 was worth it to see her book published - then there's not much that can be done to stop them. As far as the technical side of self-publication is concerned, a lot of us probably don't really know what we're doing, but a little research and some time investment which is certainly worth less than $5,000 (unless your day job is really well paid) and maybe some guiance from someone who's done it before, and you've saved yourself a lot of money.

Thanks for posting the link Kevin.