Which is to say, I am giving Agio Publishing the inaugural POD People Chutzpah Award.
It takes a rare "entrepreneur" that charges $4000 dollars and more to format and prepare a book for self-publishing.
But what really tips Agio over the edge is that what you get at the end of the day is a book released via Lulu (example).
So, for around $4000 you get a prettified manuscript, plus what Lulu provides for free or less than $100.
That for some books that have, at best, and Amazon rank of over 500,000.
So, um, best of luck in recouping that investment.
2 comments:
Hi Emily -
Thanks for posting. I had a good laugh. You are a fiction writer after all, eh? Is all your writing this bizarre?
thanks, cheers,
Bruce Batchelor
Agio Publishing House
Well, Mr. Batchelor, maybe you could clarify some things for us here at the Podpeople. Our authors, rather self-published authors in general are taught via sites such as Writer Beware to be wary of A. publishing houses that charge the author to publish, and B. publishing houses that do not fully disclose their fees and services.
I took a look around your website and only saw one dollar figure and that was your estimation that the average self-published author spends $4000.00 on their book. Where did you come up with that number, and what are your base charges for copyediting, cover design, and interior layout? We might like to compare them to industry and freelance standards. Do you charge for ISBNs? It says you take care of copyright registration and deposit copies? What do you charge for that?
As for services, obviously you use POD technology so it would be helpful if we knew who your POD printer is. We are assuming you are using Lightning Source with Ingram as the distributor, as it states on your website, but what is the charge for that, if any?
I also noticed that your ebooks are listed through Lulu. Why did you choose Lulu when there are other eBook conversion options and aggregators that are cheaper or free and offer wider distribution? Are those ebooks listed in the Kindle store? Are they listed with Ingram digital? In other words, what is your eBook distribution model.
And lastly, what sort of marketing do you do for a print book and for an eBook? Besides a standard press release. Your site says cutting edge promotion and publicity. We would like to know what those cutting edge items are and how much they cost. Blogs are free and there are plenty of places that host and design websites on the cheap that look great.
I think what Emily was getting at and what we are all getting at here is that we would like to see some hard numbers and would like to actually see a service menu so that we can compare your publishing house to other fee-based publishing companies. I suppose we want to know what makes you better than say Outskirts Press, or IUniverse, or Authorhouse, or Createspace, or Lulu for that matter, and we also want to compare your marketing mix and prices to other companies such as Readerviews, etc.
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