YouWriteOn:
Books are being priced at lower retails prices for readers and with higher royalties at writers.
Yes, but those prices and royalties don't mean a great deal given that it's the author who has to do all the marketing, all the selling and work to try and get them in bookstores, do they?
YouWriteOn:
For example, one leading POD publisher prices a 250 page book for sale on sites like Amazon and WH Smith at over £10 ($15 approx) when the author requests a royalty of £1 per copy sold.
Which POD publisher is that?
YouWriteOn:
We also donate ten percent of reader sales from our publisher profits to Sightsavers.
That's very generous of you. Of course, given that it's the authors who are out there selling their books and generating those publisher profits for you, wouldn't it have been better to instead increase even further the potential profit that authors could make by decreasing your share by 10%?
YouWriteOn:
All books passed meet Lightning Sources high standards for publishing
That's nice. What does it mean? Are we talking about formatting standards here (i.e. the text submitted must be in a particular format in order for them to be published), or are we talking qualitative standards (i.e. books must meet a certain editorial threshold)?
YouWriteOn:
Writers agreed when they submitted books that Christmas publishing was an aim and that their books would be ready before Christmas, or after Christmas.
You are the one who put a call out for 5000 manuscripts. Did you not think that it might be difficult to get all 5,000 books published in time for Christmas? Did you not realise that for authors who will be expected to do the legwork in selling these books, there is little point in them receiving the product after Christmas has finished? Why did you not have in place the staff ready to cope with 5000 manuscripts? If not, why not just put out the call for a lower threshold - wouldn't that have been a better service for those authors taking you up on the offer?
YouWriteOn:
Publishing to the exacting standards above requires checking through submissions before progressing onto the next submission as part of the timescale aims.
See my above comment. I fail to see why this could not have been foreseen and catered for in advance of it becoming a problem.
YouWriteOn:
We haven’t removed any posts for a long time, however we had received a number of member complaints about Old Hacks posts about their tone and content. Also, some information given in these posts was we consider inaccurate, for example, it was stated we aren’t registered with Gardners, we are. Where someone visits posting in this way which leads to complaints, and directing writers to another writer site (here) we also consider removing the writers posts. This is influenced by member complaints, as mentioned in this instance about the poster. So removal of posts can be for a variety of reasons. For example, complaints, or where information imparted is, in our opinion, inaccurate, particularly on a consistent basis, or for other reasons, we reserve the right to remove posts
If you were concerned about inaccurate information, surely the way to deal with it would have been to correct that by making your own posts on the forum?
The fact that you have removed posts that informed people about the disadvantages of using your offer and the struggles they would face in marketing their books could be used to suggest that you're not interested in opinions other than your own being shared.
For a site that accepts public money from the Arts Council, this is not an acceptable state of affairs.
YouWriteOn:
Please note however, to give some return feedback, we have also had reports from our writers or observers, many of which we share, that they have felt some YWO members have been shouted down for expressing an opinion here, and I am sure you will address this with writers who feel this has happened.
Really? And presumably you have verified this by going back a few pages to see the nature of the discussion with those YWO members who have posted here?
Because if you actually took the time to do so (rather than make accusations of libel against one poster) you would see that what actually happened was that some YWO members ended up being told about the very real down side of self-publishing their work and the potential consequences for them. Some YWO members took that on board and participated in the discussion, others threw their toys out of the pram and flounced out.
However, unlike your forums,
Ted, they were all allowed to express their opinion (no matter how demonstrably incorrect that opinion may be) without having their posts arbitrarily deleted. They might not like the responses they got, but if you're going to express an opinion, then you need to be prepared for people giving you their opinion back - backed up with facts where necessary.
YouWriteOn:
Of course it takes time to develop a service further to meet what writers are interested in, for example lower priced books and better royalties.
You forgot to mention that writers are also interested in seeing their books sold from the shelves of bookstores without having to organise that themselves.
YouWriteOn:
Comments are fine, but I would remind people that is was stated from the start of this thread that YouWriteOn would not work, before we’d got off the ground with our feedback process. We did work, and work successfully, involving leading publishers along the way.
Actually, I think that mathematically you're offering the same success rate as anyone would have if they submitted to an agent/publisher slush pile. In terms of the chance that you offer authors to get feedback on their work, in practical terms you can get the same type of feedback on the SYW Forums here and I'm sure at some point the stats will be run as to how many people have gone on to get agents/publishers as a result of that.
YouWriteOn:
Equally this is a new service, it will similarly succeed, writers are doing so already, and similarly take the time necessary to develop to do this.
The concern isn't whether you will succeed - there are a lot of POD publishers out there that offer the same service as you and which are making money from it.
The comments here stem from a concern that you are selling to an audience attracted to your site by the fact that you have Arts Council funding for your forums, thereby giving your self-publishing arm an extra layer of gloss. Added to that is the fact that many of the people who took you up on your offer did so without, apparently, a firm understanding of the potential implications both in terms of the amount of effort required on their part, the amount of support that would be provided by YWO or the potential damage they are doing to having a commercial publisher pick up their manuscript.
If YWO had put up a simple FAQ of what would be required from people taking up that offer, I'd have had less of a problem with it. Instead, you appeared to be selling it on the back of a couple of authors who went down the self-publish route and were picked up by commercial publishers, thereby making it appear as though this was a very real possibility for everyone.
MM