Untreed Reads Publishing

[UntreedReads]

Many thanks for the feedback, Erika. We've gone back through all of our emails for the last four months (to both the "submissions" email address and my personal email address) and can't find anything from you saying that you found a house for your work, so I apologize if that was missed.

In terms of "waiting for a longer than expected response," again there is no record of any email coming in to either of the email addresses above showing you had a new home for the work. Also, our Submission Guidelines indicate that responses are usually sent within 90 days. If you submitted on 10/1 and got my email on 1/10 then, yes, I suppose it was "longer than expected," but I think nine days over probably isn't too unacceptable.

I'll admit we've had some folks waiting longer than the 90 days on full-length submissions, as we did get behind on those for a while due to various issues (two deaths in our families, some tech issues, etc.) but have moved through most of our backlog at this point. We've done our best to answer every query from an author where the email came through asking for an update on the work. We keep records of our emails back and forth on every submission. I'm sorry if for some reason your emails didn't arrive.

There's no conflict of interest in recommending editors because we don't make any money off of the process. We just want to help authors get their manuscripts into the best possible shape. I don't believe that any author should just get a "thanks, but we don't want it" letter. I think it's important to indicate why their work was rejected and what I feel could strengthen it. Hey, that's what I went to college for! We're happy to do some editing with an author on a work, but sometimes we feel that it needs significant editing that would really benefit from some more time spent in the author's hands.

One thing I want to clarify: we don't tell authors how many times they're going to be viewed, so stating that the new publisher is "better than what Untreed Reads offered" is a bit incorrect. You're comparing apples to...well...nothing, actually. We tell authors their title will be submitted to all 70 retailers around the world for sale. But, nowhere in any of our information do we make a guarantee how many people will view material. So we never "offered" anything along those lines. There's no way anyone can properly guarantee that or accurately report that. They can tell you the number of SALES or the number of DOWNLOADS which are accurate (unless you're giving the title away for free and then the downloads vs. views thing is even more skewed), but number of views can be influenced by a LOT of factors.

So, I'm not sure you have enough facts to state that your current publisher is better than anyone in number of views unless you have the correlating statistical data to make that determination. After all, you don't know how many people are viewing a publisher's titles around the world. That's sort of like saying you know your new publisher is better than Random House because the new pub says you're getting 30,000 views; you have no idea what Random House is doing on behalf of its authors or how many people are viewing their titles. And how many of those 30,000 views were converted to sales? How many of those 30,000 views are bots?

I CAN tell you that our main website, as of this morning, has already hit 28,599 hits according to our hosting data and it's January 10th. But, as anyone will tell you, hits don't necessarily equate to "views," nor does it guarantee that a "view" is anything more than a bot scanning the material. So again, be cautious about what your new publisher may be telling you. It's important to understand the business side of what you do as much as the writing side.

Best,
Jay Hartman
Editor-in-Chief
Untreed Reads Publishing