CaoPaux and Momeento Mori, I think you are correct. The information found was likely from such sources, and I fell for it. I found a few of the pages I was getting my information from, and both are blogs by self-pub authors who now seem a bit to anti-commercial pub.
Just wanted to say don't feel too bad about this; those blogs etc. are designed to mislead people. Publishing is a complex and often confusing business, very different from other businesses, so it's often difficult to know what's true and what isn't.
What are your thoughts on small, new publishers like this? Aside from opinions of practices specific to Lilibridge. I mean, how do new publishers grow? They have to start somewhere, with smaller projects until they have the means to promote better and offer advances. How do publishers get start up capital, and is it sufficient to offer advances?
Here's the thing. Since you've mentioned Samhain, and since Samhain is unarguably one of the most successful epubs, let's talk about how Samhain started.
Samhain was started by a woman named Chrissy Brashear, who'd worked for Ellora's Cave for several years. Thus, when she decided to start her own house, she had plenty of experience. She had plenty of contacts, and brought quite a few big-name authors with her. She had funding; Samhain offered small advances from the start, if memory serves.
Because she'd been with EC, she knew a lot of people who ran review sites etc. She knew where the best places to promote the company were; she had a lot of contacts with people who were happy to talk about the company and help her promote it.
And even with all of that, even with the big splash Samhain seemed to make, it took several years (as far as I'm aware) for their authors to start making real money on their books. And by real money I mean high three figures/low four figure royalty checks.
Not to mention that when Samhain started the market wasn't as saturated as it is now. It's getting harder and harder for a new epublisher to distinguish itself and draw attention, even with big publicity campaigns. Readers buy from epublishers they know and trust; they don't tend to branch out much.
That doesn't mean a new house will automatically fail, just that it's a heck of a lot more likely to, especially if the owners don't have prior epublishing experience. Even if they don't fail, the odds are they'll just limp along, selling perhaps a dozen copies of each title in release month. Check the EREC site for some epublisher sales stats.
New epublishers are just not a good bet. Take a look at the index thread; see all those publishers listed in gray? Those are pretty much all start-up houses, and they pretty much all failed.
Getting published is all well and good, but your goal should be getting published WELL. There's nothing wrong with epublishing; you can be published very well in epublishing. But you need to be with a house that's proven it can deliver readers, and knows how to run its business. In epublishing size really does matter.
