This is not a public meltdown, as much as you would like that. It is merely me calling you on some BS statements you made about our company. BS statements that you constantly avoid dealing with or backing up. No more smoke and mirrors. Either tell everyone here where we lied about using POD or provide some meaningful evidence of author censoring. Or hey, I will cut you some slack, just some meaningful tidbit of a publisher behaving badly.
I've already explained to you my comment about your using or not using POD. I was as clear as I could be, and I even quoted the comments which led me to my conclusions. What else, precisely, do you require from me on this point?
I'm interested: why do you find the suggestion that you don't use POD so upsetting? I've explained to you the problems that I see with POD, because of its negative impact on sales: what is it about this business model that you consider so advantageous to publishers, writers or readers?
Moving on, I've already explained to you why I made my comment about censoring people. I'll quote it here to make the discussion easier to follow:
More worryingly, this publisher seems to have told some of the people posting in this thread to delete their comments. It would be better if the publisher had debated the points he didn't agree with, rather than censoring people: would you want to work with someone who thinks he has the right to tell you what you can and can't say in public? I wouldn't.
As I've said before, I was referring there to the comment at #29 on page 2 of this thread, which was written by a member called brianclegg, who then deleted that comment with a note, "Reason:
Requested by publisher".
You then came along and said,
We have not censored or asked any author not to post or to delete any post.
With a little light Googling I discovered
this negative review of a Severed Press book which says, among other things, that...
it is desperately crying out for a good professional edit...
There's a strong similarity between the reviewer's name and the name of the user who claims to have deleted his post here on your request. So while it might well be true that you "have not censored or asked any author not to post or to delete any post", it might also be true that you asked this reviewer to delete his post here.
If you did, it could be because you've since resolved some of the issues he found with your book, which he mentions in the review:
If you get a first edition of the book, the text is laid out very amateurishly (it just screams ‘self published’, although supposedly this has been in the hands of a publisher) with nowhere near enough white space or paragraph formatting. Now this has been significantly improved – the layout is much better.
I can understand why you'd prefer to have a review removed if it referred to problems which have now been resolved (although only some of the problems mentioned in the review were dealt with).
But even if that does explain what happened, you've still asked someone to delete their post here: and that really isn't appropriate.
I'd really like it if we could discuss things here, rather than arguing. It would be far more productive, and it would show your company in a much more positive light. But for that to happen you have to stop getting angry; and you have to recognise that it's fine for people to ask questions and offer their opinions and share their experiences.
