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Silver Publishing

veinglory

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Sure, putting your name in a book is one thing, but the credit card number? If customers find out that's happening Silver can say farewell to their sales.

I don't think it is, please don't hold my bad memory against this company. I know credit card number imprinted is discussed--I do not by any means know that Silver does it. Can we please acknowledge that all I know about Silver is that your name, as entered during purchase, was at least at some point put on the file. I feel like I am now libelling this press by proxy.

Please note: Silver Publishing does not to my knowledge put credit card numbers on ebooks. I apologise for ever mistakening suggesting this.
 
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Bicyclefish

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veinglory, I know you said now you're not sure "if it was just the real name, or the name plus credit card", but I'm curious where you first heard of the story of a pirate having her cc number on one of Silver's ebooks?

I decided to ask the publisher directly about a rumor that when purchasing their ebooks they print the purchaser's name and credit card number on each page, adding that I find no mention of it on their website. Their reply was that they do not.

At no time whatsoever does your credit card details get printed in the book file or any other document with Silver Publishing as WE DO NOT ask for your credit card details. Debit/Credit transactions are done by our merchant via their website during the checkout process.
It ended with a a request to know where I heard this as it "would be slanderous" to Silver Publishing and "liable to prosecution to the full extent of South African laws". I haven't replied. Legal threats always leave a bad taste in my mouth. Perhaps I should have used a better word than "rumor" to clarify the discussion wasn't stating it as fact.
 
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veinglory

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The pirate was complaining that she sared her real name when she shared the ebook. And I saw her actual posts complaining about it, not hearsay.

And why did you say anything about it actually being slander? I said "I feel like I am now libelling this press by proxy". I feel=my feelings, not the law. So are we now accusing the poor publisher of making legal threats relating to a thread they almost certainly don't even know exists? Wow.

I am going to stop contributing on this thread as I feel the whole thing is now wildly inaccurate and unfair to the publisher in question and I fee bad that I started it in this direction. IMHO everything after my comment should probably be deleted.
 

Bicyclefish

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And why did you say anything about it actually being slander? I said "I feel like I am now libelling this press by proxy". I feel=my feelings, not the law. So are we now accusing the poor publisher of making legal threats relating to a thread they almost certainly don't even know exists? Wow.
I said it's actually slanderous? I called it a "rumor". Silver's email said it "would be slanderous".
 

CaoPaux

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Closing thread for review.

ETA: Reopening for new discussion.
 
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Dee Carney

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Spam or Personal Invite?

This evening I received an email entitled "Contract Offer" from Silver Publishing. At first, I'd figured it for spam because of wording such as "We love M/M Romance Fiction and you have demonstrated a trend of success with your prior releases. Quite simply, you've caught our attention and we want you to be a part of Silver Publishing...As a top selling M/M author, we would like to offer you..."

The only problem is I'm not a M/M author. The icing on the cake is another author (who is a top seller, hands down) who writes M/F also received the same exact email.

The email goes on to detail a very generous author package with stipulations for any submission I would be sending them. I gave Silver a rather terse reply, and the sender did (much nicer than I did) respond that it was an invitation directly from him. This alone saved the email from being posted in full here.

Another author friend received the same email, with slightly better royalty rates, months ago from them. She does write M/M, however.

I'm not sure how I feel about this blanket trolling. I've had editors contact me directly before and I simply can't say I got the same feeling from tonight's email as I have from other editor's emails. It just felt...not right.
 

mlhernandez

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I got one of these through the contact on my website. All of the authors at one of my publishers received the same thing this evening. This is just ridiculous. Most of the authors who received the "contract offer" don't even write M/M!
 

Dee Carney

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I got one of these through the contact on my website. All of the authors at one of my publishers received the same thing this evening. This is just ridiculous. Most of the authors who received the "contract offer" don't even write M/M!

Grrr... This frustrates me. Another friend got the email too. She was excited for a minute because she writes M/M.

Yeah. So I'm back to my original assessment: spam.
 

mlhernandez

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Definitely spam. It's so unprofessional and reeks of desperation.

Don't get me wrong. I've been invited to sub to different publishers by editors before but not like this. Those editors took the time to write a personal email, talked about novellas or short stories I'd written and extended an invite for a direct submission.

They didn't throw out crazy royalty rates or make me an offer they "hope cannot refuse." There was no hard sell.
 

Jamiekswriter

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That spam e-mail is a little worrying. Anyone sold anything with them? Do they pay out as well as these e-mails are implying?
 

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I'm thinking that perhaps they don't make that many sales. They're targeting published authors with a following to get folks to visit their website, thinking that if readers buy one book by X author they'll look around and buy other authors. I don't know that ebook readers will necessarily do that any more - or enough of them. A lot of folks have been burned by poor quality books.

I remember that Carol Lynne was one of the authors on their website when I first looked. She still only has one short story there which given how prolific she is speaks for itself. The short story is also available from a different seller which is the one linked to on her website.
 

michael_b

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I can maybe see why they're so desperate for submissions. According to their release schedule at the bottom of the page they release a book every day. That's a huge volume of titles to bring out. When did they open? I can't remember but didn't they just open this year? They are already 'celebrating their 100th release' this January.
 

KariGregg

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...They're targeting published authors with a following to get folks to visit their website...

I don't think they're "targeting" at all. The email claims to want m/m submissions...But the email was sent, apparently, to any writer with a verifiable pulse. Okay, yes, I'm exaggerating, but I'm aggravated. Which is sad because I do write m/m and I'm not opposed to submitting to other publishers, either. I just won't be subbing to this one because the spammy insincere flattery pissed me off. I already have 2 wonderful publishers who have a genuine interest in me and my work. Why on earth would I send in something to a publisher that demonstrably has so little interest that they can't (or won't) differentiate between m/f and m/m writers? Epic fail. Huge.
 
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Bah. I didn't receive a spam email. Does that mean my writing really sucks? And I write M/M, too! Okay, so it's not published yet, but give it a fortnight...

*awaits spam*
 

smlgr8

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Hmm...well, I have a Christmas story out with them right now and as far as I know, which I certainly could be wrong, the story every day was for their 25 days of Christmas.

I didn't receive the email, obviously since I already have a book out with them, and don't really know anything about it, but I can say from what I have seen their sales are not terrible. I do write m/m and am not a newbie (and make quite a bit from my sales at all my other publishers) and the reason I went there was because I happen to have Christmas story idea that fit, but their stories, at least m/m, are consistently top sellers at All Romance Ebooks and Amazon for those genres.

I haven't gotten any royalties yet and don't think I will probably submit anything else there, mostly because I'm happy where I am for other publishers.

I do agree the email spams are rather bizarre.
 
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I see from their website they're only after M/M just now anyway, and not everything I write is M/M. In fact I'm overwhelmingly heterosexual, if that doesn't sound weird. :ROFL:
 

michael_b

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Hmm...well, I have a Christmas story out with them right now and as far as I know, which I certainly could be wrong, the story every day was for their 25 days of Christmas.

That's still a huge commitment to make and forces them to 'feed the release beast' at a rate most long established publishers wouldn't try and tackle, much less a one that's been open less than a year.
 

smlgr8

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That's still a huge commitment to make and forces them to 'feed the release beast' at a rate most long established publishers wouldn't try and tackle, much less a one that's been open less than a year.

Certainly but they aren't the only Epub that publishes M/M doing it. Dreamspinner Press does a Christmas story every day kinda thing every year, including, I believe, the first year they were in business.

Whatever the case, I do know they go through several rounds of editing there and their sales from what I know have been decent for a new publisher.
 
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michael_b

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Certainly but they aren't the only Epub that publishes M/M doing it. Dreamspinner Press does a Christmas story every day kinda thing every year, including, I believe, the first year they were in business.

Dreamspinner only publishes m/m, they are not a multi-pairing publisher like Silver. Also, I wasn't commenting on Dreamspinner, I was commenting on Silver. And what Dreamspinner does is an Advent Calender where ALL the stories are available as s single download for a larger sum of money than would be paid for a typical anthology. The idea there is to read them one per day until Christmas day, but all the books come out together. They are also made available individually for those readers who can't afford or don't want the entire set.

Example: http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/store/index.php?cPath=62_359

FYI: As an aside, at Dreamspinner you can easily see how many ebooks have sold by clicking on the book's buy link to any of their available formats. It shows the number of sales sold per format, for those of you who didn't know that. (I found this out by accident when I was looking their site over.)
 

smlgr8

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Michael, I am well aware of which publisher you were commenting on. Thanks.

I have actually had experience with both pubishers as well as others so I was merely using them as an example of others who have released many books in a single month. I am not disputing that 100 books in a short period is unusual.

As for going exclusively M/M, I think they are planning on opening to M/F again at some point in 2011, and my knowledge of that is only related to what I have seen on their author loop as I have no real connection with them other than to have a very short story out that just released in December.