That whole page is a sodding mess. A couple things popped out at me:
Average of less than 15% bookstore return rates which are then restocked for resale, offered to the authors, or donated to Habitat for Humanity
There is no way a publisher can make those kinds of claims with any consistency unless there's some footsie going on. Ingram Publisher Services is about getting books on store shelves, just like every other distributor. If the national accounts don't pre-order titles, most of the orders end up at Ingram Warehousing, where they are available for orders from Amazon, or any bookstore or library.
But here's a fun fact. They're supposed to buy the books after 90 days. Of course they don't want to do that, so they bundle up the lot and send them back to the publisher's distributor, after which they issue a purchase order on those very same books. So the publisher is paying for numerous round trips.
Now I have no idea how much in bed IPS is with the warehouse side, but it wouldn't be a wild guess that IPS clients' books aren't sent back, thus making the claim that the publisher suffers very few returns. I have no idea if that's the case, but sitting where I do, it's not beyond the realm of possibility.
Of course, Jim pointed out the silliest one about authors being expected to buy their own books. I'm but a wee company and even we would never make that demand. Silly.
Over $60,000 of co-operative marketing monies is made available to the authors on every book published
Let's not forget that the author paid some of the highest fees in the book vanity world, so I should hope they'd get something for all that money.
But what does that 60K mean? Are they actually spending that much on the marketing of each title, or is this the sum of salaries of those indie contractors who work on MJ's marketing efforts? I'm painfully familiar with one of their marketing people, and she charges a small fortune for absolutely zero results.
Authors become part of our trademarked Entrepreneurial Vision Mastermind to establish the best future for title
Is this is a lot of gobbledegook that means "we include your promotional ideas"? They claim that publisher takes over and makes all decisions. I don't know of a single publisher - big or small - who ignores an author's promo plan and works with them to enhance that plan. The idea is to make the book as successful as possible, and the publisher is creating the national footprint while the author works on the local one. How is this "taking over"?
Authors are treated as valuable partners in the process and are the most important member of the mastermind group created for each project accepted
Why does this tired and ragtag consistently rear its ugly head? The old, "we're soooo much nicer than those other guys," is as moldy as my meatloaf. And it's simply not true. I speak to far too many authors at writer's conferences who have been pubbed by mainstream, both big and small, and each of them felt their voice was heard and welcomed through every phase of production.
In short, I cringe when I see stuff like this because like nearly every vanity site I stumble across, they're very good at one thing; making themselves look like the Second Coming. Reality? Eh, as far as they're concerned, it's way overrated.