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Penguin Launches Rip-Off Self-Publishing “Service” Targeting Inexperienced...
Penguin has unveiled a self-publishing service – which will operate under the aegis of its online writing community Book Country – but questions are being asked about the huge fees they are charging,...
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How The Agency Model Led To An Antitrust Suit
As reported yesterday, the Department of Justice has filed its antitrust lawsuit against Apple and five of the largest publishers (Macmillan, Penguin, HarperCollins, Hachette, and Simon &...
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Penguin’s New Business Model: Exploiting Writers
I don’t normally post here just to inform you of articles I have written elsewhere, but I think this one is important. Most of you will have heard the news that Penguin’s parent Pearson has purchased...
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Self-Publishers Aren’t Killing The Industry, They’re Saving It
There’s a lot of talk at the moment that cheap books are destroying the industry. In traditional publishing circles especially, fingers are being pointed at self-publishers (and their chief enablers,...
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Simon & Schuster Joins Forces With Author Solutions To Rip Off Writers
Simon & Schuster has launched a self-publishing operation, Archway Publishing, contracting one of the most disreputable players in the business to run the show: Author Solutions. We’ll get to that...
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Penguin’s Solution for Authors: One Racket To Rule Them All
Regular readers of this blog will know all about Penguin’s purchase last July of the universally reviled Author Solutions – a company infamous for overcharging writers, doing a terrible job of...
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Publishers Behaving Badly, Part… I’ve Lost Count
There seems to be a view in certain self-congratulatory circles that publishers have finally got to grips with the digital revolution, that they have weathered the fiercest part of the storm, and that...
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A List of Things Scott Turow Doesn’t Care About
Scott Turow woke up from his slumber recently to bark nonsense about Amazon’s acquisition of Goodreads on the Authors Guild blog, before being thoroughly eviscerated in the comments. Undeterred, Turow...
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The Author Exploitation Business
Writing is a glamorous occupation – at least from the outside. Popular depictions of our profession tend to leave out all the other stuff that comes with the territory: carpal tunnel syndrome, liver...
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The Case Against Author Solutions, Part 1: The Numbers
The more you study an operation like Author Solutions, the more it resembles a two-bit internet scam, except on a colossal scale. Internet scammers work on percentages. They know that only a tiny...
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