Profit Engine: The Author Solutions Markup – from Writer Beware

Writer Beware is a site you should bookmark! Sponsored by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc., the goal of the site is to shine a bright light on the scams and bad practices that prey on the unwary writer.  Victoria Strauss looks a little deeper into the Author Solutions sale by Penguin and why smart writers might want to avoid them. Originally posted January 15, 2016.

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Profit Engine: The Author Solutions Markup

As most of you already know, Penguin Random House dumped Author Solutions at the end of 2015, selling it to a private equity firm for an undisclosed amount. (“A Penguin Random House Company” has already vanished from Author Solutions’ logo.)

The sale received quite a bit of media coverage, at least some of which acknowledged AS’s troubled reputation–something else that won’t be new to you if you’re a regular reader of this blog.

One of the areas that I and others have often criticized is AS’s huge range of marketing services, which are aggressively pitched to authors who sign up for publishing packages. Most of these services are dubiously useful (email blasts), jawdroppingly expensive (book signings at book fairs), or both (cinema advertising). Basically, they’re the equivalent of liquor at a restaurant: relatively inexpensive to deliver, but extremely profitable because of the enormous markup at which they can be sold. (AS executives have actually admitted, in depositions related to class action lawsuits brought against AS, that selling books is not one of the goals of AS’s marketing services.)

What’s the actual markup, though? How much difference is there between the price for which AS sells a service, and AS’s cost to deliver it?

Here’s an example. One of my readers drew my attention to this recent ad on Craigslist, in which Author Solutions seeks “freelance coverage writers” to “read self-published books and provide detailed, coherent coverage on the work’s potential for film/television/digital adaptation.”

Read the full post on Writer Beware

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