Quote:
Originally Posted by Ramen
Well, none of the points raised have been addressed by Alm.
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WordClay hasn't fixed their search engine, either.
Of course, they have no real
reason to fix it. Their customers -- the authors -- undoubtedly have their book pages, or their writer pages they access them through, bookmarked. The search engine is primarily useful for book buyers, and -- as with any vanity press -- they're not the customers at all.
That's what so many people don't get. A while back, when there was a story in the local paper about an author who had "been published" (she paid to have her NaNoWriMo book printed), I worked out how much she'd paid. I think the cheapest options came out to about $600 or so, almost all of which is profit because their pre-press system is essentially the Meatgrinder. Let's say the company makes $5 on each book they sell. An author would have to sell 120 copies of any given book to equal the
least they would pay to the company -- and that's not including the price of fancier covers, revisions to the text, or anything else. So the company could try to sell 120 items, or they could try to sell 1 item. It's more worth their while, in terms of sales, to try to sell one publishing package to an aspiring writer than to try to sell 100+ books to readers ... and, frankly, the majority of self-published books aren't going to sell 100 copies. Or 10 copies.
There can be times when that makes sense. A family matriarch having a cookbook printed, for instance, so everyone can have all her great recipes (I have one of those; she was a cool person, too). I'm working on something that I'll probably pay to get printed because I
know it has utterly no commercial potential (I doubt if even my friends will want to read it) but it's stuck in my head and has to come out, and getting a few copies printed by POD for my own entertainment will be fun. There are people who sell pay-to-play books ... but they do it by putting a
lot of work into the selling end of things, because nobody is going to come looking for books they don't know exist, and people whose market is authors wanting books printed have no incentive at all to look for penny-ante buyers when they can just keep on pitching their services, sometimes to the tune of thousands, to the apparently limitless pool of would-be authors. And personally, in latter case, I'd just pay a printer to print and bind my books from camera-ready copy, and put in a wee bit more work (nothing compared to the marketing) beforehand, which would save a bunch of money.
So I'm not holding my breath waiting for WordClay to fix a search engine which is essentially superfluous for them. Alm could fix those $0$0, though!