We received a complaint about the terms this company offers contributors so we decided to check it out.
You’ve likely seen the hundreds (perhaps thousands?) of ads posted on the Internet by Examiner.com, which seems to perpetually need writers. You can bet that anyone posting this many help wanted ads is offering really, really low pay.
This Week:
Ordinarily, you read WritersWeekly for tips about how to make money. This is a cautionary tale that may help you keep more of your earnings. Last year, I discovered that I need a business license to write at home.
Swine Flu. Oh, joy. The bane of my recent sleepless nights and new gray eyebrows (seriously – that’s the only place I can see gray hair!).
My POD Best Practices articles series states that POD publishers “should not do business of any kind under a false name.”
A reader notified me last week about a website that appeared to be set up to help authors find the best “indie publisher” for their book…
This Week:
When it comes to submitting a query, article, manuscript or poem, I’ve broken every rule. My problem stems from my elementary school days. I was told by teachers and friends that I could write. I made my best friend, Josephine, weep over my love stories. My first grade teacher marched our whole class into the third and fourth grade classroom to read my story about the birthday party. (True, it was only a small international school with combined classes.)
Six months ago, the credit crunch seriously hit my writing income. I’d made the fatal mistake of ‘putting all my eggs in one basket’. That ‘basket’ – a women’s weekly – changed its format and no longer needed the well researched features I’d been supplying.
Last week, I told you the road was clear and that we could get to our land in Western Maine. Despite having a terrible cold, with a cough I can’t seem to shake (no, it’s not Pertussis), we drove to our land on Saturday. It was a perfectly beautiful Spring day! The sun was shining, the birds were singing, and the trees on the mountain, while still pretty bare, had tiny buds that you had to squint to see. The stream was gurgling from the recent snow melt and Max and Mason tossed in one pebble after another.
There are lots of snakes in the Print on Demand (POD) industry. While most companies charge too much, way too much, there are a few that offer good services at reasonable prices. Some of those even offer reasonable customer service!
This week, we are consolidating the entire list from Part I, Part II, and Part III.
But, first, I need to rant. Being a POD publisher myself, I hear from authors who have been ripped off by other POD publishers on almost a daily basis. Some of their stories make me sick. From elderly authors who were convinced to give more and more and more of their retirement money to the POD publisher (who knew all along that person’s memoirs would likely never sell more than a few copies to family members), to authors who paid thousands when they could have paid hundreds to a better POD publisher, to authors who were forced to pay hundreds to fix the POD publisher’s own mistakes, to authors who gave up rights to their current and future books to a company that pretended to be a “traditional publisher” but who was just another form of vanity publisher, preying on authors and hoping they would buy more and more and more books.
