I find it a little hard to summon any massive outrage on this basis:
The last time I blogged about the Author Solutions subsidiary iUniverse, I highlighted a typical marketing move. Just before Christmas last year, iUniverse mailed their existing customers with a very special “deal” where they offered to turn their print books into e-books and upload them to the various retailers for free. The catch was that customers would then have to fork over 50% of their royalties from every single sale to iUniverse. Needless to say, formatting and uploading is a trivial task. For those unable to do it themselves, that service can be purchased for a nominal up-front fee, leaving a writer’s royalties intact.
50 percent of their sales? Hmmm. Looking back at my original Simon and Schuster contract, it appears that they took 93 percent of my sales in mass market paperback. While I don’t use any Author Solutions services and never have, I fail to see how their overpriced services are any more abusive than the way conventional publishers have been treating the vast majority of their authors for decades.
Most of the publishing industry is set up specifically to exploit writers. That’s the stone cold reality. Castalia House isn’t, but then, as the shambling shoggoths will readily testify, we are extremists very far outside the pale of the mainstream publishing industry.