Originally, the offer was to be an investment, of mine, of around 1400 dollars, but they made an offer to me of around 600. I told them I wouldn't pay the fee, and I am in the works of negotiating with them, but now I'm having second thoughts. They shouldn't have asked for a fee in the first place, and even if I end up not having to pay it, it makes me wonder.
It should. A publisher that wants to charge you a fee of any kind--whether cash upfront or in the form of purchases you have to make--is either a vanity publisher or a self-publishing endeavor. Since A-Argus so strenuously denies being a self-publishing service, that leaves vanity publisher.
Vanity publishing
is never a good idea for writers.
I've seen a copy of A-Argus's contract. It levies a fee of less than $1,000 (don't want to say exactly how much in case it identifies the person who sent it to me), with reimbursement promised after the sale of 1,000 copies. Given this publisher's apparently minimal marketing and distribution capacity, I'd say the odds of achieving this level of sales is pretty slim--especially since, unusually, A-Argus prohibits the re-sale of author-purchased copies. Making author purchases less attractive is likely to put the 1,000 reimbursement threshold even farther out of reach.
The contract is an all-rights contract, even though there's no evidence that A-Argus has any mechanisms in place to sell, license, or exploit the subrights it wants to keep. It's also a life-of-copyright contract, with inadequate reversion provisions (there is no definition of when or how the work is to be taken out of print). Royalties are paid on "net price," without any definition of what "net price" actually means. The author must deliver the work "in final form," (which looks to me to mean "ready for print," which would suggest that the publisher does no editing), and the publisher has up to 3 years in which to publish (much too long--12 or 18 months is more standard).
As to A-Argus's email to Waid--
They claim to mail out review copies. This is all very well, but not very useful if they can't command enough notice to actually get reviews. Check their website listings for their books, the authors' websites if they have them, and the listings for their books on Amazon. Can you find any reviews? If they aren't successful in getting their other books reviewed, it's not very likely they'll get yours reviewed either.
As far as I know there is no such thing as either a "Barnes & Noble search for the Next Great Author contest," or an "Amazon Booksellers contest for best seller." Barnes & Noble does have a Discover Great New Writers Award, so perhaps this is what they mean. And Amazon has a Breakthrough Novel Award, but it's for unpublished manuscripts, not published books, and you can enter it yourself.
Ingram and Baker & Taylor are wholesalers, not distributors. Wholesalers provide warehousing and fulfillment services for publishers--i.e., they have the books in stock, or print them to order if the publisher is using digital technology, and ship them in response to orders. Distributors also stock and ship--plus, they have a sales staff to sell the books directly into stores. Without that direct sales component, it's unlikely that stores will even know your book exists, much less stock it on their shelves. While a lot of books are bought online, for volume sales you need a balance of online and offline availability, so shelf presence is extremely important.
One of the ways that stealth vanity publishers (as opposed to straightforward ones that simply quote you a fee) do to divert your attention from the fact that you're being asked to pay is to tell you that they're not a vanity publisher because vanity publishers "charge several thousand dollars." This is nonsense. A fee is a fee, whether it's $10,000 or $500.
In my opinion, you'd be better off with Lulu or a similar self-publishing service than with an amateurish vanity publisher that wants you to believe it's not a vanity publisher--you'll probably pay less, you'll definitely get a better contract, you'll likely receive more reliable service, and you'll experience about the same level of marketing and distribution. Plus, you won't get a lot of crap about how they aren't actually what your gut instinct tells you they are.
- Victoria