Interactive Press / Glass House Books / Interactive Publications Pty Ltd

Website

I'm a bit concerned about this publisher. They're an Australian setup, and they're doing a publicity event in my town next month. In particular I don't like this: http://ipoz.biz/guide.htm. Scroll down to where they start talking about reading fees, and further down to where they mention 'partnership agreements', which looks like vanity publishing to me.

My summation is that this is a company that has a couple of 'famous names' as a veneer for a vanity setup; there doesn't seem to be any division between the royalty arm and the vanity arm, either.

Also the majority of the covers are terrible.

I'd be grateful for any opinions on this, even for some experienced eyes just to look over the website.

Oh, and the number of outfits telling poor writers that they can be published on Amazon, and then taking money off them for converting a word document to html and uploading it! Makes me want to start throwing things.

Yup - since landing in Oz I've pretty much depended on my Kindle. Book prices are horrendous here.

I tried to support my local independent bookshop, but when I asked them to get a UK book for me, and they quoted me a price that was twice that of buying it on Amazon (shipping included), I gave up.

I'm glad a few people agree that this 'publisher' is probably a vanity outlet. There were a few more things that concerned me - the cost of entering that competition, for one thing, (and did you see that if you enter the same MS in more than one category, you pay the full amount again?) plus where they say that 2/3 of their online visitors are from overseas. I think what they're doing is looking at the data and counting every spider program from Russia as a 'visitor'. Whether that's deliberate or because they don't understand how to assess IP addresses is hard to say.

Anyway, looks like I'm going to do a session for the local arts group on the pitfalls of the publishing industry. Maybe I'll be able to prevent a few people falling for scamsters.