It's a weird mix of agenting and self-publishing but there's no information on agents they've helped set up authors with or commercial publishers they have helped get publishing deals with. There's also a certain degree of misinformation on the site about how commercial publishing works, which could be suggested to encourage people to go down the self-publishing route, e.g.:
Author Agency Website:
Advances are modest for new authors who do not have an established following
Not true. A mate of mine got a USD 50,000 one book deal from Harper Collins and he has no following at all, another friend of mine for a USD400,000 2 book deal a few years ago (again, debut novel with no following).
Author Agency Website:
Marketing is often the authors responsibility, as stated in most contracts
Authors should always be prepared to get involved, but even new authors will find their publishers do a certain amount of marketing for them - even if it's just arranging printing of stuff like bookmarks etc.
Author Agency Website:
If your books don’t sell after the initial launch, they’ll be off bookshelves within months
That depends on how bad the sales are.
Author Agency Website:
The publisher can take your book out of print whenever they want to
No, the terms on which a book can go out of print will be set out in the contract and usually tied into a rights reversion to the author.
Author Agency Website:
If your book does bad, and you wanted to write a second but your publisher won’t publish it, getting another deal is almost impossible with bad sales.
This depends on how bad the sales are versus the advance paid to the author. If a publisher paid a fortune for a book and it tanked, then yes, getting a deal for another book will be harder (but then, you did get paid a fortunate up front). The truth is that a book would have to do spectacularly badly to deny you the chance of another deal because in general, most publishers make money from books even if the books don't go into royalties for the author.
Basically, this looks to be a pay to play outfit with an agent submission service tagged on (which I don't see any benefit of). Why on earth would you want to submit a manuscript there?
MM