Hi everyone. I am Sundeep Parhar, MD of New Dawn Publishers, and after finding out about this thread I decided to come and clear a few things up.
I can assure people that, while our website may at first glance appear to be geared towards attracting authors rather than readers, we do put all the effort we can into getting our authors' books out there in the marketplace. With the competition we're running, every author we publish, at least 100 writers in all, will all be paid for their work- through royalties rather than with advance payments, but
no-one offers advance payments when publishing anthologies. And given that major retailers have already expressed interest in stocking the competition's anthologies, those potential royalty payments shouldn't be scoffed at.
Also worth mentioning is that I haven't been a member of firstwriter.com for at least a year, and the publishers' profile cited is now out of date. We no longer charge fees in any circumstances- and to clarify the term 'performance-based bonuses', it refers to our policy of increasing the royalties we pay our authors once a specified number of copies have been sold.
For the competition, it is also worth mentioning that entries are being judged continuously even now. The cover designs of the anthologies themselves has already been carried out, advertising and marketing will begin months beforehand, and all that we will actually need to do in the eighteen days after we stop taking entries (or probably a fortnight, if we take into account how long postal entries will take to get to us) is just the printing and distribution of the anthologies.
Something else from which several people seem to have derived entirely the wrong impression, and perhaps understandably so, was our prior statement that-
...if you have the qualifications in, or relating to the field of Creative Writing, or you're currently working towards getting them, that's enough.
I acknowledge that this was somewhat misleading, and the statement has now been changed to clarify matters. Of course, not every person who takes a creative writing degree will be capable of writing a good novel, and we don't want anyone to get the impression that we will publish anyone who sends their work to us so long as they're a student or a graduate. Every author who submits their work to us will 'get the chance they deserve', but they have to deserve that chance to get it. It's also worth bearing in mind that not every person who has a literary agent will have a publishable book either. Terie, I agree that you don't have to have qualifications to have talent, but talent undoubtedly makes it easier to obtain qualifications; and as for the other part, isn't improving your skills supposed to be what higher education is all about?
Momento Mori- I sincerely apologise if you were angered or frustrated by our website, and you brought a number of points forward which needed to be answered. We didn't intend to give the impression that publishing will write off all your student debts (
especially not in the U.K nowadays, after the tuition fee hike), but surely the added income would help towards it? The statement-
'...both publishers and authors lose more royalties that way'
-was poorly worded, and written with the idealistic view that, with the royalties divided between two parties, we would have a moral obligation to pay the author higher royalties to compensate for this. Of course, you'd be hard-pressed to find any for-profit publisher that would think that way, that would give the author's lower effective royalties a second thought; but I'd very much like to count our publishing house as one of the few ones that would.
As you can see, we have only found two novels worthy of putting into print so far. As such, with our short list of titles, we don't need the added incentive of having cash tied up in a novel to do all we can to make it a success. Many people have already drawn attention to the fact that I have already completed a novel myself, and that that novel,
Turbulence, is still unpublished. If I wanted to, I could have published it myself, through my own publishing house- but New Dawn Publishers is not a glorified self-publisher, or a vanity publisher. We're not saying that publishing is broken, or that the system doesn't work; we're just saying that another system, our system, has a chance of working as well.
