[YADS] Inkitt

Tor has an open submissions policy. You don't need an agent for them to read, and possibly buy, your book.

Anyone else read the comments from Ali and Erin Swann on the Writer Beware post and think of how unnatural and press release spammy they seem? Erin doesn't even feel like a real person the way it reads.

Or maybe I'm being overly cynical.

They actually tweeted another publisher today asking about publishing a novel with them. It seems like they just randomly tweet without a care in the world. Annoying, that's for sure.

Inkitt is apparently running a contest wherein you submit a book, they publish your book, in full, on their website and "crowdsource" the selection-for-publication-process. From reading Jim C. Hines' Twitter, they apparently don't believe this affects first rights in any way because they don't see publishing it on a website (again, in full) as "publishing" it. Smh. JCH's done a nice blog post on it here - http://www.jimchines.com/2016/05/inkitts-publishing-contest/

The contest is here - https://www.inkitt.com/grand?ref=v_3450d920-5866-4f9d-9f5d-9eb689d7c3f2

Mr. Hines' Twitter conversation with Inkitt is here - https://twitter.com/jimchines/status/735809660821725184

There's a discussion about the Hines article on another forum, and someone said first rights aren't that important any more. I'm coming to this from the assumption that first rights are still important, but I was just wondering whether there's anything current to read up on the subject. I'm certainly not going to throw mine away, but I'm getting some mixed messages about it from people involved in the display site scene (mostly Wattpad) and really wanted to set the record straight. (Mostly because I end up giving advice on the subject to new writers.)

LouiseStanley said:

There's a discussion about the Hines article on another forum, and someone said first rights aren't that important any more. I'm coming to this from the assumption that first rights are still important, but I was just wondering whether there's anything current to read up on the subject. I'm certainly not going to throw mine away, but I'm getting some mixed messages about it from people involved in the display site scene (mostly Wattpad) and really wanted to set the record straight. (Mostly because I end up giving advice on the subject to new writers.)

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A work I have up on Wattpad that I'm doing an R&R on with a publisher and they don't seem to be concerned. I'm not concerned.

A friend worked with a Big 5 publisher and she said they aren't concerned about sites like Wattpad. Last summer Harlequin ran a contest on Wattpad.

As for anything to read up on, I haven't seen anything recent.

Anna204 said:

A work I have up on Wattpad that I'm doing an R&R on with a publisher and they don't seem to be concerned. I'm not concerned.

A friend worked with a Big 5 publisher and she said they aren't concerned about sites like Wattpad. Last summer Harlequin ran a contest on Wattpad.

As for anything to read up on, I haven't seen anything recent.

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Yeah, I saw your post on the Wattpad thread - which is why I asked here . Because a number of people have said that about Wattpad, and so I wondered whether it also applied more broadly to other display sites, and to blogs. I do know from query streaming on Twitter agents still tend to reject self-published books, so there seems to be a line drawn somewhere.

Putting work up on a display site or a publicly available (i.e. not password protected) blog or forum is considered publishing and can kill first rights. Posting excerpts or first drafts is less damaging. (And many, though not all, folks use Wattpad as a kind of beta-reader hub - posting work in progress, then revising based on response.)

Anything that is exceptionally good or exceptionally popular will probably still have a good chance of being picked up, even if first rights are gone. It's all the rest that will receive polite rejections due to being already published.

With Inkitt, they are not only blowing your first rights by publishing your entire work online, but they are also attempting to sell it to publishers which burns other bridges. (Once a MS is rejected by a pub, that's it unless you have a very persuasive agent who can put it in front of a different editor.) Not to mention the spammy approach in trying to drive folks to their "contest" and the overall low quality of work they are attracting.

I would not want my MS in the middle of it.

All based on the assumption that algorithms are better. Just because.

Sigh.

'We have maths and statistics we don't understand! We spam people like it's 1999! Trust us with your book!'

Filigree said:

'We have maths and statistics we don't understand! We spam people like it's 1999! Trust us with your book!'

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I think it's more a situation of a developer understanding the math just fine and not understanding how to apply it to real problem-solving. So a symptom of teaching lots and lots of entrepreneurial coding and not a whole lot of critical thinking. I almost feel bad for them, as they're just trying to experiment, but for some reason this kind of experimentation never comes with much research first, and it always seems to involve an inability to listen to feedback.

I could rant for awhile. Don't mind me.

Aggy B. said:

Putting work up on a display site or a publicly available (i.e. not password protected) blog or forum is considered publishing and can kill first rights. Posting excerpts or first drafts is less damaging. (And many, though not all, folks use Wattpad as a kind of beta-reader hub - posting work in progress, then revising based on response.)

Anything that is exceptionally good or exceptionally popular will probably still have a good chance of being picked up, even if first rights are gone. It's all the rest that will receive polite rejections due to being already published.

With Inkitt, they are not only blowing your first rights by publishing your entire work online, but they are also attempting to sell it to publishers which burns other bridges. (Once a MS is rejected by a pub, that's it unless you have a very persuasive agent who can put it in front of a different editor.) Not to mention the spammy approach in trying to drive folks to their "contest" and the overall low quality of work they are attracting.

I would not want my MS in the middle of it.

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Thank you, Aggy, for the clarification. Wattpad is also log-in-to-view too, which presumably helps, although the marketing is 'books on the internet', but that's off-topic in this thread.

@VBB - it also feeds into concerns about automation that every profession ever (or so it seems) has had (cue posts on 'next the computers will be writing books based on an algorithm'). Not brilliant for confidence there, even if it's not something to be overly worried about.

We keep seeing slight variations on this theme: someone not trained in publishing (but often in marketing, coding, engineering, etc) decides 'Publishing is broken!' and 'We know how to fix it!' Then they launch a publishing related business without really understanding modern publishing, or three of its core truths:

People write a lot of crap. Given the availability of free or almost free display platforms, people will post a lot of crap. Many other people will not be able to tell the difference between crap, medium-level work, and outstanding work. (Wattpad, though I love it for its possibilities, is also the same type of giant oozing slushpile as Tumblr, FF.net, Etsy, and DeviantArt. Some gems in all of them, but hard work to find them.) I don't trust crowdsourced popularity contests because they tend to skew toward the lowest common denominator as far as work quality.

So most of these 'new style' publishing aggregators will end up pushing product that might be popular according to one narrow metric, but isn't great. Because they are reader-and-view-vote-focused, they're also prone to chasing writing trends instead of spotting them. (YA dystopias being a great current example.)

The rare success stories coming out of the display sites are outliers, not the norm.

It reminds me of people who say writing a romance novel is easy. They think they can churn one out in a week, post it to Amazon and rake in millions. Thing is, the people who do it well make it look easy because A)they've been doing it for years and have experience or B)there's a whole lot of behind the scenes stuff going on that an outsider will never be privy to.

fwiw, there's an interview with one of the people behind Inkitt on this edition of BBC Radio 4's Open Book. The segment starts at about 8:05, runs for three minutes and is mostly about the way in which Inkitt analyses reading data. It ends with this exchange:

Ali Albazaz (Inkitt): ...In total, at the moment, we are looking at one thousand two hundred different behavioural patterns.

Mariella Frostrup (host): And can I just ask you, if you're reading on Inkitt do you know that your reading patterns are being analysed?

AA: They go there because they can read really, really good books and the tracking that we do is a hundred per cent anonymously. So...

MF: So the answer is no, you don't know that your reading patterns are being analysed.

AA: It's also like we're not storing your name, so it doesn't really matter. I mean, as long as we're not saving your name and we don't know who you are, I think that's totally fine.

MF: Thank you very much, Ali Albazaz. Food for thought indeed.

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Heh, I can just picture Mariella's face! (sadly I don't know her, but she's on TV over here quite a bit).

She certainly didn't sound impressed!

Inkitt.com

Any information on this outfit?

I'm not sure what they do. They seem to say they are a publisher / agent.

Their website is not accessible without first signing up.

Thanks

JJ

Thread on Inkitt here.

General gist: Display site with serial spammers on payroll who have no idea how publication rights work.

Thanks for this info. Getting my barge pole out.

JJ

Pole away.

Eh, they've just spammed me on twitter. I used the #amwriting tag a grand total of twice. Overreaching much?

Just got spammed by them after commenting on the Queryshark blog (no connection, they're just harvesting names from there now apparantly). Ughhhh. "Marvin Wey" was the name they used too.