And the "work for us" page. If you can't pay anybody for the hours of work you're expecting out of them, you
seriously need to rethink your business plan.
ETA: Especially if you're still raising funds through
Patreon and
Kickstarter (the link goes to a draft page that isn't live), and asking for general donations through Paypal. So they're actively raising funds for a venture they hope to open this October while simultaneously soliciting submissions for said venture to release
the same day the business goes live.
Patreon timeline shows this:
- Patreon went live in October 2016 (only one pledge since).
- Calls for submissions went out in March 2017.
- This (supposedly) will give them time to get five anthologies ready for opening day in October 2017.
Seriously. There is so much
wrong with that line of thinking (and I should know: I've gone into business for myself underfunded and it's not fun).
The way we will run the business will be by slowly (probably no more than twelve to twenty-four full-length books per year for the first two years, including the anthologies) accruing and curating diverse titles for our lines.
That word does not mean what you think it means. And twelve to twenty-four books a year with no guarantee of funding in place for even the first year of operation is a disaster waiting to happen for all parties involved.
We don't want to overextend ourselves because we really want this business to last. So that it can do what it's been designed to do and make diverse stories available.
Of course, if we get to the point through the generosity of our patrons to earn a subsistence living at doing this, we'll be able to put more books out, much faster.
It doesn't work that way. In this day and age of crowdfunding, you cannot rely on the proverbial kindness of strangers. Like anything else online, you're drowning in a sea of noise and if there's no way to boost your signal to be heard over everybody else, it's hopeless.
As mentioned above, they seem to have admirable goals but they're going about everything
all wrong. To successfully operate a business, they need the capital in place first to cover initial expenses before they can move on to their objective: to get the product out there. Again, this just has "disaster" written all over it and I honestly, truly hope I'm proven wrong.
