Sad decline at iUniverse
I just published my fourth book with iUniverse, and things have gone steadily downhill. The company was purchased by Pearson (Random House, Penguin, etc) to be their do-it-yourself arm. The result is that the new goal of the company has become quite obviously to get as much up front money from the author as possible, then continue to drain the author's wallet with expensive marketing programs. I'm beyond disappointed.
This time around I bought an advanced editorial program just because I've never gone that way and I could afford to give it a shot. The results were fine in that there are no errors that I could find in the book, but I wasted weeks arguing over what the Chicago Manual of Style says about such things as italics and quotation marks. As an English teacher, I know what the rules are and how to bend them, but I decided to go with the flow in order to be considered for the Editor's Choice award. Yeah, I got the award...and when I looked at the list found that there are 1000 titles and the list isn't searchable, so no vendor is ever going to find my book there.
To recap my adventure, I submitted in July and didn't see the book until mid-November. I was right on the ball with every edit, returning the changes within a day. Meanwhile, I was shifted from one account manager to another and repeatedly dunned with surveys that were meaningless since I didn't have the book in hand. To say my responses became moody and angry is an understatement. The marketing department also started calling immediately upon my submission of the original ms back in July, and the rep got testy when I pointed out I wouldn't buy a marketing plan until I'd seen the final product and deemed it worthy of selling. The phone never stopped ringing for five months it took them to birth my baby.
Biggest problem? There is NO coordination among departments.
Biggest disappointment? NO marketing tools included as in the past. I kind of liked the bookmarks, sell sheets and the rest that used to be part of the package. They were nicely done and made it easy for me to market to local shops by just dropping off a free book and a stack of promo materials. No more. Now everything has a hefty price tag. The marketing rep couldn't understand my ire at the delay in printing that cost me the holiday trade I'd been counting on. "People buy books all year." That's what he said. I explained that these are specifically gift-type books and the missed window of opportunity would cost me. His response? Try again next Christmas because "no one will have read it so it will still be a new title." Oh, joy!
End result? A nice enough book--I give them credit for quality--but a cash outlay I'll never recover because it's a small-niche title on which a quarter-page NYT Book Section ad (for a measly $12k) would be wasted.
So it goes. I released a children's book directly to Amazon via KDP and already sold more copies of that than of the iUniverse title. I had to buy a copy of the ebook to check for errors because they don't send one until 8 WEEKS after the title has "gone live", and I put that up on Amazon as well via KDP. It's already sold for Kindle and Nook, so that wasn't much of an issue.
Be forewarned! Unless you have the patience of the proverbial saint and a bank account that allows you some frivolity, this is not the place for you. I'd go with Createspace (Amazon) or straight to Kindle. You're going to do your own marketing anyway, so why add a middleman?
