Sheesh, I go away for a couple of hours and miss the whole pie fight. Not fair!
IntelligentWriter, you've been busted by the head honcho of AW. We know you're no more Preston Browne than I'm Halle Berry, so move past that.
The flounce lacked professionalism, but we can let that go.
The main point is no one from ParaDon replied to any of the questions posed in my first post on the company.
Lashing out on the Internet about how awful AW is won't do you any good. It will only show a continued lack of professionalism and chase off potential customers.
Yours is not a "new" thing in publishing. Yours a remarkably old thing that is often attempted by failed writers. When they can't interest a legacy publisher in their work they bitch about the unfairness of it all and complain that agents won't give them a chance--anything but admit that their writing might need more work.
So they open their own house. Larry Clopper of PublishAmerica (look up that rat hole on Google) did the same thing, bad grammar and all.
You're inviting writers to send you 25.00 to read their stories. I'm sure there will be a few just dumb enough to do that. AW's job is to let the rest know it's a bad choice.
Unless the questions are addressed--who are your editing staff and their qualifications, who are your cover artists, show samples of their work, what are your distribution channels, etc.--then we've little choice but to conclude you've indulged in rather a lot of exaggeration to make the company seem more than it is.
But that reading fee and the poor grammar were the red flags that tipped off everyone.
For what it's worth, self-publishing, thanks to free venues like Kindle and RARE success stories like Amanda Hocking, is losing its bad rep. Yes, it's still a haven for slush pile rejections, but others have made it work and turned a profit.
I expect you've put considerable work into your website--with the exception of proofreading and grammar checks--and are spamming as many resource sites as you can find on Google.
But the fact stands: you're an amateur with no real resume and expect others with even less experience to pay you 25.00 to read their work.
Quit now and get a real job. You want to learn about publishing? Work for a publisher.
But polish up those grammar skills. More than once it's been noted that English is apparently a second language for you. Fix that. Plenty of others have.