This is relevant to the discussion, since EP is listed on the first post as a publisher of erotica.
I do not recommend Eirelander Publishing. I've had personal experience with them under a different pen name, back in 2010 - 2011.
At first everything was fine. I did a few levels of editing, the first level was for a "redundancy check" IIRC. After it was finished, I never heard from them again until a year later. Seriously. And my ebook was due to be released about six months
before that.
While the previous editor was good and knew a lot of stuff, she
did make a couple of mistakes with grammar; unless that was the epub's particular "house" style.
When the new editor (
and owner of EP) finally got hold of me, she rushed out the ebook not long afterward, complete with horrible cover (I make better covers than that within fifteen minutes). When I read the inside content, it looked like she'd published the
unedited and unrevised version, because I distinctly remember the edited version read so much better than this one.
Anyhow, I made a total of - $20 royalty over the lifetime of the ebook. Could've been because of the bad cover. Could've been because of the poor editing/writing.
I only know that the ebook sold about
24 copies at first, for a 5,000 word story, overpriced @
$4.99. Royalties? A grand spanking total of
$12. If I'd just done it myself and sold the same ebook on Kindle at that price, I could've made around $42. However, I'm glad to have made the owner a little richer. *sarcasm* Not that I'm really bitter about it; I'm just glad I learned a lesson. Now I'm smarter, more wary and
a lot less naive.
To compare, for my first self-published ebook--for
.99--under a new pen name, I've made
$122 + in the space of 7 weeks, for an ebook of the
same length and genre, and have sold nearly
350 copies so far. And it took 4 days to write/edit/revise/format and publish, instead of a year (normally it does take me longer to write/edit/revise; I was esp. efficient at the time I pubbed this ebook). I also plan to release another 3 ebooks within 3 months (1 novel, 1 novella and 1 novelette; all finished but need polished).
So glad I'd learned my lesson about bad publishers, that way I won't give any more of my books away---for free. I work too damn hard to receive virtual peanuts in return... just to make someone else more $$.
Furthermore, if I ever ran my own epublishing company, I'd never,
ever gyp my writers in such a way. I wouldn't be able to sleep at night, knowing I pocketed at least $30 while one of my authors received $12 for something
they'd written. It's pathetic IMHO. Not to mention spending a moment to create an embarrassingly bad cover (for free), then slapping it on the author's work. I'd never do that either. I'd ensure the author's book had a better cover than my
own.
I
do have a "start-up micro epub. company", BUT it's
not live nor open for submissions (and it states as much on the 'Submissions' page), and possibly never will be live. I'd
never go "live" until I
knew for a fact I had a hired staff of industry professionals (truly pro editors, artists, etc.),
and I knew what I was doing. I'd never jeopardize any author's First Rights of Publication just because
I wanted to get richer and "play" the game of publisher.
So, again, currently I don't run my own pub. company because I
do not know what the hell I'm doing. I just use the name for my ebooks, and have designed a site simply because it's the kind of thing I like to do.
I'm going to copy and paste this to the Eirelander thread on the BRBC section.
Again, this is only
my opinion. My opinion based on
my own experience with Eirelander.
Your experience could be better, or you might have had a better experience with this publisher.
Personally, my experience was horrible.