- Joined
- Feb 12, 2005
- Messages
- 28,750
- Reaction score
- 2,934
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- right here
- Website
- www.veinglory.com
For print, anything under 50,000 tends to be a sale per week or less. Kindle is a bit harder to figure out.
Fixed it, I think
Well I feel it only fair I share what I know about Crushing Hearts and Black Butterfly (CHBB) Hot Ink Press (HIP) and their new sister add on company Vamptasy. Vamptasy I know very little about. The merger just happened. It has some worried, with good reason. That aside, Hot Ink aka HIP is an erotic sister company. Whereas CHBB primarily handles paranormal of some kind or another, but nothing ever over 100k words.
The shorts they publish they don’t pay for but the shorts they sell, they usually only charge .99 cents for. They say this is to put money back into the company. Now I recently opened a company ( we are NOT a publishing house) where I plan to do something similar with anthologies only, however those proceeds go to getting authors into conventions and stuff like that. We are considering publishing anthologies that go out in or magazine as a collection volume style thing. Anyways that’s not what matters. I know it’s a promo lots of companies do by selling work for a dollar or under. That’s their choice but that’s why they won’t pay you for them.
Their FULL MS they give 50/50 royalties on. Again keep in mind they will not accept anything above 100k, their average full run s about 60k. To me I consider that a novella not a full. Points of view though.
I am not personally a fan or their promotional graphics, for merchandise posters trailers or covers. But some of them do look nice. My favorites are generally created by the author or someone they know personally and are not in house designers. They have some decent names. One I know of I believe is going to be agented to the big 6 soon. (sidebar: Is it still too early in that merger to call them the big 5 now?)
Was hired by CHBB’s publisher this past fall as an editor when I took them 5 of their published books and pointed out errors. The head of their company acted appalled and hired me immediately without asking for credentials. I never asked for the job. She just assigned it to me as her handy little helper. Fortunately I freelance on the side. She didn’t know this. But I agreed and I edited them. This upset her other editor that she did fire. She had one other editor that she didn’t fire. She avoided speaking to and completely dropped them without comment going forward. I pity this editor but she is recovering from the insulting blow. Of the 5 I took to the publisher, SJ Davis, this editor was not listed as an editor… However yesterday I learned that SJ Davis does edit… it is SHE that runs this company. It is NOT SJ Davis that edited most of these books. She took the credit but from what I have discovered she has edited few of these books herself. Why would the publisher personally edit them anyways? They have more important things to do. So why not give credit where credit is due, even if said credit may be minimal for not much was done?
But a lot of you said that CHBB and Hip or SJ basically said she gave general non answers as to how they would handle things. And a lot of assumptions were made about twitter fb and blog tours. All I can go by is my own personal experience. In going by that, I agree with every single one of you… I wasn’t just an editor for CHBB I recently signed with them in October. Today I resigned. I’m not bitter actually I am well past that. I won’t give you the many many reasons as to why I resigned because as of yet the editor hasn’t responded in regards to my resignation. I think that’s bad business to go poo on someone in a time when I may come across as bitter.
As far as website and graphics go I am not impressed. Their trailers are one MAYBE two pictures generally floating around a screen with scrolling font. Not impressed. I contracted my own people into doing it which lead to me creating a company of such services.
As far as the skill of their authors… Their cheapest books are their worst. They are the most poorly edited. Great authors are being dismissed as lazy because of the errors brought to them by their readers. It is a writers group for writers who couldn’t publish elsewhere so they published for themselves. No outsider do I believe would find a great deal of enjoyment in the majority of their works. Now I say the majority. Some if it’s very good… I was blessed to be the editor of a book titled Revealing Hamilton. It was an awesome book that I could barely put it down. I had to re-read it more than a few times to make sure I didn’t miss something cause of how much I got hung up in some spots.
This is just my opinion of course.
All it boils down to is that I am glad I pulled my work out of their hands before it was too late. They play favorites. They dramatize, socialize and magnify things like teenagers. It didn’t take a month before I was second guessing my decision in signing with them it took less than two before I outright regretted it. I was slandered once for expressing excitement for an upcoming photo shoot I had scheduled for something I thought may be great for CHBB. After being publicly slandered I was then threatened.
But that’s all I need to say for now. I have done my research heavily since feeling weary and have moved on to more promising places. They play some dirty pool though.
FYI, I never posted this, not a word. Evidently my name got attached to someone else's post. Maybe a kind-hearted mod can fix it, please?
You posted it to make AmbrosiaArts' post #26 readable (she later changed it). I've added a quote tag for you.FYI, I never posted this, not a word. Evidently my name got attached to someone else's post. Maybe a kind-hearted mod can fix it, please?
Is there a mod I can get into contact with?
Regarding what? Use PM if you'd like to talk privately.Is there a mod I can get into contact with?