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[YADS] YouShelf

RedWombat

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These guys just sent me a spam tweet, "inviting me to self-publish with them" then filed me under "invited authors," an honor I probably share with the approximate population of a small mid-American city.

They're billing themselves as a pay-as-you-read subscription site. 100% royalties through 2016...so that's a thing.

Their Wordpress blog could kinda use an editor.
 

Marian Perera

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Their Wordpress blog could kinda use an editor.

No kidding. From their blog:

The power of mobile Internet is – it gives choice and flexibility to readers; it lets the high quality content owner to be the real king. Be a wise king, make right choice.

To the tune of "We Three Kings" :

You wise king, self-publish a book
How to get the readers to look?
Try subscription
For your fiction,
Get it on Kindle and Nook.
 

Asha Leu

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With the traditional $-per-book sales model, readers need quite some research to decide whether to buy a book. It pushes away many would-be readers who simply don’t have time for such research, and those who don’t like the guesswork of buying a book upfront.

Yes, all that horrible, tiring research always makes me think twice about buying books. You have to go to all the trouble of reading the blurb, flicking through the first few pages... maybe even resorting to truly strenuous work like looking the book up on Wikipedia or reading reviews and "LookInside" on Amazon! :eek:

Many readers reduce to the safe bet of following the crowd and only buy highly endorsed books, leaving many great stories not properly found.It doesn’t have to be this way.

Oh, thank god. Just thinking about all those stories I've not properly found yet has been keeping me up at night. Like most avid readers, I can just never find new books to read, and I certainly don't have an constantly growing backlog of unread books weighing down my bookcase.

YouShelf offers a much simpler and effective way

Awesome, let's hear it.

– we let readers start reading instantly & pay as they read, at cost of a few cents per thousand words – a no pressure price you decide for your readers.

Oh. You mean like what I can do for free using "LookInside" on Amazon or in physical bookstores?

By removing the need to purchase the whole book upfront & giving readers the full control to pause & resume reading anytime, YouShelf enables readers to be*much more open-minded and adventurous to try out new stories. It gives the opportunity for your story to truly shine and appeal to a much larger audience!

And if the quality of writing in these stories is as good as it is on your blog, I'm sure they're going to find an enormous audience!
 
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Filigree

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I'm seeing a lot of suspect publishing/marketing/display sites from overseas, many which are so transparent I don't even bother reporting them here. Apparently, the Philippine and Indian markets are overflowing with dodgy publishers. I wonder if Tate and Publish America outsourcing 'editors' was a cause or a symptom? They certainly seem to have spread their business model.

But I sadly suspect that American gullibility is on the rise, too. I'm seeing more multi-level marketing schemes, which seem to target the same demographics as vanity publishers.

In this case, I wonder if the principals either don't know or care about all the other display sites that have come and gone.
 
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RedWombat

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One thing I always wonder about these "pay by the amount you read" systems...I am that most loathsome of readers, one who, at about a third of the way through the book, will frequently flip to the last page to make sure it's not a horrible tragedy or (worse) a cliffhanger.

Do these sites think I've been to the ending, ergo I have read the whole book, or are they logging number of pages visited? If I check a footnote or a bibliography, does my "amount read" leap forward?

Inquiring minds are only vaguely curious, but it keeps coming up as more of these services come along.
 

aliceshortcake

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A bit more info about YouShelf:

Domain Name: YOUSHELF.COM
Registry Domain ID: 1526620179_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.enom.com
Registrar URL: www.enom.com
Creation Date: 2008-11-01 01:53:31Z
Registrar Registration Expiration Date: 2014-11-01 01:53:31Z
Registrar: ENOM, INC.
Registrar IANA ID: 48
Registrar Abuse Contact Email:
Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: +1.4252744500
Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited
Registry Registrant ID:
Registrant Name: JINGXIN HUANG
Registrant Organization:
Registrant Street: 844 LEMOS LANE
Registrant City: FREMONT
Registrant State/Province: CA
Registrant Postal Code: 94539
http://www.sitetrail.com/youshelf.com

Jingxin Huang is also the president of Childroad Inc, a company providing children's audiobooks in Chinese:
http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/childroad-inc