Random House Digital Cynicism

[Kingson]

Publisher's Weekly article regarding Random House's new digital-only imprints provoked cynical comments from Robert Gottlieb, chairman of Trident Media Group:

Here's the link:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/b...-imprints.html

[gingerwoman]

Most of the Big Six Traditional Publishers or & 7 if you count Harlequin have now started digital first lines for romance.Random House is also accepting unagented manuscripts in suspense and fantasy genres in addition to their romance line LoveSwept.
It is really unknown at the moment how much an author will be able to make from these lines, and how well they will do. That is not to say they won't do well. It is just an unknown how these lines will pan out.

The royalties on these lines appear to be....shall we say modest. They are less that what other e-publishers offer. Although I have seen no mention of what royalties Random House will actually be offering anywhere.
Avon Impulse and Forever Yours have lower royalties than older digital first publishers such as Ellora's Cave.
Some people say it would be worth it for the branding, editing and promotional push that the Big Six or Seven can give you despite the lower royalties.

Avon Impulse for example offers 25% on net sales until you reach 10,000 copies sold and after that you get 50% net. E-pubs like Ellora's Cave on the other hand offer 40% of cover price for digital releases.
But these big publishers have a lot of promotional pull etc.... Avon Impulse seems confident a significant number of Avon Impulse authors will sell over 10,000 copies.
Trident may certainly have a point about low royalties, but has it's own bandwagon to push. Almost no publishers give advances on ebook only sales. In fact Random is known to give advances on it's LoveSwept romance line, though I don't know what these advances are.
I think you (OP) said in your other thread you had difficulty getting any traction with sales going it on your own? So it's all taking a punt really.
You cannot submit to Ellora's Cave and many digital first lines unless you have a romance.
But Harlequin Digital Editions are also willing to look at what you write (suspense, mystery). Not sure on the royalties there either probably similar to Avon. http://www.harlequin.com/articlepage...1734&chapter=0

[Old Hack]

It is not acceptable to quote without correctly citing the source of the quote or linking back to it; nor is it acceptable to ignore fair use.

As the OP failed to cite his sources and quoted far more than is acceptable under fair use guidelines, I've deleted the material he quoted in the first post of this thread.

If the OP would like to edit his post again to provide a link and so on, that would be fine.

[Laer Carroll]

This is a symptom of the times. Trade publishers, small as well as the Big N, are trying all sorts of ways to get in on the growing ebook market. Some of these tactics will be successful, some will fail.

But you can be sure each publisher will try to (1) get as much as they can and (2) give as little as they can. Whenever we see stories such as this one in PW we need to be very careful in looking for gotchas. This attempt seems to have several.

In particular, they are trying to get inexperienced writers on board. This is partly a good idea on their part, as they may find promising beginners before they become popular. It is also something of a scam, because it trades on the desperation some beginners have to be published as soon as they can.