Apologies for not finding this thread earlier. I'm the contact at BigDifBooks.com and am happy to answer questions. I think we've set up a pretty good model for sharing kids' stories, but maybe we're not explaining it as well as we should. We built the site to do two things:
1. Provide really cheap ($1.99) or even free access to original kids' stories.
2. Provide an outlet for people -- inlcuding kids themselves -- to share their stories and maybe make a few dollars.
For background, I did an interview at macaronikid.com that will provide additional background. some important things to note:
1. Author retains any and all copyright
2. If we accept a book, author (not us) chooses to share it for free or sell it for $1.99. Whichever is chosen, the books are treated exactly the same way. They are made available as an on-screen, page-flipping book -- or they can be printed at home. There is a small chance (we haven't done it yet) where we may ask someone to consider offering a book for free vs. $1.99. The only way we could see that happening is if someone (probably a grade-schooler) submits a three-page book and wants to sell it. We then would ask them to offer it for free probably or save it and make a collection of short stories or something ...
3. If we accept a book and an author chooses to sell it, the author makes one dollar of the $1.99 price. A 50+ percent royalty. Traditional publishers typically pay 7 - 12 percent. BigDifBooks makes 99 cents. Actually, we make 84 cents (PayPal gets 15 ... I think). And, truth be told, we're going to have to sell an awful lot of books just to pay for development and copyright attorney fees over the past year ...
Obviously, the whole reason we can offer the stories for very little money (or none at all) and pay an author a much larger royalty is because we are distributing the books as digital files. We don't have to print, distribute, buy back, pay Barnes & Noble etc. etc.
I really started the idea after working on some picture books with my kids' third-grade classes. and after getting frustrated at seeing some of the stuff on today's bookshelves for young readers. How many Dora the Explorer books can there be? They all stink (in my opinion). We own every Dr. Seuss book (including my favorite, The Butter Battle Book). Now my kids are a little older and they're writing their own stories. And some of them are really charming and funny. And I thought the idea of creating a place where they could share them -- and other creative people could share their stories -- was a good idea.
That's the nuts and bolts. I'm going to try to answer specific questions from above real quickly, but will come back here and check in more often if anybody has anything else. Starting at the very top.
There are no fees to the author. Unless you count snail-mailing the book to us, instead of uploading it.
We don't prefer donating books for free over offering to sell them. Selling them puts 99 (umm, 84) cents in our pocket. We don't prefer either way over the other though. Both ways are treated the same.
We do think "family fun"is part of the idea. Families getting together, writing and illustrating a book, then (if we accept it), putting it up for friends and relatives to see from all over the world is a cool idea. And a good way to keep kids interested in reading -- and writing.
Don't mean to imply for one second that someone can just 'toss off' a good children's book. As the author of a few on the site, I don't think that's possible. As someone who writes for a living (marketing, advertising and speechwriting), I do know it's nice to take a break and work on something for my kids -- and a break that I enjoy from other writing.
There is a fundraising component for good causes. We envision it for school classes mainly. We change the royalty to 75% (So BigDifBooks makes 49 cents ... umm, 35 cents after PayPal). There are two books that raise money for schools on the site right now -- and one (Miss Mila Can Do Anything) that goes to Noah's Wish, which is an animal rescue organization.
We're legit. We're not some kid-friendly front for a corporation or Penguin or a printer or something.
Can't attest as someone who has used the site -- I'm a little biased. We went live a few months ago and the first couple months of that was for testing. We've posted about 10 new books from new authors -- and we have quite a few in the pipeline. The people who try the idea seem to like it very much.
Man, this is a long post. Happy to answer more questions now that I have found the thread.
Thanks.
Welcome to AW, by the way!