No, no, no, no, no. Not directed at you, but at Oftomes, if this is indeed the case.
To respond to kkosach: I wouldn't judge too much based on a publisher's social media savvy. It's not necessarily the most important thing in selling books. The publisher should have a publicist who in turn understands when and how it is helpful for authors to be involved on social media. It's helpful but not essential. People don't buy books from Twitter.
It may be unintentional, but this exact language appears way too often when the publisher expects authors to cross-promote each other. This doesn't work, is disingenuous to readers, and is, again, not the done thing. You're an author with a desirable product. Being part of a family isn't an important or even desirable part of the business transaction. Selling books is.
This post seems to nail it on the head. OfTomes liked my pitch during one of the Twitter pitch parties, so I researched the company and grabbed up a bunch of his ebooks when he put them on sale for 99 cents, and they vary wildly in quality. Have followed Ben OfTomes off and on, and have talked about OfTomes with a friend who works in publishing and knows the industry better than I, and here are several reasons I've concluded to STAY AWAY.
1) There's clearly not a professional editor involved. There are grammar errors all over the website, on many of Ben's social media posts, on the back covers of his books, and littering several of the books themselves.
2) He's been pumping out "rereleased" self-published books left and right, which tells me either A) his quality new submissions have dried up or B) all he cares about is the short term pops from new releases (and "rereleases"), since the Amazon and Goodreads stats for his mature titles are horrendous.
3) His Manuscript Wishlist posts and submission page reflects a complete ignorance of the current YA market. He seems trapped 5-10 years in the past, asking for every cliche and worn out YA trope, from dystopian to witches to boarding schools, and now he's set to republish a vampire trilogy called "The Blood Series" or some similar cringe inducing name. Not all of his current books reflect this, and there are a couple of really good ones in there, but the vast majority have little chance of standing out in the current market.
4) The only marketing appears to be some Twitter and Instagram posts and the rare shout out on Ben's YouTube channel. He gets maybe 2-3k views a video, most likely from an ideal target audience of YA readers, yet Ben doesn't mention his own books very often curiously. Strange for a social media based publisher to fail to use his most popular tool, video blogging, to market his own books effectively.
5) As I said, it seems likely Ben doesn't actually have an editor, and he doesn't seem to be partnered with anyone with industry experience from what I can tell, so we're dealing with someone without any real experience here.
In conclusion, I would advise extreme caution before submitting to OfTomes. The idea behind a social media based publisher is intriguing at first glance, and for the sake of all writers I would love for Ben to be "the real deal", and would love if I were wrong about all of my speculation, since it's always great to have more options, but this looks like a dead end. Even if we were dealing with one of the top top youtube and social media book blogger personalities with 20-30 times Ben's audience, I would still advise caution unless they had partnered with someone with publishing experience, hired an editor, and focused on maybe 5 or 6 unique, quality releases a year instead of spamming out repackaged self-published books from dated genres. Hopefully someone who's worked on the inside speaks out and gives more insight, but even if not, we can infer a lot by examining the titles, the website and social media posts, and everything mentioned in this thread.
Hopefully someone that has signed with this publisher will explain how it's like because I am curious.
