Mr Swanson, do you think that there may be a conflict of interest inherent in your being the owner of the press?
For example, publishers may find that for every X dollars they put into marketing a title, they increase that title's sales by 10%. A savvy publisher, therefore, will put more money towards promoting a big-selling title than a tiny niche book. It makes more sense to spend the press's limited marketing budget to increase Big Title's sales from 10,000 to 11,000 than it does to spend the same amount to increase Tiny Title's sales from 1000 to 1100. The thousand extra sales of Big Title will give the press a profit; the hundred extra sales of Tiny Title won't cover the cost of marketing.
Authors know this and expect this, so they strive to write the best, most marketable books they can, knowing that the better their book is the more the press will put into marketing it and the more sales they'll have and the more money they'll earn. However, this only works if the press allocates its marketing dollars fairly, based on the author's previous sales and projected sales for the current title. That kind of falls to pieces if the press has a vested interest in putting its marketing dollars into a particular title regardless of its potential or sales, simply because the person making the marketing-dollars decisions also wrote that particular title.
I'm not saying you DO do this or that you WILL do this. I'm saying that it has happened before with author-owned presses, and it will likely happen again. The conflict of interest exists with every author-owned press. The potential for the press's authors to be subsidising sales for the press's owner-author exists.
Can you address what steps you've taken to remove this conflict of interest?
