This thread is a bit old now, but I wanted to add details to it as someone who used to work on the publishing team at TZPP around 10 years ago (now that it finally feels career-safe to talk about it).
As far as I remember, when I was there in 2012 about 100% of the people working there were unpaid college interns--myself one of them. There may have been a full team behind the scenes, but I don’t remember interacting with any other members of TZPP if there were any. We only spoke with Travis and his head editor, Anna McDermott a.k.a. his actual mother.
I was part of a 6-intern team tasked to make this:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1937365107/?tag=absolutewritedm-20
The "Max Avalon" editor listed on the cover is actually Travis, which you can confirm if you look at the book's Goodreads page where he uses this name handle. But the truth is this product was almost 100% intern-driven.
As many people here rightly guessed, we had no prior editing or publishing experience. We did everything from choosing the cheesy title, to selecting story entries, editing at all levels, copy writing for back covers, hiring cover artists, etc. I believe we truly worked our asses off and did our best (not an excuse), but of course had NO idea what we were doing.
Travis and Anna did provide guidance and oversight along the way and to me seemed genuinely interested in helping us learn. Sometimes the concern for quality seemed to come second to appeasing the authors. Otherwise our team had full creative and editing autonomy. This book eventually came together through a lot of conference calls, a lot of Googling “is X grammatically correct?”, and in my case a lot of sending apology letters to angry authors when our edits came off too critical or ignorant or just plain wrong.
Of course the ultimate publication quality was poor. I doubt it sold more than a dozen copies. I saw TZPP selling it for $100+ out the gate for awhile on Amazon (maybe to milk $$ from the supportive friends and family?? I have no idea. We were all confused).
If you were one of the unfortunate creatives involved I’d like to personally apologize. I often had a lot of fun getting to meet with many of you and trying to help people polish their pieces, and learned a smidge about publishing, but our authors and cover artist deserved so much better than being guinea pigs for an inexperienced team. I really am sorry we couldn't have done better for you all. I'm especially sorry everyone had their time wasted by what I now see was a complete scam.
If I can give any advice to fellow writers out there when working with small publishers in the future: absolutely feel entitled to ask for your team’s qualifications!
Hoping you have all continued your craft and that TZPP wasn't the end,
Anon Intern