If Barack Obama wants to hire someone to sell Obamacare to the American voters, he should hire the sales people at Author Solutions. If Mitt Romney wants to convince American voters that he’s “one of us”, he should hire the sales people at Author Solutions. If I want to convince Zooey Deschanel to go on a date with me, I’m going to hire the sales people at Author Solutions.
Seriously, these guys make the stock brokers in the movie Boiler Room seem like Gandhi
Today, I was reminded how this company did $100,000,000 in revenue last year. I spoke with a woman who paid Author House (an Author Solutions company) $1500 over the phone. No contract. Not a sentence in an email. Nothing. Just some amazing sales person selling her dreams and promises.
Damn these people are good (but also, very bad).
Author Solutions is affiliated in some way with Crossbooks. I know because the email address for one Eugene Hopkins, the fellow who handles their evaluations, is “@authorsolutions.com.
I am thoroughly fed up with the predatory pricing practices of these people. They wanted $2000 to edit my book. I had it done by a retired magazine editor for $500. I recently received an email from Crossbooks offering a publicity package for $20,000! I paid $2900 and all I got was a bunch of postcards, bookmarks, and calling cards and a web page that was not registered with the search engines or optimized for keywords. Their entire marketing program is word of mouth. You can’t sell more books than the number of people you can contact face to face. They don’t do social media and they don’t utilize the web effectively. They don’t do video shorts or promote their authors to journalists.
Their book prices are exorbitant. The hardcover version of my book costs over twice as much as the hardcover version of Ross Douthat’s book “Bad Religion,” and Joel C. Rosenberg’s “Implosion” two similarly themed books written by a NY Times columnist and a perenniel NY Times Best Selling author. Even my softbound edition is more than their hardbound versions.
My book retails for $19.95 in paperback and $39.95 in hardback! I don’t have any friends who have spent $20 for a religiously themed book in the past year. I know because I ask them.
Crossbooks sticks it to the author up front and then makes it very difficult to recoup his costs by pricing his books affordably and then marketing them effectively. So if you just want to see your book in print and don’t care how much you spend or how many people get your message, Crossbooks is the publisher for you.
Craig, you stated this so eloquently. Yes, CrossBooks is another Author Solutions company, using a Christian company as a front. This is what Penguin bought for $116,000,000.