Online Publishing

Naessens

For a TY project, me and my partner are think of setting up an online publishing service.

You would pay to publish your work on our website. Anyone could then read it for free and give feedback in the form of ratings and reviews. Hopefully, after enough reviews and ratings, and if they are high enough, you would be able to use them to convince a proper publisher to publish your book.

We were thinking of roughly €3 for 10 pages, €10 for 100 pages and €15 for 250 pages of text.

Does anyone think that they would use our service?
Or do you have any ideas that would increases the effectiveness of our site?

We are waiting for feedback before we set up the site.

All thoughts and questions welcome.

Thanks in Advance,
Naessens

pickarooney

Why would someone pay to 'publish' their work on your website? What would the site offer that free sites wouldn't? How are you going to get people to read the stuff on your site and rate it?

Naessens

All the Other Online publishers i found that were free, you had to buy the book after. People would pay to make their book open to the public, for the feedback, not for the profit.

And the fact that it is free to read the book will hopefully make people want to read them. Also we hope to make the books e-Book compatible, we will also advertise the site when it is set up.

MikeC101

Naessens wrote: »

For a TY project, me and my partner are think of setting up an online publishing service.

You would pay to publish your work on our website.

Why the hell would someone pay you to give you the publishing rights at the same time? What do they get out of it?

Yog's Law: Money flows towards the writer. If a publisher wants to publish your work, they PAY THE WRITER for publishing rights.

Naessens wrote: »

Anyone could then read it for free and give feedback in the form of ratings and reviews. Hopefully, after enough reviews and ratings, and if they are high enough, you would be able to use them to convince a proper publisher to publish your book.

If an author wants feedback on their work, there are plenty of online communities and writers groups that do this without charging a fee. If somebody wants to put their work online for people to read free they can easily do so without paying.

On the idea that if you get good enough ratings / reviews you'll be able to convince a proper publisher to publish the book - I doubt it. Why would it? In addition, the publisher Baen already has a system like this - you submit your work, and the highest rated book each month gets looked at by the publisher. They don't charge you anything for it either.

Naessens wrote: »

Does anyone think that they would use our service?
Or do you have any ideas that would increases the effectiveness of our site?
We are waiting for feedback before we set up the site.

I appreciate that this may have appeared to you as a niche market idea, and your intentions are good, but it's very similar to a lot of literary agent or "writing competition" scams out there.

I'm starting to see more and more of this, even here, and I've kept my mouth shut about it, especially the "give us free articles for our webzine and if we somehow make money we'll split some with you" type, because I understand that some writers want the experience, practice, whatever. But when you start trying to charge them for this, no way.

Naessens wrote: »

All the Other Online publishers i found that were free, you had to buy the book after. People would pay to make their book open to the public, for the feedback, not for the profit.

These are underhand scams then. An online variation on vanity publishing, stealing money from naive authors.
Edit: Or you're talking about self publishing, which is a different thing entirely.

pickarooney

Naessens wrote: »

All the Other Online publishers i found that were free, you had to buy the book after. People would pay to make their book open to the public, for the feedback, not for the profit.

And the fact that it is free to read the book will hopefully make people want to read them. Also we hope to make the books e-Book compatible, we will also advertise the site when it is set up.

I've a feeling you've misunderstood the point of those sites. They're for people who can't (or don't want to) get their book published and want to have a bound copy of their work to keep on a shelf or give to friends and family, or sell...

Even if you were to magically attract thousands of vistors to your site, it would be extremely difficult to get them to read whole books that are not either highly recommended or written by famous authors.

There are any number of free online book sites out there.

ztoical

Naessens wrote: »

We were thinking of roughly €3 for 10 pages, €10 for 100 pages and €15 for 250 pages of text.

That's expensive - there are POD's online that will print the book for alot cheaper then that. How did you work out these costings? Web hosting doesn't cost that much and you'd want a fairly basic web design so as not to distract from the text so I get how it would cost 15 to host 250 pages of plain text.

You can post creative writing to sites like deviantart for free and get feedback and comments or even on this forum right here.

WHU

Agree with the above, I found a lovely small online community for writing and reviews for free.

Naessens

Thanks for all the feedback

It seems that this website is a bad idea and I imagine it will be scrapped. If there is free versions of what we were going to offer then there is no point in setting up this site.

The prices were simply based on the cost and time we would put in.

But please, if you have more to say, do. Even if it is just to hammer in the last nail.

By the way, the idea of providing the services for authors came first, we just turned into a business for a project. Were not trying to scam anyone or steal their books

pickarooney

If you set up a site where qualified reviewers (a bit of a vague term, but however), agents, editors, spellcheckers, specialist fact-checkers etc. could tender their services to unpublished authors there might be more interest in it.

For example member A provides proofreading services at 50c a page, member B is a judicial expert and can bull****-filter legal thrillers, member C is a dab hand at turning plodding prose into sharp writing, member D is a Spanish translator, member E is an agent who specialises in chick lit etc. etc. and member X can contact any of the above for help fine-tuning his or her novel.

You could take a small cut per tender offered or requested.

The idea probably exists or is so stupid as to be unworkable, but hey, it would be something that I personally would find far more useful.

EileenG

There's also a huge problem here that anything which has been already published on-line can't offer a publisher the same rights as something which is unpublished. If I were a publisher, I'd be very reluctant to accept anything which was already in the public domain.

I've written articles for a specific website, and seen them floating around the Internet years later, on different sites, and with absolutely no credit or acknowledgement to me.

As for getting reviews, people posting things up on this forum find that unless their offerings are very short, it's hard to get people to sit and read them, never mind do in-depth reviews. Or are you thinking of paying people to review them?

Naessens

pickarooney wrote: »

If you set up a site where qualified reviewers (a bit of a vague term, but however), agents, editors, spellcheckers, specialist fact-checkers etc. could tender their services to unpublished authors there might be more interest in it.

So the suggestion is that we set up an online editing service?

That sounds like a good idea. I'll check for similar services online and see what comes up.

And on the problem of people stealing your work. We were checking how to provide copyright, but we've got nothing solid yet.

EileenG

An editing service could be good, but you'd have to make sure that what you were working on was not in the public domain. You can't publish it on your website, or you risk making it impossible for the writers to publish it as a book.

Naessens

OK, i'll run this info through with my partner and see what we come up with. Ill make sure to post any ideas we come up with for your thoughts and advice.

If any one has any thoughts on the editing service please post.

MikeC101

One of the problems is how do you prove you have the relevant skills or experience to do the job of editing - I know of a few people who offer this service for a fee, and they all have relevant experience, as editors, slush pile readers, or various other writing related jobs.

I like the idea pickarooney has of providing a portal for experts to offer their services, at least in theory, but it might prove difficult to put into place in practice.

Naessens

By "Editing service" i meant what pickarooney said, i was just giving it a name. I realise just how hard it would be to set up but we will look into it. In all probability it would take a very long time to build up editors etc. But it may be worth it.

MikeC101

I really like the idea of it, and have spent the last hour daydreaming of being able to send off my manuscript to an expert on Roman military outposts along the Limes Germanicus between 166 and 170AD, and having him fix anything inaccurate that slipped in. Instead of spending the time researching it myself.

Naessens

Some how i don't think we'll ever get an 1800 year old soldier to read the books, but its good to get someone who likes the new idea.:D

pickarooney

Is your goal to put in place somethign which is a good idea in theory and will get you good marks for your project or a more long-term thing you can grow over time?
Obviously both would be ideal!

Naessens

Our main priority is to set up a useful website. If we do that the marks should come naturally.