I received a response from the publisher I was forwarded to this morning. Very exciting stuff. So exciting, in fact, that before I hurriedly sent off that manuscript, the musician in me, who has been screwed over so many times he’s lost count started to speak up and say, “Hey, this isn’t so different from the music world, and nothing good comes without the feeling that you’ve smashed your head against a billion brick walls.” And so I whipped out my google-fu and did a quick check on this “traditional publisher”. Aha… they are under investigation in Florida and also on at least one “Writer Beware” page. I also found some forum posts from people who have submitted queries to them where the initial responses seemed very similar to the one they sent me. People who went further, were recommended to pay for professional editing. The editors chosen were also associated in some way with this network of companies and were presumably getting kickbacks from referrals. Basically, they seem legit in the sense that they’re not completely scamming you, but more in the sense that you’ll probably end up paying as much as you would if you went the self-publishing route, plus you’d be under contract with them. The warnings also mentioned that the company’s track record of commercial book or script sales is not known. I double-checked on Amazon and found that every title I searched for was indeed listed and they were listed as the publisher, but I wasn’t able to find any book with more than one review, which makes me wonder how much these books are pushed. (more…)