On November 17th, Harlequin announced Harlequin Horizons, its new self-publishing venture with Author Solutions. The newly formed Harlequin Horizons made their motives quite clear in this quote from the original press release:
Titles published through Harlequin Horizons will be monitored for excellence and retail potential for possible pick-up by Harlequin's leading traditional imprints.
one that does any of the following: requires individual writers to pay for part or all of the publication costs; asks writers to buy or sell copies of the publication; publishes the work of anyone who subscribes to the publication or joins the organization through membership fees; publishes the work of anyone who buys an advertisement in the publication; publishes work without competitive selection; or publishes work without professional editing.
If shortcut implies skipping the man in the middle, then perhaps POD and ePublishing are shortcuts to publication. But what if the shortcut wasn’t just a shortcut, but a new path entirely? Blazed by a few, ventured by many and proven successful, new technologies can change the publishing playing field entirely. If one were to consider the eReader as an iPod for books, this change seems not only possible, but entirely inevitable.
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I’ve heard all kinds of accusations made against such publishers- that they are luring naive authors with the “farming” bit, with the distribution- even world wide- bit, with taking the author’s money and run, with inundating the author’s garage with thousands of unwanted books, that they are desecrating the name they bear. However, there’s one thing I’ve not heard at all sounded in the air and that is, the money such publishers earn from the self-published authors is bunked together with the traditional branch- now that piece of news should have at least made quite a few bones rattle in the publishing world- and yet not a word.
So I shall say something about this: All you agents, published authors out there, it is time to stop moaning, it is time to stop calling self-published authors stupid because it will be thanks to the money I spend on publishing my book, that yours gets printed for free and it is my money that it will get it sponsored and agents can reap the rewards. There’
(Continued from above) There’s no justice. Justice will be done if and when I get to sell a heck lots more books than yours ever will and I will get the same amount of royalty for 100 books sold that you would for 10,000. So all you moaners out there who enjoy cat calling us “inferior” authors will one day have to find answers for these questions. Who is a second class author? Who is naive? Who is mentally retarded? A WestBow Author is, of course, is what you say today... We’ll see.
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