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HarperCollins

HarperCollins responds

January 17, 2009 · 5 comments

Overnight, Authonomy site administrators posted a response to the criticism on the forum:

This will be another free feature of the site. It certainly isn’t about exploitation. It won’t be compulsory. It is part of the authonomy toolkit. Like forums, messaging, RSS feeds, watchlists etc., we won’t be forcing anyone to use these features, but if you want to, then they’ll be there. For you.

Read the whole post here.

My initial thought is that if HarperCollins really are introducing the POD option simply as another feature of the site which adds value for its members, why bother to go to the expense and effort of building your own solution? Why not simply partner with an existing service, such as lulu.com, which is bound to be more efficient and less costly?

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Is Authonomy authentic?

January 16, 2009

Bren MacDibble alerted me on Facebook to  some grumblings about HarperCollins’ Authonomy site. Authonomy participant, Alexander McNabb, fought his way to a top 5 ranking on the site, spurred on by the promise that each month HarperCollins would read the Top 5 ranked manuscripts. What he got was not what he expected. But the HC review [...]

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Publisher as brand?

October 4, 2008

Recently the friendly-looking team at HarperStudio asked a question on their blog, The 26th Story, about whether to invest in a full-featured website or keep up the blog. Since they invited input, I weighed in with an oft-quoted phrase in the industry: “The author is the brand”. The general idea (which someone else much smarter than I [...]

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Lies, damn lies and statistics

June 20, 2008

More from HarperCollins, this time some sweet data on the results of their recent experiements with “free”. Publishers Weekly reported that at recent panels at BEA and the IDPF Digital Book conference HarperCollins shared the results of digital giveaway campaigns they did with books by Neil Gaiman, Erin Hunter and Robin Hobb. Here’s the skinny: [...]

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The Amanda Project

June 20, 2008

The other day I was discussing with an agent whether authors should hold back digital rights from publishers until the publishers could demonstrate they had the know-how to fully exploit those rights. Well, HarperCollins US have just taken a big step toward bolstering my confidence. Forbes.com has reported that HarperCollins, together with 4th Story Media, are producing The [...]

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