Suppose you buy the premium package for your novel, which costs fifteen thousand dollars. Suppose you price your e-book at $5.99, which is a good price for a self-pubbed novel. (Which this isn’t, since AHI is acting as the publisher, but anyway.) Since Archway is so generous as to give you fifty percent of NET, after taking your fifteen grand for their services up front, you end up with $2.09 per sale. You’d need to sell 7178 copies of your book just to break even. And that assumes you’re not stupid enough to go for their book trailer package, which doubtless costs more (I’m sure they don’t offer “opportunities” like that for free), or any other possible add-ons, which would add to the bill. This is thoroughly ridiculous, and the price is outrageous. Only a writer completely ignorant of the realities of self-publishing would even consider going for this. If a writer doesn’t feel comfortable or just doesn’t want to do the editing and layout and cover and such, there are other companies who’ll offer these services at a much more reasonable price, by like an order of magnitude more reasonable, who don’t charge anything like fifty percent of net forever, in addition to a huge fee.

Other publishers have partnered with Author Solutions in this manner before. It’s strictly a cash cow for both ASI and the publisher. The promise of a CHANCE of being picked up by the publisher is just the carrot dangling to attract desperate writers who can’t do math. Go ask Harlequin how many writers they’ve signed through their partnership with ASI. I supose there might be a few by now, but I haven’t heard of any through the romance grapevine. Even that few would be a tiny percentage of the books published through Harlequin’s ASI partnership.

This is strictly a rip-off, targetting the ignorant and desperate. It’s only good for the industry if you consider “the industry” to consist of the corporate entities involved — ASI and the big publishers who partner with it.