Valeca,
The publishing rights (web-site posting being deemed as publication) has come up before. You can visit our FAQ's on our web-site to see the U.S. Copyright Offices official definition, and a link is provided there that will take you directly to their site if you wish to see for yourself.
As far as
no other publishers asking that your work be submitted through a charging reading service, I can provide you a partial listing, if you wish. And they tend to be the bigger houses.
Also, I understand that until we have completed a web-site for Cutting Edge Press beyond an information page, that it may be somewhat confusing.
Cutting Edge Press is an entity of its own. The same for Cutting Edge Literary Services.
Cutting Edge Literary Services is in the business of providing test marketing for
any publisher that is interested in using those services. We have contacted quite a few already, and it may surprise you to learn that we have had several publishers approach us upon hearing about our work. One of which is a major publishing house.
Cutting Edge Press functions as any other publisher out there with traditional advances and royalties. However, as a new publisher, we are hedging our bets on what we place on the market and insist on the test marketing. The reason the fees are deducted from the advance if we subsequently offer a contract is two-fold:
One, even though both the Service and Press are owned by one entity, they are
two separate companies. On the books, we have to show that fee that the Press is waiving as being paid from one company to the other. The test marketing is still being paid for, just by Cutting Edge Press instead of the writer.
Two, it would be patently unfair to those writers that
do make the investment in their work to see others, whatever their circumstances, get the same opportunity for free.
Third, and this is addressing the fees in general, we anticipate a large volume of submissions. If charging a fee weeds out those authors that may otherwise dump their work on us with no true conviction that it is anywhere near marketable, then this aids us in keeping that volume to a manageable level.
As an added note: We have one writer currently on our site that had submitted his work to publishers for
twenty-eight years. I wouldn't consider him a newbie. There's a difference between being a new writer and expecting to fight an uphill battle getting published, and a seasoned writer that, as this gentleman put it, has every confidence that no acquisitions editor, in all that time, had actually even read his work. Did we read it? Yes. Did we accept it? Yes. And this gentleman will be one of the first ones to get a contract from us.
That is the difference between being flooded by so many free submissions that you are forced to make a decision from the first ten pages due to time constraints, and being able to sit down, read the entire work and make a decision from that.
I hope this helps clarify some of what we are doing.
As we stated before in a prior post, although we expect both of these ventures to pay their own way
at some point in the future they were both began with the writer in mind. Specifically the talented writer that has good, solid work and difficulty placing it. We think a lot of good reads are slipping through the cracks because of genre placement difficulties (the 'how do we categorize this?'), length (unpublished writers with a lengthy ms. have even more trouble placing their work, which is a shame, because there is nothing I love more than a 'luxury cruise' book, as Stephen King described them in
On Writing),or simply because they have no track record.
In Christ,
Rebecca
Cutting Edge Literary Services
Cutting Edge Press
http://cuttingedgeliterary.com/Cutti...formation.html
