Why I'm giving Authorship.com a wide berth.

If you use Facebook, you can’t have failed to notice ads for a company called Authorship.com. Their ads make it sound like they will pay Authors something like a salary as soon as they post their book. They go on to say they will pay ninety percent royalties on eBooks. Yes, that’s right nine zero per cent and fifty percent on printed books.

I was brought up to believe that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. Being the cynic that I am I decided to look further, what I found was interesting. Authorship’s own White paper, the document they used to sell the idea to investors, speaks at length about de-centralising the internet and putting the power back where it belongs with us users. A laudable idea if you can pull it off. It also talks a lot about revolutionising the publishing industry. However, the publishing industry they describe is a pre-Amazon and pre-self-publishing one. I was surprised that they didn’t seem to know that that mould had already been broken. Authors can already directly market their own books.

If this didn’t seem odd enough I continued onto how the system works. It all pivots around Authorships own crypto-currency called ATS Tokens. In order to buy your book the reader must first purchase sufficient ATS Tokens. They can buy these with US dollars. You are than paid your royalties in ATS Tokens but you cannot immediately convert these to US Dollars. You can spend them on the Authorship site or you can go to a crypto-currency exchange and trade them for Bitcoin. Unless you are very lucky there is nowhere on the high street where you can spend Bitcoin. If you do find somewhere you usually find that the handling charge is so high that your purchase becomes outrageously expensive. When I brought this up with a representative of Authorship, they told that there are cash machines that pay out dollars for Bitcoin. Not in my town there aren’t. The same representative seemed to be totally unaware of the catastrophic fall in the value of Bitcoin on Dec 24th. He made light of the suspension of Bitcoin trading and mining saying it was just like my local bank closing for a few days. In reality, it was more like The Bank of England closing its doors. Bitcoin is now worth less than half of what it was on 23rd of December, so that royalty of ninety percent has just dropped to forty-five percent in real terms.

So, is Authorship a scam? Not for Authors, no I don’t think it is. It is never going to break the stranglehold that Amazon has on the industry, but everything is free so you aren’t going to lose anything but your time. If you are hoping for the elusive exposure then forget it. Years of experience have taught me that every barrier you put up reduces the likelihood of sales and having to buy an otherwise worthless currency is a big barrier. Authorship’s own business plan says they will have 10,000 authors on board by June 2018. That is the reason for all the marketing. Presumably that is the time for the next share issue (I believe shares can only be bought with Bitcoin). Whether Authorship is still around after that share issue remains to be seen.

Why am I avoiding it? Well first, it’s a business model that I can’t see working so I don’t want to waste my time with it. Second, it could be a mechanism to dupe would be investors, in which case I want no part of it.