This is the second day in a row, and the third out of the last five, that I’ve gotten mail from these people.  This one was addressed to both my real name and my pen name.  Honestly, I wouldn’t have mentioned it this time around, but 1) they cunningly dodged my new “don’t even bother opening their mail” policy by sending me a postcard this time and 2) they include numbers that give some insight into just what a shitty deal their original “Ultimate Publishing Package” is.

I won’t be mentioning them again unless it’s really entertaining.  But nonetheless:

Here we learn that they want to charge you $237 to print a hundred copies of a fifty-page book.  The original cost, remember, was $1600, less a $601 “discount,” to $999.  Of course, no one anywhere actually writes fifty-page books, and if I were to self-pub Skylights through them it would cost me an additional $746 on top of the not-actually-$999-it’s-really-$1118.40 cost that their “Ultimate Publishing Package” entails.

In other words, $1864.40– nearly two thousand damn dollars— for a hundred physical copies of a book that I’ll never be able to move and a bunch of other services that I can either a) do for myself because they’re free or b) when bought in bulk, which this company is certainly doing, are minimal in cost.

That is a lot of profit, kids.

Then again, they spend a lot on postage.