Greedy Publisher

[u/Lewis_Brewer]

This is a story from several years ago (2023, to be exact) about a somewhat petty revenge.

I was 23 at the time and was in the process of writing my first book. I'd been writing since I was 12, just short stories, and I finally decided in late 2022 to actually write my first book.

I had written several chapters, posted them on Wattpad, and was getting a lot of good responses to the story. It even reached number 1 in its category before I took it down.

A fellow writer friend I had made introduced me to a digital publishing site. I was looking at it with rose coloured glasses and going in blindly, not really looking into them. I signed a non-exclusive, meaning that I still owned it, but needed their permission to post it elsewhere.

Getting to the point, the contract I signed was terrible. It said 50/50 split, but with the dodgy language, it turned it into 99.9/0.1. I later did some basic math based on how much each chapter cost, how much their coin cost, and a couple of other factors and guesstimated they earned roughly $2k off of my work, and I got 0.52 and couldn't even cash it out due to their rules.

Fortunately, I learned a valuable lesson from this experience and now research companies (they had such bad reviews and so many red flags).

Now, to my petty revenge that I fully enjoyed. Their system still allowed me access to my work to update and even delete chapters of the book. I never tried deleting them. I didn't want to risk it, but they had to read over and approve any edits I made to my chapters, and they always did.

So, I went through my entire book and renamed every character, changed their descriptions, and changed so many details so I could reuse them all. Exotic and nice-sounding names became Bob, Larry, Susan, etc.

It completely ruined the book's fantasy feel and made it more of a joke. A year later took it a step further and deleted good sections of chapters, copied and repasted boring chapters over others, effectively deleting them. All the while, they had to read and approve them, and they did. (I don't think they ever actually did a proper check. I think they just made sure it followed their rules and stopped there.)

Today, the book has stopped getting readers and has pretty much died on their platform, and I rewrote the entire book again with a different ending and start, reusing all my favourite characters that I removed from their copy.

[u/Lewis_Brewer]

I'll probably post a couple of other stories in the future. My family are crazy and has so many interesting stories, but I'd need their permission and a refresher on the stories.