@hockney, these are excellent questions. Thank you for asking them. This post was intended as an overview, not meant to be comprehensive, so many details were excluded in the interest of readable length. However, discussion is an excellent way to address more points. We will try to keep your comment voted to the top as best we can.

As far as royalty rates, we will be experimenting with that for a while. We’d like to offer 40% to the author, which is a significantly higher percentage than Top Five publishers offer, as well as other small press. We don’t have the overhead cost of office space and other expenses that traditional businesses encounter. Most of our expenses will be marketing and promotion, and we also intend to employ salaried staff. The first novel to be released is written by a board member who will forfeit much of her royalties to startup costs. That makes it a great pilot project unlikely to incur liability.

You asked how our ecosystem differs from the traditional editing process. My question to you is what type of editing process are you referring to? There are paid editing services and then there are the editing departments of publishers. We won’t be offering commercial editing services, or at least that isn’t within our scope at this time. In order to access the editors of publishing houses, you must first have your work accepted by them. Anyone who has submitted work to a traditional publisher will know how improbable this is in today’s market. Acceptance and admission past those formidable industry gatekeepers is a rare thing indeed. With Steemhouse, the editing staff and SHP Board members are accessible right there in our community. They can’t commit to working with every writer on every project, but TWB offers regular writing workshops in which aspiring authors can learn exactly how to get their work accepted by our acquisition team. This is unheard of in the publishing industry. The best most authors can ever hope for is a form rejection letter, and if they are really lucky, a personal note explaining why their work wasn’t accepted.

Lastly, “why would an author on Steem submit their work to Steemhouse, rather than just post it directly to Steem?” Well, first of all, Steemhouse is only accepting novel-length work. We aren’t interested in posts. Steem is great for short stories and novellas, but not the ideal place for chapter by chapter publishing of books. There’s a seven-day payout window, and past that, blockchain content can generate no revenue. Also, work posted on Steem isn’t publishable in traditional markets. Once work is posted to the blockchain, it’s considered perma-free on the Internet. No publisher worth their salt will attempt to sell a product that’s available online at no cost. For those intending to self-publish, consider that Amazon price matches. That’s exactly how authors set their books at perma-free on Amazon—they post it online somewhere else (like Smashwords) for $0.00 and notify KDP with the link. KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) then matches the product offered on their site to the same amount. And if you think reviewers and readers won’t discover your work on Steem and report you to KDP, you’re sadly mistaken. No serious author would take this chance. By the same token, Steemhouse won’t touch anything that has been posted on Steem beyond a teaser chapter or the first 5,000 words. It simply is not worth the risk for us. Therefore, the answer to this is in the question for authors of novels: Steem isn’t where they want to publish their books in the first place.

When it comes to Wordrow, our literary magazine, short stories and serialized novellas will indeed be posted to Steem through our front-end. The submissions process is for featured work only, the work that will appear on the public front page and be upvoted vigorously by our partners (we aren’t yet at liberty to disclose more information—NDAs and whatnot.) Work approved through our submissions queue will then be eligible to use in professional portfolios as described in the post above. In this submissions process, rather than a form rejection letter, authors will be informed of the reasons their work isn’t suitable for publication in our literary magazine, and in many cases, offered a consultation with our editing team at no cost to discuss ways to improve the material. Again, this is unheard of in the publishing industry. Will it be a herculean task for our editing team? Certainly it will. But because we’re a Steem community, we have access to a growing pool of users who may be interested in training for these editorial acquisition jobs. We will eventually launch our own SMT, which will make excellent compensation for their hard work.

Any more questions, feel free to ask!