🚀 go-pugleaf

hilary@netwise.com (Hilary Lane) writes:

>I happen to know the guy who started CROW, and can tell you it's no
>scam.

I just want to point out that I never called it a scam. I simply feel that
it's very unlikely to have any positive effect on a writer's career or
chance of sales.

now, if CROW can start showing me a track record of sales to mainstream
publishers where the author makes more money on the sale than they
spent on the ad, and show me statistics showing that the percentage of
authors using the service that get a positive response is somewhere beyond
the noise level (let's be generous and say 5%) then I might think the
service was useful. 

I mean, seriously: once every 5 or so years, someone pays the Scott Meredith
Literary Agency's reading fee desk $400 to look at their book, and the book
is good enough to be referred to the REAL agency and gets sold. That book,
however, would have been good enough to sell without the author spending
money in the first place, and I'm sure it doesn't make the other few
thousand people who spent $400 on a nice, detailed critique feel any better.
Nor do I think ONE success out of thousands legitimizes that service. 

And I see NOTHING her that tells me this is any more or less legitimate than
SMLA. Not illegal. Not a scam. Just an immense waste of money that's
targetted at naive authors who don't know enough about the business to
realize it's a waste of money for them. And unless CROW has the numbers to
prove they DO perform a reasonable service to a reasonable percentage of
their clients, then nothing else really matters, does it? It's a bad
business deal for the author, and my response is the same: run for the
hills.

nohownoway I recommend stuff like this. (period).

(and the cynic in me says this, not that I believe it: if CROW *WERE* a
scam, than it would make sense to have shills out on the net running around
saying things like "I know CROW. It's not a scam." -- and how would anyone
know any different until it was too late? But frankly, I don't think it's a
scam. I think it's well-meaning, but wrong-thinking folks. Same result to
the people who send money and get phht in return).

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