Promoting book sales via a specialist niche community site isn't a bad idea.
In fact niche marketing was more or less how 50 Shades got started. It was a crappy novel marketed brilliantly by a professional marketer, who went from persuading a small community to praise the book, to leveraging that praise to get interest from other online communities, to leveraging that interest into a mainstream publishing contract with formal marketing support.
Of course, for that to work you need a marketable demo.
Outdoorsmen who read erotic fiction in between heroic fishing exploits are possibly not the world's biggest niche book market.
How much money would they even have had to spend on marketing the books, given they would have their own web portal?
> I dunno, does this make it sound like the scam / system described in the submission is worth a punt?
Maybe not if you're trying to make a successful business. But if you're trying to do the bare minimum to quickly score about 80k usd while still protecting yourself from fraud/felony charges, wouldn't this be good news? It sounds like you could easily find an author who'd be happy with 10k or even 15k per year.
So what? Isn't all investment "a bit of a gamble"? If it was self-evident that money would be made, it wouldn't be a good investment opportunity. Some degree of risk is inherent.
To be clear, I'm not defending the fraud described in the article, only the concept that someone may rationally wish to invest behind a self-published author.
It feels like a bit of a gamble to write a series of books and throw a huge marketing budget at them. That's what publishers have been doing, and it doesn't work for most of their books.
Average earnings for published authors in UK is £11k pa.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/20/earnings-autho...
> The top 10% of professional authors, those who make £60,000 or more a year from their writing, earned 58% of all the money made by professional authors in 2013, and the top 5%, those making more than £100,000, earned 42.3% of that money. The top 1%, who make mean average earnings of more than £450,000, take 22.7% of all earnings, said the Authors’ Licensing & Collecting Society, which commissioned the UK-based survey.
> The picture for lower-earning writers was much bleaker. The bottom 50% of authors were those who earned less than £10,500 in 2013, and accounted for just 7% of the amount earned by all writers put together. And 17% of all writers did not earn anything at all during 2013, said the ALCS, adding that 98% of those authors had published a work every year from 2010 to 2013.
I dunno, does this make it sound like the scam / system described in the submission is worth a punt?