This is another "publisher" that contacted me on Twitter [see my other thread on Channillo]. I'm not doing anything spectacular on Twitter by the way; in the words of another writer, Inkitt "spam like it's 1999." They even Tweeted a legitimate publisher asking if they wanted to publish a book with them. Anyway. Inkitt present themselves as a combined agent and publisher. You submit your work, readers vote on it, and if readers love it they will act as your agent and try to sell it to the Big 5. If they fail, they will publish it themselves for you. Like Channillo, sounds a bit win-win? Nah. 1. You give up your first rights by submitting your manuscript to them, because it's then put on the site available for readers. I know some (one in particular ) members on the forum will argue that first rights aren't important anymore, but not everyone agrees--including real agents and publishers. Submitting your work to Inkitt is probably kissing goodbye to any potential sale to a real publisher/agent, unless it's outstanding. Of course, they benefit greatly from all this free content and marketing from their authors. It should be noted here they do have one sale to a real publisher, Tor (Macmillan). However, Tor don't require agents for submissions, so it's debatable whether publishing on Inkitt helped this author get their sale. 2. It's pretty much a big slush pile, 95% of which will be crap. Sorting through to find the gems is bloody hard and unrewarding, as any agent or editor will tell you. Are the chances of being 'discovered' on here any better than submitting to a reputable agent or editor in the first place? I would say not. 3. They are very dishonest. They claim to have published authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Mary Shelley. You know, those authors whose work is in the public domain and so can be "published" by any website. 4. Their spamming is... something else. They literally have an army of spambots on every site from Twitter to Goodreads--one author found over 200 Inkitt twitter spambots in a single day. All day, every day, they Tweet authors offering to "publish" their work. Like vanity publishers, they prey on people's dreams. At least they don't charge you for giving them free content and rights. No legitimate publisher needs to spam authors. They're beating us away with sticks because they're so inundated. Again, make your own mind up if you're contacted!
I mean Mary Shelley? Like anyone's gonna think they didn`t just reprint a public domain work. It`d be pretty hard for them to have done anything else seeing as she died in the eighteen hundreds. That`s a pretty good warning sign if they don`t have anyone relevant enough that they need to brag about a dead woman. Maybe they worded it odd or something..I just can`t wrap my head around someone trying to make it sound like they published Frankenstein.
To be fair, legitimate agents list long-dead authors when they still represent the estate. But of course that's very different to what Inkitt do. I'd like to think nobody would fall for it but...
Here's a decent blog about them that someone on another forum linked to: What’s Wrong With Inkitt’s “Publishing Contest” – A Partial List
Definitely not! Inklings Literary Agency is legitimate, wonderful, and has fantastic clients (cough Like Me cough). There's also Inkwell Agency, which is very much legitimate even if I'm not one of their clients. Poor them.