Raider International Publishing (RAI 208.16) has been in the author solutions service business for five years. Actually, May 31st was the exact date of their foundation. Company owner and founder, Adam Salviani, made his annual address, and you can find that here.
I have a lot of time for Raider International Publishing – their core approach to being an author solutions service is laser sharp, and in many ways, they are way ahead of more illustrious competitors. Earlier this year they opened their own bookstore in New York, and the Raider Broadcasting Network has been in existence for more than two years. While it is clearly a platform to promote Raider books, it has also become the home of some pretty reasoned and balanced advice for aspiring authors. I don’t listen in to RBN (Raider Broadcasting Network) for every program they podcast, but every so often I drop by and listen to what is happening there.
Last weekend, I drafted in the elite techo forces to help me out with putting together the POD INDEX we just launched this week. I explained in a previous post that it took us pretty much most of the weekend from Friday through Monday to extract all the data we needed to create the POD INDEX – that meant going through every review and overview we ever did here on the site, as well as looking at all the comments you good posters leave here. I also went through my network of email correspondence over the past three years. The goal was to put together the most accurate picture and assessment we could of all the author solutions services we have covered in our existence on this site.
Late on Sunday, as we started to pull together the first real picture of how all the companies stacked up, one of my colleagues, Tod, remarked about Raider and the data we were seeing in front of us. Now Tod only helps me out occasionally, usually online or via email, but he is as sharp as a cactus needle and has the memory of a proverbially elephant.
“Jesus, Mick, last time I looked at all this stuff, Raider were right up there – what-the-fuck??”
Quietly, without expletives, I wondered the same thing.
Here is Adam Salviani, founder of Raider reflecting on, what for the most part, he considered to be a successful year, but with a significant qualifier:
“…we’ve also seen our own family – the Raider Publishing staff – nearly double this year to meet the demands of a growing author base and a book-selling market which we are becoming a very big part of. There have of course been problems as well to go along with these successes, through a package we no longer offer, many production cycles were interrupted or delayed. we have nearly repaired the damage done by this problem and I think we learned a valuable lesson in the process. In this instance, we valued efficiency over quality of our publications which is not what our company deems to be important or values. Certainly, we will not make this mistake again.”
Adam Salviani, CEO and founder of Raider International Publishing.
This is a remarkably forthright and honest statement – even detrimental in some ways to Raider and their output over the past six months. What astonished me most in the past few months was Raider’s persistence in advertising an expedited publishing service at a time when clearly they were having problems meeting normal deadlines. Salviani remarks above that ‘efficiency’ suffered over ‘quality of our publications’. In this instance, as I read it, speed became the overriding goal in an ever-expanding company.
Quite how this will all be resolved and pan out, remains to be seen. That Salviani did not see this coming as early as some of the comments posted to this site (and here) over the past few months and the general correspondence I received, still puzzles me. It has been apparent since before Christmas 2009 that things were pretty stretched at Raider and the centre core had to give at some stage.
I applaud Salviani for doing what many company CEO’s would not dare to do. But for now, Raider has a busy summer, and some bridges to rebuild.
