That’s from the gospel according to the NCP loonies.

I received this e-mail from one of their authors:

Hi, Karen. NCP just sent out a “marketing tips” letter to the internal author loop, this one explaining very seriously (and with absolutely no self-interest, of course) why it’s bad for authors’ careers to publish at multiple houses, and why authors should be publishing three or four books a year with NCP in order to develop the maximum possible fanbase.

Here’s an excerpt from the original post:

“In 2007, NCP sold around 150,000 ebooks. This year’s sales, contrary to the hopes and dreams of the truly evil, are up around 25%. Since we have, since our inception, pretty much doubled in sales every year, this is a low increase for us thus far this year, but we put this down to the choking economy—-not evil wishes. It’s difficult to get an exact figure on the customer base since many of our customers get a new customer number almost every time they visit, but with those sales figures it should be easy to see that we have a pretty respectable customer base.”

Totally selfless this lot, aren’t they?

Is it me, or do they seem to be getting more and more desperate?

You can pretty much guarantee that since they’ve given 25% as their annual increase, the numbers are probably a lot lower than that in reality.

Here’s hoping they go under soon.