Who writes this
What Writers Don’t Know is written and edited by Dan, a publishing professional with more than ten years inside a publishing group operating across Europe. My working life has been submissions, manuscripts on their way to print, printers and distributors, and what actually happens to books after publication. This site exists because most of what aspiring writers read about publishing is written by people who have never seen a royalty statement from the other side of the desk.
Where I stand — read this before anything else
I earn my living in publishing, in a group whose activity includes contribution-based (co-publishing) contracts — the model many Anglophone blogs file, without further distinctions, under “vanity press”. This site is a personal project: my employer does not fund it, review it or approve it, and nothing here represents its position. But my vantage point is part of the record, and you should weigh it when you read my arguments — exactly as you would weigh any critic’s.
Because of that conflict of interest, this site holds itself to one hard rule: it does not review, rate, recommend or warn against any individual publisher or service provider — including any connected to me. The briefings deal with models, numbers, contracts and incentives, never with named commercial recommendations. If a page ever appears to break that rule, use the corrections desk and it will be dealt with in public.
What this site argues
This site has a thesis and does not pretend otherwise: the economics of publishing are harsher than new writers are told; most books lose money for someone; and the useful question about any deal is not which tribe it belongs to but whether its terms, costs, selection and outcomes are transparent and verifiable. Where I think popular watchdog advice oversimplifies, I say so — with sources, on pages with a public corrections ledger. You are not asked to trust the conclusion; you are given the trail.
How the work is produced
This is a one-person desk. Every briefing is written and edited by hand and then run through an AI-assisted verification pass — source checking, figure checking and fact-checking against the primary documents in its ledger. The technology helps me catch errors faster; it does not decide what this site says. Material corrections are dated and public.
Contact
Editorial and correction enquiries: wwdkdan@gmail.com.