Misleading the 5000

I had another email today in the increasingly hilarious saga of the YouWriteOn/Legend Press "5000" deal in which Hedge Witch is involved. Unfortunately it serves only to confuse matters further. I'm sure the people involved in this are making Herculean efforts to fulfil their promises but, frankly, the whole thing seems to be in meltdown. I have no confidence they'll get Hedge Witch published by next Christmas now.

Here's a quote from the email :

"we at Legend Press have agreed to taking on completing the remainder of books to be processed ourselves. In order to do so, we are going to use a strict pass/fail text and to give you the choice of having your book complete by the end of February by choosing one of the many great template covers"

I include this not so we can snigger at the garbled English sent out in an email by a publishing house - although we can certainly do that - but to indicate how confusing the whole situation is. I infer from what they say that lots of people have failed to meet the formatting guidelines, mainly over their cover artwork. What isn't clear is whether Hedge Witch has passed or failed their mysterious "production test", or whether it hasn't even been tested yet. I supect the latter; I followed the instructions over DPI etc. pretty carefully. But they still, incredibly, haven't told me where I stand. Communication seems to be a big problem for them. Remember, this is from a publishing house.

Am I still in a queue, waiting to be processed? Will the book suddenly appear, fully-formed and glorious? Will it appear but without some of the revisions I've sent them over the past few months? Or am I stuck in YouWriteOn purgatory, awaiting some mysterious salvation later this year? I don't know and I'm largely past caring. I've moved on.

Meanwhile the YouWriteOn forums are still offline. You don't say.