Writer Beware

Latest Posts

Author Complaints at Starfish Bay Publishing

OCT 16, 2026October 17, 20262 COMMENTS

I first heard of Australian children's publisher Starfish Bay Publishing (SBP) in 2024, thanks to a question from an author about the advisability of investing in SBP's Author Supported Traditional Publishing Programme. Implemented, SBP's website explained, because of "the severe effect the pandemic had on our publishing business", this program--despite using the word traditional--required authors to come up with a "temporary loan" of AU$6,000.

Here's how SBP's website described the Author Supported program at the time I received the question, from an October 2024 archive of the SBP website (thank you, Wayback Machine).

I told the author that including words like "traditional" and "loan" and "temporary" in your demand for money doesn't change the fact that a large amount of cash is due upfront as a condition of publication. Pay to play is pay to play. Even if SBP sincerely intended to pay the money back within two and a half years, what guarantee was there that it would still be in business at that point? Maybe not terrific odds if, a full four years after the pandemic, its business was still so precarious that it had to rely on its authors for financing. The whole thing seemed highly questionable to me.

CONTRACTS

More Rights Grabs from Must Read Magazines

Header image: photo and graphic collage of two hands, one holding and one signing a paper contract, on a pale orange background (Credit: Roman Samborskyi / Shutterstock.com)

OCT 9, 2026October 16, 20267 COMMENTS

In early 2025, a group called Must Read Magazines (MRM) acquired a suite of five well-known genre fiction magazines: Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. My July 2025 blog post about the acquisition, and the ensuing backlash over unfriendly contract terms, has all the details, but here's the TL;DR.

News of the acquisition came out of the blue. But despite how little was known about MRM and its founders, as well as concerns about consolidation, there was hope that the new ownership might help the magazines survive. Analog, Asimov’s, and F&SF had been steadily losing print sales and subscriptions over recent years, and F&SF had been the subject of complaints of contract and payment delays for some time.

It soon became clear, however, that MRMs' new contracts were significantly author-unfriendly, with sweeping claims on a large menu of rights (including rights, such as merchandising, that aren't typically part of magazine contracts), no provision for rights reversion, and, troublingly, a moral rights waiver (for more on moral rights, and why such waivers are contract red flags, see my blog post). Although MRM was willing to negotiate changes, some writers described the process as unduly time-consuming and convoluted, with the moral rights waiver being a particular sticking point.

AI SCAMS

How Those Personalized Generative AI Scam Emails Are Built

Header image: white robot fingers typing on a gray keyboard against black background. Above the keyboard hovers a visualization of an email message: a document halfway inside a mailing envelope (Credit: Koupei Studio / Shutterstock.com)

SEP 25, 2026September 25, 202635 COMMENTS

One of the things I often hear from writers whose inboxes are crammed with incredibly personalized marketing or book club or editor impersonation emails--you know, the ones that make it seem the sender has first-hand knowledge of your book and your bio, and is really impressed with both--is "How are these things created? How do they get so many of the details right?"

The answer, of course, is generative AI, which makes it possible to scrape authors' data from the internet and regurgitate it in response to prompts fed into a chatbot. Mostly the chatbots get it right. But if you've gotten more than a few of these solicitations, it won't be news to you that they do make mistakes: someone else's name, wrong or nonexistent book title, hallucinated bio details.

Occasionally, those mistakes provide a little insight into how the solicitations are built and targeted.

OVERSEAS SCAMS

Love v. Wiley Book Writers: A Publishing Scam Gets a Rare Comeuppance

Header image: touchscreen with law-related icons (gavel, court building, open book, etc.) with hand selecting scales of justice (Credit: mayam_studio / Shutterstock.com)

SEP 18, 2026September 24, 202632 COMMENTS

Raymond Love just wanted to publish his children's book with a trustworthy self-publishing company. Instead, he found a scam that took his money and delivered nothing of value.

For most authors in this situation, lost cash and lost dreams are unrecoverable, but Raymond Love's story has a different ending. He sued--and won.

The legal documents in his case provide fascinating insight not just into the techniques scammers use to bleed their victims of resources--manipulating them with constant and egregious lies into believing that services are being delivered and promises fulfilled--but also the complex web of shell companies and shady operators that keep the scam humming.

Anthropic Copyright Settlement: Publishers Are Making Incorrect Claims on Authors’ Payouts

SEP 4, 2026September 18, 202686 COMMENTS

This week, many authors who are part of the Anthropic copyright class action settlement began receiving notices like these:

The one on the right invites authors to review and confirm their claims: just making sure all is as it should be. If you received the one on the left, however, all is not as it should be: there's some conflict between rightsholders' claims that needs to be resolved.

Upon accessing the portal (which doesn't seem to have a formal name, so I'll call it the "disgreement portal"), many authors who received the left-hand notice made an unwelcome discovery: their publishers are making claims on their allocations (aka the payouts for their works) that are simply...wrong.

AI SCAMS

Production Companies, Literary Agents, Foreign Languages: AI-Driven Scams Continue to Morph

Header image: multicolored, backlit letters AI repeating diabonally on a yellow background (Credit: Steve Johnson / Unsplash.com)

AUG 28, 2026August 28, 202647 COMMENTS

When I first began reporting on the aggressive AI-driven email scams that have been plaguing the Inboxes of authors everywhere for well over a year now, they were limited to marketing scams offering supposedly expert "visibility" for writers and their books.

In the year-plus since then, the scams have adapted and expanded in response to writers' reactions and increasingly widespread reporting and discussion. In addition to marketing offers, they now include book club and review scams and a wide variety of impersonation scams, where the goal of initial contact is to steer writers through one or more referrals into paid editing or marketing arrangements. They've impersonated well-known writers, literary agents, editors at publishing houses, book festivals (with fake invites), and radio stations and hosts (with fake interview requests).

The one thing the scammers haven't changed or adapted is the set of markers that have characterized the scams from the start: hyper-personalization coupled with lavish praise (thanks to generative AI) that makes it seem the sender has actual knowledge of the writer's book; the almost universal use of Gmail addresses; banking/payment information that traces to scammers overseas; and extreme aggressiveness that paradoxically undercuts effectiveness (when you're getting multiple flattering yet suspiciously similar solicitations every day, they start to seen a tad inauthentic). It's a business built on volume, so only a small fraction of writers need to be fooled in order for the fraudsters to make money.