DISCOVERPUBLISHERS.COM
I’ve gotten several reports over the past few days about solicitations from an outfit called DiscoverPublishers.com. The solicitations are “personalized” with the author’s name, and have slightly different text, but the import is the same.
In the original email, if you hover over the link you’ll see that it actually goes to a different URL, https://goto.discoverpublishers.com/grow/. That’s often the case with mass marketing campaigns, which take you to a special page that tracks clicks from the solicitation emails.
So what is DiscoverPublishers.com? (That’s the real URL.) On visiting, I recognized it as a company I mentioned all the way back in 2018, as part of a post on predatory publisher-finding and -matching “services”. These outfits have you fill out a form with your name, contact information, and maybe a couple of things about your manuscript (is it fiction? What’s your budget?) and then either provide you with a list of supposedly perfect matches, or promise to send your matches to you.
What they don’t mention: they’re not actually about finding publishers for authors, but generating leads for vanity publishers and assisted self-publishing services, which pay to participate. These are the only “matches” you’ll receive. Also, because you’ve provided your contact information, they can now aggressively solicit you via phone and email.
Author Solutions owns a bunch of these faux publisher-matching sites. It isn’t associated with DiscoverPublishers as far as I can tell, but I don’t know who is; its “Who We Are” page offers no concrete or verifiable information, nor does its Privacy page (there are no Terms and Conditions). It owns at least one other domain name: http://freepublishersinfo.com/, which leads to the same website.
Usually writers stumble on sites like this through inadvisable websearches, such as typing “find a publisher” into Google. This is the first I’ve heard of a faux publisher-matching service doing email outreach.
RESELLER VENTURES
I’m also receiving reports of a solicitation from a company called Reseller Ventures, which describes itself as a distributor.
It’s an approach specifically designed to appeal to self-published authors who want to reach beyond online distribution and gain physical bookstore and library presence, or sell books abroad. Note the strategic, yet curiously generic, flattery, designed to tweak an author’s ego and make the solicitation seem personal, rather than the mass email it probably is. Also, you can’t see it because I’ve redacted it to protect the author’s identity, but the book title is in a different font, indicating that it has simply been dropped into a template.
So already there are questions. And when we hop on over to Reseller Ventures‘ website…well. Typos and other errors on the homepage. No meaningful information about the company or staff. No list of “reseller partners” or customers–just a handful of canned-sounding testimonials. No service specifics (do they distribute to bookstores? Libraries? Non-book retailers? Domestically? Abroad?) These are all things you might want to know about a distributor you’re thinking of using.
As for the “15 years of undefeated success” touted on the homepage? It’s actually closer to 15 weeks. RV’s web domain was only registered this past June.
I haven’t heard from anyone who has responded to the solicitation, so I don’t know the endgame. But for sure, it’s something the author will have to pay big money for.
Possibly it’s a republishing scheme, where RV claims that the books has to be “rebranded” or “relicensed” in order for it to be distributed. Or maybe it’s a book order scam, with RV announcing that “reseller partners” have placed orders but the author has to pay in advance for printing, shipping, or some other supposedly associated expense. Such schemes work well for scammers, because authors have no way to verify whether books were ever actually produced or where they went, and scammers can easily manufacture “evidence”, such as photoshopping book covers onto stock photos of bookstore shelves (I’ve seen several examples of this).
Have you received one of these solicitations? Did you respond? What did you find out? Let me know in the comments, or email me: beware@sfwa.org.
DiscoverPublishers is advertising on TV too — I just saw one of their ads during a Rick and Morty episode on Cartoon Network.
I read all the bad stuff about Publishers, but no clear way on how to get a book published.
There’s information on the Writer Beware website about agents (necessary if you want to get published by one of the big publishers) and small presses (which don’t require authors to be agented) that can help, including discussions of good and bad business practices, tips to help you avoid getting scammed, and links to resources that can help you find a publisher or agent.