The official blog of Writer Beware® shines a bright light into the dark corners of the shadow-world of literary scams, schemes, and pitfalls. Also providing advice for writers, industry news, and commentary. Writer Beware® is sponsored by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association.
Last year, giant publishing services firm Author Solutions Inc. contracted with two major commercial publishers to create publishing service (a.k.a. self-publishing, a.k.a. vanity publishing) divisions: West Bow Press for Thomas Nelson, and DellArte Press (formerly Harlequin Horizons) for Harlequin. ASI also, at some earlier point, set up a similar operation, Cross Books, for Christian publisherRead More
When Writer Beware was founded in 1998, the main actors in the arena of literary scammery were literary agents (or people calling themselves literary agents). Though there were certainly many disreputable publishers out there (you can read about some of them on the Case Studies page of Writer Beware), complaints and questions about faux agentsRead More
You may have read a recent article in PW called “Self-Published Titles Topped 764,000 in 2009 as Traditional Output Dipped,” about the amazing growth in “non-traditional” (a.k.a. print-on-demand-produced) books. Or you may just have read about it, given how many tweets and blog mentions it received. If the latter, you may have wondered what suchRead More
Self-promotion: a subject much on many writers’ minds. All across the Internet, new authors are urged to be proactive in publicizing themselves and their books–to build a “brand.” But what to do? And how much? I blogged about that a few months back, focusing on the uncertainties involved, and the fact that, ultimately, no oneRead More
Like many writers (whether they admit it or not), I have Google Alerts set to email me a link whenever my name is mentioned online. Today, it brought me a link to a blog post by Peter Cox of the Redhammer Agency. The post concerns the question of whether an agent who competes against anotherRead More
There’s been a bit of attention paid lately in the blogosphere to the “promotional” antics of everyone’s favorite author mill, PublishAmerica. As with other author mills, PA endeavors to turn its authors into customers. While it doesn’t contractually require authors to buy their own books, it’s relentless–and creative–in its efforts to persuade them to doRead More
