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.
Recently I blogged about IndieReader, an online bookstore/distributor that is attempting to raise the visibility of self-published books and authors. In the process of researching that post, I discovered Publetariat Vault, which is also attempting to bring attention to self-published books–though in quite a different way. The Vault is a project of Publetariat, an onlineRead More
Below, links to some interesting and useful articles and blog posts that I’ve encountered recently in my travels round the Web: – On Nathan Bransford’s blog, guest blogger Eric, a sales assistant at a major book publisher, provides a primer on how publishers sell books into bookstores. An eye-opening post that points up, among otherRead More
Last week, the Twitter- and blogosphere were abuzz with two tales of authorial bad behavior: much-published author Alice Hoffman’s Twitter meltdown over a poor review (Hoffman tweeted several angry messages about the review, including one that provided the reviewer’s phone number and email address and encouraged fans to “Tell her what u think of snarkyRead More
Yesterday, the US Justice Department confirmed that it is opening a formal investigation into the Google Book Settlement. A quick recap: Several years ago, Google entered into agreements with a number of libraries to scan the books in their collections. The books were then listed online via Google Books, along with publishing info and, forRead More
Regular readers of this blog will know that I have a small obsession with so-called literary reality shows. (Amazed that such things could even exist? See this recent post for a recap.) To date, seven of these suckers have surfaced. Five never got past the planning and announcement stages. The jury’s still out on theRead More
Writer Beware often gets correspondence that goes something like this: Dear Writer Beware, I [wrote/self-published] a book about [topic/plot synopsis]. I sent [the manuscript/the book] to [name of agent/publisher]. Next thing I know, there’s a book on the market just like mine! I’m sure that someone plagiarized it. What can I do? My answer (couched,Read More
