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.
If you’re a writer, you’ve probably heard of BookExpo America. Although it describes itself as “the premier event for the North American publishing industry,” in recent years it has shrunk considerably, both in exhibitors and attendance. There are those who question its relevance, not to mention its survival (see Mike Shatzkin’s interesting essay on theRead More
One of two covers for this week’s edition of Publishers Weekly features SterlingHouse Publisher and a number of its writers–just in time for Book Expo America. Over the SterlingHouse logo and seven author photos floats the cover caption “Hot New Authors.” If you’re a Writer Beware regular, you may know that SterlingHouse is one ofRead More
A little less than a year ago, I blogged on ebook giveaway experiments by major publishers (including Tor, Random House, and St. Martin’s Press), and the question of whether such giveaways could boost print sales. At the time of my blog post, what reports there were (from both industry sources and individual authors) indicated thatRead More
On the heels of Queryfail and Agentfail and all the anti-agent feeling generated thereby, agent Nathan Bransford hosted a Be An Agent For a Day contest. The goal of the contest: to see whether people could pick the three published authors from a group of fifty query letters (all posted on Nathan’s blog). Nathan postedRead More
In my last post, I discussed the misleading appropriation by self-publishing conglomerate Author Solutions (parent company of AuthorHouse, iUniverse, Xlibris, and Trafford) of the term “independent publisher.” The flip side of this is the growing tendency among self-published authors to call themselves “independent authors” or “indie authors.” I don’t know where this term came from,Read More
Back around the turn of the century, a certain author mill headquartered in Frederick, Maryland decided it wanted to distance itself from the business model of the then-new print-on-demand self-publishing services–because even though it followed most of the same practices (little editorial gatekeeping, minimal distribution, no marketing, and reliance on digital technology), it didn’t chargeRead More
