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.
I'm blogging over at Writer Unboxed again today, with an overview of a type of scam that currently represents 50% or more of the questions and complaints I receive.
The current self-publishing industry has its roots in the mid-1990s, when three startups–Xlibris, Trafford, and AuthorHouse–began selling digital publishing services to individual authors.
(Bear with me: I’m getting to the subject of this post!)
"You warn about so many bad literary agents and publishers, why don't you ever tell us about the good ones?"
It's a question Writer Beware has been getting for almost as long as we've been around, from writers bewildered about where to go for reliable information, frustrated by the abundance of author-focused schemes and scams, or just exhausted by the work of finding a good home for their manuscripts.
I have a standard answer that I provide when people email me with this question or ask me on social media. But with writing scams more prevalent than ever, and writers more beleaguered by fraudulent solicitations than at any time in Writer Beware's history, I thought it would be helpful to offer a more detailed explanation of why we call out the bad guys but don't focus on the good guys.
In a super-crowded, hyper-competitive marketplace, one of the main challenges for book authors is to stand out. And where there's a need, there are always unscrupulous operators waiting to take advantage. The internet is awash in worthless schemes and outright scams designed to profit from authors' hunger for publicity and exposure.
I've written about a number of these junk marketing products: Hollywood book-to-screen packages, the hugely marked-up PR options offered by assisted self-publishing conglomerate Author Solutions, high entry fee awards programs, offers for book fair "representation", advertising in pay-to-play magazines, faux news segments, expensive paid shelf space schemes.
Today, I'm going to talk about vanity radio and TV interviews.
Babelcube is a platform that matches publishers and self-publishing authors with freelance translators to produce foreign-language versions of their books. Authors and publishers can post descriptions of their books for translators to bid on; the author can then select the offer they prefer. Translators can peruse book descriptions and bid on books they're interested in. Payment for both author and translator is a revenue share of sales income, with Babelcube taking an administrative fee of 20%.
I've long been a bit skeptical of Babelcube. Book translation is much more than simply rendering words in a different language; both skill and artistry are needed to capture the author's voice and style. Running the text through Google Translate or another translation program won't do that, even with some by-hand tweaking. Also, authors are able to cancel projects if they don't like the quality of the translation--but how do you vet quality in a language you don't speak?
I don't doubt there are honest translators at Babelcube, and satisfied authors too. But the potentially very low pay (revenue-share arrangements are always highly speculative) would seem to attract a lot of non-professionals, with all the quality issues that implies--not to mention the potential for scammers looking to make money with a large volume of quick, shoddy translations. (One example, shared with me by a translator: an English-language book whose title included the word "rake"--as in philanderer--and was translated into Italian using the word for the garden tool.)
A little while ago, I wrote a post on the anatomy of fake literary agency scams. This post focuses on their somewhat less common, but equally pernicious, sibling: fake film company scams.
Here's how it works. A film company--with a website and everything--calls or emails out of the blue with a tempting offer: your book has the potential to be made into a movie/TV series! And they want to represent you to studios/pitch you to producers/take you to a major conference where scores of film people will be present! Just one requirement: you need a screenplay/a pitch deck/a storyboard/some other product. Don't have those things? No problem--they know a reputable and expert company that can create them for you...for a fee.
It's a classic bait-and-switch setup. The "film company" is a front for the service provider, which in turn is owned by a parent company overseas. And that initial service that was pitched to you as absolutely essential? It's just the start. By paying, you've marked yourself as fair game for escalating sales pressure and fraudulent offers involving large upfront payments. And the sales reps who staff the scams--who earn a commission on every dollar you spend--will take every opening you give them, and won't stop unless you stop them.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that where there is an issue of concern for writers, someone will find a way to monetize it.
And with AI suddenly omnipresent in our lives (or at least in the media), creators are confronted with a bewildering multiplicity of issues of concern, from unauthorized use of creative works for machine learning, to whether AI-created work is covered by copyright, to crappy AI-created books inundating Amazon and in some cases impersonating real writers, to the replacement of (expensive) creators with (cheap) generative AI tools like ChatGPT and MidJourney, to the looming prospect of machine-created art or novels or journalism becoming indistinguishable from the work of humans.
In this fraught environment, it was probably inevitable that enterprising people would come up with the idea of a service to certify or authenticate human authorship, and invite creators to buy into it. This post takes a look at two such services.
