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.
Many of you may be familiar with the recent activities of Barbara Bauer, unlucky number four (in alphabetical order) on Writer Beware’s 20 Worst Agents list. Always swift with a cease-and-desist demand, and unhappy with her new notoriety as the 20 Worst List proliferates across the Internet, she’s taken to slamming people who post theRead More
Last time we checked in on the saga of Melanie Mills, a.k.a. Lisa Hackney, a.k.a. Elisabeth von Hullessem, now calling herself Raswitha Elisabeth Melanie Mills, this outrageously bizarre literary scammer and alleged mother-murder attempter had been extradited to the USA from Canada, and was sitting in an Arkansas jail awaiting sentencing on six charges of failure to appear (jumping bail back in 1999), first-degree battery (pinning her mother to a picnic table with a car), aggravated assault (ditto), and theft of property (embezzling part of her mother's estate and kiting bad checks).
On February 10, 2006, she pleaded guilty to all six charges, and was sentenced to two prison terms in the Arkansas Department of Correction, one of 15 years and one of 10 years, to run concurrently.
However, she won't do any jail time.
There’s a new literary agent in town, boys and girls. His name is Henry Santsaver, and his agency is called, rather generically, Literary Associates. Here’s his page on Publishers Marketplace. Here’s the agency’s website. Anyone’s who’s read my posts on the qualifications an agent needs or fake track records should be able to spot theRead More
Yesterday I drove up to Annapolis to give my writing workshop on “Finding an Agent” at Anne Arundel Community College. The last hour of the short workshop is devoted to writing a first draft of a query letter for the student’s current work-in-progress. At the upcoming Balticon, Victoria and I have volunteered to conduct aRead More
This was one of the silliest writing-related (well, sort of) things I ran across last year: the Book Millionaire "reality show." It's the brainchild not of a publishing industry insider--or even a publishing industry outsider--but of Lori Prokop, purveyor of a variety of get-rich-quick tapes, seminars, and books, and owner of her very own vanity press, Best Seller Publishing, Inc. (which currently has no working website, but here's what it looked like in 2003).
And guess what--these lucky would-be authors don't need to squeeze out a single line of prose! According to the show's FAQ: "We are looking for a person who desires to be America's next Book Millionaire and best selling author. This means the book may or may not be written yet nor would it need to be written before filming of the show."
So this is a book contest in which an actual book is irrelevant. For any potential contestants who might be feeling a little nervous about that, not to worry--if you don't have your own book, you can use someone else's! "You will not need to have your own book finished for the filming," the FAQ helpfully explains. "Rather, we will use prominent company products and currently published books for the tasks." Clearly, this is a competition for all the people who always kinda thought they might write the Great American Novel but never quite found the time, or the people who have a fab idea for a book if someone else would just take care of writing it for them, or the people who want to be authors but don't want to take the time to turn themselves into writers.
A few posts back, I linked to an example of the sort of agent website that fairly screams “Avoid!” Unfortunately, the reason I know about this website is that someone wrote me to ask whether the agent was reputable. You’d think that some things–an inability to spell, for instance–would register on the clue meter. Sadly,Read More
