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.
In another of my periodic updates on the #DisneyMustPay initiative, below is the open letter that the #DisneyMustPay Task Force posted this morning.
(For more information on this important initiative, see my September 2021 post: #DisneyMustPay Update: Disney Is Still Not Paying.)
Dear Disney,
GenZ Publishing is "on a mission to bring new authors to the world." Founded in 2015 by Morissa Schwartz when she was just out of college, GenZ publishes a wide range of genre fiction, as well as some nonfiction. It also has a YA imprint, Zenith Publishing.
Ms. Schwartz, who describes herself as a bestselling author, is also an entrepreneur: in addition to GenZ/Zenith, she's the founder of Dr. Rissy's Writing & Marketing, which offers various PR services along with copywriting, editing, and consulting; and, according to her Reedsy bio, of a ghostwriting company called AmWriting. She was recently elected to the IBPA Board.
GenZ first came to my attention in 2016, thanks to an unusual clause in its contract (see the second paragraph).
This important update was just posted on the SFWA website.
SFWA recently received guidance from the Authors Guild, one of our sister organizations, on a significant United States tax-reporting change that many independent authors have shared concerns about since January 1. That’s when Audible/ACX changed their tax-reporting practices for royalties from audiobook productions, by including royalties for both authors and their audiobook narrators on the same form delivered to authors. This move created a lot of confusion about how to file taxes for independent authors; its effects are explained more fully below.
Although it is now late in this year’s tax season, we do hope that affected authors will find this guidance useful in preparing or amending their United States taxes for 2021 and looking forward to next year’s. Thank you to the Authors Guild for compiling this guide, and do feel free to share it with other authors you know who may be affected by the reporting change.
As I define it, it's one-size-fits-all marketing that's inexpensive to provide, can be (and usually is) sold at a huge markup, and is often of dubious value for book promotion.
Press releases are a good example. They're the sort of thing that "everybody knows" should be part of a PR campaign. Like any worthwhile marketing or promotion, however, they need to be tailored to be effective: recipients must be carefully targeted and followed up on.
If blasted out to a list of unvetted addresses (such as that list of thousands of librarians that some email spammer may have pitched to you at some point) or posted to online press release distributors (where they will drown in an ocean of thousands of others), they are all but useless: in other words, junk. And sellers of press release services often charge astronomical prices: for instance, AuthorHouse's "web-optimized" press release will set you back $1,299. That's a pretty nice profit for cutting and pasting an author's bio and back matter into a press release template and clicking "publish" on PR Web.
This is an update of a post I wrote some years ago. Since I've been getting a lot of questions lately from writers wondering how to request contract termination and rights reversion, I thought it would be useful to take another look.
There's no "right" or "official" procedure for a rights reversion request. If you do a websearch on "rights reversion request" you can find various pieces of advice from authors and others. That said, here are some common-sense suggestions for how to go about this (Obligatory disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, so what follows is not legal advice.)
First of all, if you have a competent agent, discuss the situation with your agent and ask them to approach the publisher on your behalf. Especially if you're with a larger publisher, your agent is more likely to know whom to contact, and in a better position to push for a response.
Welcome to the new home of the Writer Beware blog!
After many years on the Blogger platform, we have finally transitioned to WordPress, which offers much greater flexibility in terms of design, control, and ease of use.
We also have a new, easy to remember web address: writerbeware.blog.
