Writer Beware

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A New “Beware”: Scammers Impersonating Reputable Literary Agents

AUG 13, 2020April 18, 202383 COMMENTS

I've written about this new "beware" twice already (you can see those posts here and here), but it appears to be a growing problem, so I want to put out a more focused warning.

Scammers--the same Philippines-based Author Solutions copycats that I've featured numerous times in this blog (also see the long, long list in the sidebar)--are impersonating reputable literary agents and agencies in order to bamboozle writers into buying worthless "services." Here are the misused names I've documented so far; the scam companies they work for are in parentheses:

- Jennifer Jackson of the Donald Maass Literary Agency (TechBooks Media, aka Chapters Media and Distribution)

PUBLISHER COMPLAINTS

Small Press Storm Warnings: Filles Vertes Publishing

AUG 4, 2020February 1, 20247 COMMENTS

Scroll down for updates I first heard of Filles Vertes Publishing (FVP) in late February of last year, when I was contacted by a writer wanting to know if I’d received any complaints. I hadn’t–but a look at FVP’s website prompted some concerns. On the plus side, FVP was distributed by Small Press United, theRead More

PUBLISHER COMPLAINTS

Small Press Storm Warnings: Lethe Press, Seventh Star Press

Header image: dark, stormy sky with lightning flash (credit: Den Rozhnovsky / Shutterstock.com)

JUL 23, 2020June 29, 202315 COMMENTS

Founded by Steve Berman in 2001, Lethe Press is an LGBTQ-focused independent publisher "specializing in the strange, the eerie, and the uncanny". In a publishing environment where small presses come and go like mushrooms, it has been in business for nearly two decades, and has garnered awards and starred reviews for its books.

Unfortunately, it has recently also been garnering complaints.

Writer Beware has heard from multiple individuals who cite a variety of problems at Lethe, including contract breaches in the form of unpaid royalties (for both authors and editors) and late royalty payments and statements. Contractors (such as audio narrators) have also gone unpaid. Royalty reports I've seen are seriously lacking; among other things, they fail to state sales numbers for ebooks, showing only gross income.

LITERARY AGENT SCAMS

The Impersonation Game Redux

JUL 16, 2020February 4, 20237 COMMENTS

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware® A few months ago, I warned about a scammer impersonating agent Jennifer Jackson of the Donald Maass Literary Agency. The fraudster in question turned out to be yet another of the Philippines-based publishing and marketing scams that I’ve been writing about so much over the past couple ofRead More

LITERARY AGENTS AND AGENCIES

Agencies in Turmoil: Red Sofa Literary Threatens Legal Action, Mass Firings At Corvisiero Literary Agency

JUN 11, 2020May 26, 202215 COMMENTS

On May 30, following blowback she received for her tweeted responses to the protests in her hometown of St. Paul, MN, Dawn Frederick of Red Sofa Literary posted a note of apology on the agency's website.

Between then and now, Frederick seems to have changed her mind--at least, about her critics.

Today, three of the people who responded critically on social media to Frederick's tweets--agents Beth Phelan and Kelly Van Sant and author Isabel Sterling--received a letter from Frederick's lawyers threatening legal action unless they remove and retract their responses, which the lawyers allege are "false, harm [Frederick's] reputation and are defamatory".

Four Major Publishers Sue the Internet Archive Over Unauthorized Book Scanning

JUN 1, 2020January 31, 202527 COMMENTS

This past March, I wrote about the Internet Archive's National Emergency Library--a spinoff from the IA's massive Open Library project, which makes scanned print books available to the public for free in various digital formats.

While many of these books are in the public domain, many are not: they are in-copyright and commercially available, and have been scanned and uploaded without authors' or publishers' permission, violating copyright law and potentially interfering with authors' income. To create the National Emergency Library, the IA has used the figleaf of the coronavirus pandemic as justification to remove even the minimal restrictions on borrowing that governed the Open Library--abandoning one of the key provisions of the legal theory that it and others created to justify what amounts to massive copyright violation.

Though controversy erupted over the Open Library a few years ago, with the IA's actions condemned by authors, publishers, and authors' groups, and many authors contacting the IA to have their books removed, no legal action followed. Given the outcome of the Authors' Guild's long legal fight against Google's book scanning project, I'm guessing it might never have done, had the IA not thrown down the gauntlet of the National Emergency Library. Now, four publishers have called the IA's bluff.