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.
KISS Library has been shut down. Scroll down for updates. I’ve gotten several alerts over the past week about a pirate site that’s new to me (though not new: this warning was first published in September 2017): KISS Library, where many authors are finding unauthorized electronic versions of their books. KISS Library differs from the typicalRead More
Founded in 2004, Dog Ear Publishing is part of the surge of Author Solutions-style assisted self-publishing companies--many of them now defunct--that entered the market in the early aughts.
Headquartered, like AS, in Indiana, Dog Ear presents itself--with more than a smidge of exaggeration--as "The best of traditional publishing, re-imagined for the modern author". Its publishing and marketing packages are typical for this type of company, and while they're not among the most expensive, they aren't cheap, either.
Unlike the various Author Solutions imprints, Writer Beware never received any complaints about Dog Ear, which appears to have been reasonably trouble-free for most of its existence.
Vanity publishers, unfortunately, are not in short supply. Writer Beware's files include hundreds of them, large and small. But there's a select few about which we hear most often, via writers' questions and complaints. These companies reel in scores, hundreds, and even thousands of writers, often doing business on an industrial scale.
I'm going to provide a snapshot of some of these below. But first, some common deceptive terms.
Hybrid Publisher: There's some disagreement over whether there actually is such a thing as a hybrid publisher--a company that charges substantial fees yet provides a service that's otherwise equivalent to traditional publishing, including rigorous selectivity and editing, high royalties, offline distribution, non-bogus PR, and more. Regardless, the term is extensively misused by vanity publishers trying to look more legitimate. Any publisher billing itself as "hybrid" demands further investigation.
Last year, I published a post on the perils of searching for a publisher on the internet using general phrases like “how to get published” or “how to find a publisher”. While such searches turn up excellent resources (such as Jane Friedman’s Start Here: How to Get Your Book Published), a lot of what you’ll seeRead More
Lately I’m seeing frequent ads on Facebook for high-entry fee literary awards, such as the International Book Awards ($89 per entry, though if you enter by April 30 you can get a special early bird rate of $69). It’s sponsored by American Book Fest (formerly known, at various times, as USA Book News, JPX Media, and i310Read More
In December 2011, I wrote a blog post about a Turkish publisher called Arvo Basim Yayin, which was contacting self-pubbed and small press authors out of the blue and offering to buy Turkish rights to their books. Arvo signed up at least ten writers as a result of these approaches, some with multiple books (thoseRead More
