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.
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When the late, unlamented Tate Publishing & Enterprises went belly-up a few months ago, I started hearing from Tate authors who were being contacted by self-publishing companies and other for-profit enterprises looking to recruit new customers. Some of these were straightforward, reasonably reputable (if overpriced) businesses. Others...not so much.
Very active trying to snag Tate authors was Legaia Books.
UPDATE 9/22/19: This post, written in August 2017, chronicles the events leading up to, and following, the abrupt disappearance of PublishAmerica/America Star Books. Given the amount of time that has elapsed since the company vanished, Writer Beware thinks it's safe to conclude that PA/ASB is permanently out of business.
It's been a while since I wrote about America Star Books, née PublishAmerica, one of the most prolific author mills in America (also the subject of scores of author complaints, and the recipient of an "F" rating from the Better Business Bureau). So what's been going on?
In May 2015, ASB/PA co-founder Larry Clopper filed suit against PA/ASB, co-founder Willem Meiners, and several others, alleging breach of contract, among other causes, and demanding dissolution of the company and appointment of a receiver. After over a year of legal maneuvering--which included the appointment of an appraiser, a counterclaim by Meiners/PA/ASB, and the issuance of subpoenas by Clopper to various PA/ASB banks and creditors--the parties agreed in July 2016 to stipulate to dismissal with prejudice.
On July 20, the Authors Guild and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America announced that they had together reached an agreement with Hungary-based Galaktika Magazine. For at least a decade, Galaktika re-published stories by multiple authors without seeking permission or remitting payment. Galaktika claimed that, since the stories had been published online, they were in theRead More
Today, Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter filed eight felony charges and one misdemeanor charge each against Ryan and Richard Tate, respectively CEO and founder of Chiristian vanity publisher Tate Publishing & Enterprises, for alleged fraudulent business practices.
According to local news station KFOR,
The charges include four felony counts of embezzlement, one felony count of attempted extortion by threat, two felony counts of extortion by threat, one felony count of racketeering and one misdemeanor count of embezzlement.
In the late 1990s, when Writer Beware first started up, the digital revolution was just peeking over the horizon. Traditional publishing was still the only path to publication, and literary agents were the principal gatekeepers.
As a result, there existed a huge and lucrative subculture of dodgy literary agents, who fed on writers' hunger for publication and turned the (false) promise of access into money. Upfront fees, editing referral schemes, vanity publishing scams: the list was endless.
No more. With the enormous growth of small presses and the expanding number of self-publishing options, agents are no longer the be-all and end-all of a writing career, and fewer writers decide to seek them. Writers are also more savvy these days about proper business practice. This has been bad news for the predatory agent subculture, which has shrunk to a sickly shadow of its former self. Fee-charging agents, once the most common of all literary pitfalls, are now relatively rare.
A little less than two years ago, I wrote a blog post that focused, in part, on Author Solutions' declining share of the so-called assisted self-publishing market.
According to a report by Bowker on ISBN output in the self-publishing market between 2008 and 2013, the number of ISBNs issued by AS dropped 15% between 2011 and 2013, from an all-time high 52,648, to 44,574.
(ISBN output is not a meaningful method for assessing the self-publishing market as a whole, because so many self-publishers don't bother with ISBNs. But it is an effective way of tracking Author Solutions' activity, because all AS publishing packages, even the ebook-only ones, include ISBN assignment.)
