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.
PLEASE NOTE:
As a result of this post, I'm getting many emails from authors who believe they are contacting PublishAmerica/America Star Books. Writer Beware is not connected in any way with PublishAmerica or America Star Books (in fact, they sued us, unsuccessfully, for defamation in 2014).
The changeover is acknowledged on America Star's website, on the About Us page:
An article in PW last week caught my eye. WinePress Publishing, a Christian self-publishing company, has closed its doors, according to an announcement yesterday on the company’s Web site. The house had been plagued in recent years with accusations of fraud, complaints from authors and former employees, and financial problems. WinePress itself had filed aRead More
Here at Writer Beware, we love the weird stuff–the nutty, fring-y, even, dare I say, totally freaking insane things that are always cropping up at the boundaries of the publishing world, often spawned by people who haven’t really taken the time to think things through. Or maybe they’re just idiots. Hard to tell sometimes. So…playingRead More
Last week a literary agent contacted me on Twitter. “Ever heard of these folks?” she asked. “They’ve been spamming us all day.” The link she gave me led to a service called Agent Artery. Agent Artery is a service with both writers and agents in mind, helping literary agencies and agents manage and keep onRead More
I was contemplating what to write for my first Writer Beware blog post, when a subject popped up out of the blue, packed with all kinds of fascinating questions.
Some of you may remember when SFWA tangled with the online “digital library” Scribd back in 2007. Scribd was loaded with unauthorized uploads of copyrighted material, but SFWA screwed up big time by sending a sort-of DMCA notice (it wasn’t really) to get works by many sf writers removed from the site. It was an embarrassment for SFWA, and over time made it less and less likely that the organization would do anything directly about illegal uploads, even though a plan had been developed to do so for members who had specifically authorized SFWA to act as their agent.
Since everything to do with online piracy left a decidedly bad taste in my mouth, I decided I would not go looking for illegally uploaded copies of my or other authors’ works, and I didn’t check to see if Scribd was following through on the promises it made at the time to provide real-time checking of works uploaded to the service.
Welcome to 2014! (I've been hibernating for the past week, working on revisions for my latest novel, so this is actually the first time I've written out the date.)
Every January, I look back over this blog and pick out what I think were the most useful, interesting, and/or important posts of the previous year. Here goes.
JANUARY
