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.
If you’re a regular visitor here, you may have noticed a change in our masthead. I’m delighted to announce that the Horror Writers Association has joined the Mystery Writers of America in providing additional support for Writer Beware (our main sponsor, of course, is the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America). We’re thrilled toRead More
Literary feuds are entertaining: famous and not-so-famous authors holding grudges, slinging insults, or sabotaging one another with bad reviews (both anonymous and not).
But what about author feuding in real time? Can the spectacle of writers racing one another to finish a story, or competing to make the best elevator pitch, hold an audience riveted? Will viewers mourn as authortestants fall by the wayside, and cheer for the last author standing?
A new Italian reality show, Masterpiece, aims to find out. At stake: a deal with Italian publisher Bompiani, and an eye-popping first print run of 100,000. Here's how it works.
(UPDATE 12/12/19: Sometime after July 2019, JM Northern took its website offline (here's the Wayback Machine's most recent cache). Its only web presence now appears to be at BookFestivals.com, which seems to be trying to boost its credibility by also listing other book fairs. It mentions only four of JM Northern's many properties, but more are included on the handy "multiple entry" form. Here's the list as it appeared on the old website.)
Why, you might ask, would one company run so many book festivals? To make money, of course. JM Northern's "festivals" aren't really festivals at all, but textbook examples of a moneymaking awards program. Here's the M.O.
- Solicitation. To maximize entries, moneymaking awards programs do email blasts. JM Northern is no exception--if you get on its list you'll be relentlessly spammed with calls for entry to any or all of its fifteen "festivals."
Have you recently been solicited by a company called Bloggingbooks that wants to publish your blog in book form? Millions of people share their point of view with the world in real time – This is how blogs have become part of our everyday lives. Blogs focus on the present and thereby provide continuous commentaryRead More
Last summer, I wrote about a police investigation of Michigan-based pay-to-play publisher 2 Moon Press, which closed its doors in May amid competing claims of wrongdoing by its former and current owners. In the process, it left large numbers of authors in the lurch–many of whom had paid thousands of dollars and never seen aRead More
Back in August, I blogged about the latest effort by Cheryl Lee Nunn, owner of vanity publisher American Book Publishing Inc., to expand her author-fleecing efforts with a network of new publishers, bogus publishing organizations, and triple-barrelled aliases. Following my expose, Nunn slapped ludicrous “for sale” notifications on the websites of the fake orgs andRead More
