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.
I’ve gotten some questions over the past week about a fiction contest currently being conducted by WriteOnCon, a “totally free, interactive online Writer’s Conference held annually during the summer.” The contest, which is being conducted in association with TheReadingRoom.com, offers a grand prize of $1,000, an author profile page at TheReadingRoom, and evaluation by literaryRead More
When Writer Beware was founded in 1998, it was vanishingly rare for publishers (or agents) to contact aspiring writers to express interest in their work–so rare, in fact, that any sort of unsolicited publisher or agent contact was almost certain to be a scam or a pay-to-play arrangement. For instance, Dorrance Publishing Company–a venerable vanityRead More
There’s been some Internet buzz over the past few days about an apparent scam in which an unknown individual, posing as agent Jodi Reamer of uber-agency Writers House, targeted an unsuspecting author with a fake representation offer, followed by a fake high-advance contract offer from a major publishing house, all in the space of aRead More
If you thought that Judge Denny Chin’s denial of the Google Book Settlement last March was the end of that story, you were wrong. In the absence of a settlement agreement, the 2005 lawsuit brought by the Authors Guild and various publishers against Google for copyright infringement, due to Google’s scanning of in-copyright books, mustRead More
When publishing relationships go bad, the writing was often on the wall long before the author signed on the dotted line. Perhaps there were nonstandard business practices, such as a hidden fee or a book purchase requirement. Or there might have been a large body of author complaints, easily found by doing a basic websearch.Read More
Fellow authors, do you have a loved one who was a writer too, but sadly passed over into the Great Beyond with their poems or prose unpublished? Does the cosmic injustice of that weigh heavy on your soul? Do you lie awake nights, grieving that your loved one never had the chance to see hisRead More
