Click on the screenshot to see a full-size image. Where possible, we’ve included links to the original images or web pages.
1. The Write Agenda wants Victoria dead!
2. The Write Agenda implies that it will follow Ann Crispin to the 2011 World Science Fiction Convention in Reno, NV
3. Goodreads one-star review from The Write Agenda
4. Similar material on The Write Agenda and Strategic Book Publishing websites
“Thumbs Down List”/Watchdog sales ranking comparison on The Write Agenda:
“Thumbs Down List”/Watchdog sales ranking comparison on AuthorMarketingIdeas.com (AMI is a Strategic Book Publishing website):
The “Thumbs Down”/Watchdog sales ranking comparison chart from The Write Agenda:
A suspiciously similar sales ranking comparison chart from AuthorMarketingIdeas.com:
5. Strategic Book Publishing publicity material accidentally posted to The Write Agenda’s Twitter feed
A bit of introduction here. One of the “marketing” services Strategic Book Publishing sells to its authors is Facebook fan page setup. Another is a personal assistant service that, among other things, will maintain the fan page.
We suspect that what happened here is that the the person who maintains The Write Agenda also maintains various Strategic author Facebook pages, and simply mixed up the accounts, accidentally posting several Facebook updates for a Strategic author to The Write Agenda’s Twitterfeed. (The erroneous posts vanished from Twitter within 24 hours.)
Author tweets on The Write Agenda’s Twitter feed:
Identical updates on a Strategic author’s Facebook page: (we’re not inserting links here, because we don’t believe the author has anything to do with The Write Agenda):
Note the “affiliation” and the contact email on the author’s FB page, which we’ve circled in red. We’ve redacted her personal information.
This isn’t the only Twitter snafu for TWA. Check out the tweet we’ve circled in red:
Now have a look at where that link leads (AuthorMarketingIdeas.com is a Strategic website):
6. Turnaround Media and The Write Agenda
Turnaround Media appears to be an obscure PR firm that has recently branched out into digital publishing. We believe that its staff have been hired to maintain The Write Agenda. (They may also subcontract for Strategic Book Publishing. Among other things, this would explain the Twitter snafus detailed in #5 above).
Here are some of the things that connect Turnaround Media to The Write Agenda.
To bolster its case against the evil anti-scam activists, The Write Agenda sometimes embeds screenshots of blogs, Facebook pages, and other online sources in its posts. A number of these screenshots show not just the image TWA wants to present, but the browser window in which the image appears. In other words, they provide a partial picture of the computer screen of the person who took the screenshot.
Below are a couple of examples (links to the posts in which the screenshots are embedded are underneath). You can see the tabs that were open in the person’s browser when the screenshots were taken–and you can also see a bookmark toolbar that includes a number of folders, including a “Turnaround Media” folder (circled in red).
New information added 10/7/11: Here’s another of TWA’s screenshots. This time, Turnaround Media really slipped up, because its email address can be seen in the upper right-hand corner (I’ve circled it in red):
As mentioned above, Turnaround Media has recently begun offering publishing services. It couldn’t resist giving its books special placement (in red, yet!) on The Write Agenda’s “best seller” lists–despite not actually being best sellers (as of this writing, two of the books have no sales rankings on Amazon):
Miriam Silverstein, one of The Write Agenda’s sockpuppets, promotes Turnaround Media and its books on “her” Facebook page:
7. American Book Publishing Police Investigation
The message board on which these posts appeared is long gone, but the Internet Archive has preserved them. Links to the archived pages appear below the screenshots.
