We refer authors to professional illustrators, cover designers, editors, marketers/publicists, and other publishing service providers that I have personally vetted.

I received two emails from authors this week who hired legitimate freelancers (we did NOT refer the authors to those folks!) to perform services for them. The authors vetted them, determined they weren’t overseas, and that they had a website and a long list of satisfied clients. One was an author who ordered original illustrations. The other one was waiting for his book cover to finish being designed.

These situations differ entirely from the overseas publishing scam cartel we’ve been covering.

In the first case, the illustrator had sent the author one illustration at a time. The author would approve it, and then give the illustrator the green light to do the next one. The author had paid up front and the illustrator was clearly putting the work in. However, after the job was almost complete, the illustrator stopped responding to the author.

Here’s the problem. The illustrator was emailing the illustrations to the author, but sending them at 72 dpi because large email attachments can cause problems. I’m convinced the illustrator was honest. Otherwise, she’d have taken the money and run.

The author is stuck. She doesn’t have 300 dpi versions of the illustrations (that’s required for printing in a book) and she has repeatedly emailed the illustrator to no avail. Of course, I told the author to check her spam folders. Nothing there. The illustrator’s website is still up but she doesn’t use a contact form. As a last resort, I told the author to try to find the town where the illustrator lives, and to Google that name with the illustrator’s name and the word “obituary.”

Believe it or not, when I have not heard from one of our authors for a long time, I do that. And, over the years, I have , discovered that several “missing authors” were actually deceased. 🙁

The other example is from an author who hired a cover designer who has made many mistakes. He has been very patient with her but she keeps sending him files with errors and he keeps sending her lists of corrections. Last week, she stopped responding to him. I doubt that one is deceased. She probably just got tired of doing way more work than she bargained for. Of course, she was NOT a professional cover designer and she had no idea what she was doing.

That is one of the dangers of hiring a cover designer (or any publishing service provider) who doesn’t have enough experience in the field. The most expensive error authors make is hiring an “editor” who is not trained and who sends “edited” files back to the author with even more errors. It is EXTREMELY important to ONLY hire an editor who has been vetted by a professional in the industry that you trust.

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