The recent Writers Weekly article, Great Writing Gig Or A Scam?, got me thinking about all the deadbeat editors I’ve met in my long freelancing career and how I’ve answered some of their “scams.”
I am publishing an anthology book for my project, and read your article, HOW TO COMPILE AND PUBLISH AN ANTHOLOGY. I found it very insightful.
I was wondering if you might be willing to share the contract that you use. I would be willing to pay for it.
The day finally arrived. My polished non-fiction book proposal needed a royalty publisher. There was more than one direction my proposed manuscript could go, and I wanted to secure a publisher before completing the book so I could adapt to that publisher’s style.
Somewhere I’d heard the idea of hunting through specialty bookstores and book catalogues for newer or unlisted publishers. The idea was to search for titles that didn’t compete, but were similar enough in topic that your own title would complement their list.
But I didn’t start out looking for a publisher that way. You might say I went around the barn…
What she sent wasn’t a screenshot of a “sale” at all. It was just a picture of the ranking history on Amazon.
For the past six weeks, we’ve spent every spare moment judging the hundreds of entries submitted for the WritersWeekly Winter, 2015 24-Hour Short Story Contest. In case you’re not familiar with our quarterly contest, this is how it works…
An writer recently asked me to go to a website and “vote” for her. She wanted me to have our readers also click to vote for her, even asking me to post notices on Facebook and Twitter. I receive those types of requests all the time and, frankly, they’re insulting…
Losing money on your book because it is returnable? Changing it to non-returnable takes six months.
On occasion, we hear from authors who are accusing their distributor of theft because their Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com “ranking” moved…but their actual sales numbers did not. Several years ago, one author claimed she was owed millions because her Amazon ranking was…in the millions. As you’ve probably guessed, this is a common problem. New authors often try to use bookstore rankings to estimate their sales and that doesn’t always work…especially if those authors don’t understand how the rankings are calculated…
Last weekend, I received the email below. It was, by far, the nicest email anybody has ever sent to me. It made me cry…
Slick sales talk and false praise will always draw in a certain percentage of the gullible population.
For vanity publisher salespeople, it can be difficult to find folks who are in the process of writing a book, or who are considering writing a book. But, after someone has published their book, it’s very easy to find those books and, subsequently, those authors online. I’m not going to tell you the simple method these folks use to find these authors because I don’t want to give other scammers any ideas. I can tell you, however, that it’s very easy, and only takes a few seconds. Unfortunately, new authors are frequently the target of spammers and scammers. Many authors report receiving spam from a variety of firms shortly after their books were released.
And, it happened again this week. One of our authors asked about terminating their contract. They said they were contacted by a “reputable publisher.” I first assured them our contract at BookLocker.com is non-exclusive, and can be canceled at any time. But, I’ve seen this type of victimization of authors before so I, of course, searched for that firm’s name on Google. I wanted to save this particular author from the heartache others have endured. What I found didn’t surprise me…
