A Writer's Life

The Mail I Get

I got this email the other day:

Have you ever heard of "Writers Book Publishing Agency"? That's the name. Seemed a bit generic to me, so I am suspicious. Their web page indicates that they are a reletively new lit agency, and are seeking authors. Having tried to obtain an agent for a year now, they sound too good to bet true. Their client list went like this: Joe, who is an electronic engineer wrote his first book.....etc....etc.  Mary, a housewife, is working on her second novel in which she.....etc.....etc. I know the authors need their privacy - but.......does this not sound suspicious to you?

Of course it does. And it should sound suspicious to anyone with an iota of common sense.

They are a well-known scam that has also gone by the the names "Children's Literary Agency," "The Literary Agency Group, Inc" and "ST Literary Agency," among others. Your first tip-off that they aren't legit should be their name:  "Writers Book Publishing Agency." What reputable agency would call themselves that? Agents aren't book publishers.

If the name of the company wasn't tip-off enough, you'll notice they don't list a single author among their clients, only plumbers, housewives and, well, other suckers.

Writer's Beware lists the "agency" among their top twenty worst agents. You can find out more about them here:

http://www.invirtuo.cc/prededitors/warnlag04.htm

How good does your writing have to be to interest the Children's Literary Agency?

http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=8286

http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=8312

http://cs.writermag.com/forums/67920/ShowPost.aspx

http://www.underdown.org/researching-agents.htm

                   

Writer Beware

Victoria Strauss has an excellent post up today on her Writer Beware blog with great advice for aspiring writers about what to look for before signing with a small press. It's a must-read for those considering signing with a POD press.

J.T Ellison also offers up some good advice today on How To Avoid Scams over on the Murderati blog:

The biggest problem new writers are faced with is desire. You've worked so damn hard, have slaved away writing your book, and you WANT to get it out to the reading public. We understand. We were there once too. But DO YOUR HOMEWORK! There are several easy steps you can take to ascertain whether the offer you've been approached with is legitimate. Because that's the problem with scams. The veneer of legitimacy can be shiny and obscuring.

They Never Learn

The Martinsville Reporter-Times reports that the FBI and the U.S. Postmaster have launched a joint investigation into the business practices of Airleaf Publishing/Bookman Publishing, a notorious vanity press scam that went bankrupt last year. Let's hope this is just the beginning of a national crackdown on the deceptive practices of the vanity press industry.

But its hard to feel any sympathy for the Airleaf victims. Any reasonably intelligent person could have seen that Airleaf (and its previous incarnation Bookman Publishing) was a sham.  Even if the aspiring authors were too blind with desperation and naivete to see the scam for themselves, a simple Google search would have turned up plenty of resources (including my blog and others) that talked about the company's many deceptive practices and false promises.

They made a dumb, costly, and humiliating mistake.

So you'd think that now the Airleaf victims would know better than to ever get involved with a POD vanity press again.

Well, you'd be wrong.

Incredibly, many of them are once again writing checks to vanity presses, including Bonnie Kaye, who founded the Airleaf victims blog and whose relentless efforts are largely responsible for Airleaf's fall and the subsequent federal investigation.

She's now a customer of CCB Publishing, a print-on-demand vanity press that she calls her "new publisher."  CCB's former Airleaf clients include John Krismer, who has written a book that reveals this:

Few realize a New World Order plans to replace our constitution with a Single World Government, nor that our Federal Reserve Bank is privately owned and is not subject to oversight by Congress or the President.

[...]George H. W. Bush, the undisputed “Overlord” of the Shrub Dynasty, in his State of the Union Message in 1991 said: “What is at stake is more than one small country, it is a big idea – a new world order.” Did We the People ever agree to this treasonous act of turning over our nation’s sovereignty to a Single World Government?

Uh-huh. This is the kind of unpublishable swill that the vanity press industry thrives on. Is it any wonder he has written a check to another POD printer?

I applaud Kaye for going after Airleaf and bringing the company down...but she's still foolishly writing checks to a POD vanity press and deluding herself into thinking that she's "published." By doing so, and praising the company to other Airleaf customers, she's perpetuating the myths that the vanity press industry thrives on. How sad.

But that's not the worst of it.

Some other former Airleaf clients have become customers of Jones Harvest, a vanity press that is run by former Airleaf employees!  Those  particular Airleaf customers aren't victims at all. They are brain-dead morons.

Don't Expect the "Truth" about Self-Publishing from Someone Who Runs a Vanity Press

Earlier this month, I told you about a scam called "Beneaththecover.com," which purports to offer authors inside news and expert advice about the publishing industry when, in fact, it's just a front for a bunch of vanity press and book promotion hucksters selling their wares.  This point was driven home the other day when one of their so-called "experts," vanity press publisher Yvonne DiVita, offered this outrageous lie in a post she had the chutzpah to title "POD Myths Dispelled - Get The Scoop Here":

In today’s emerging digital world, if you truly want to attract that big name publisher, use a professional POD firm to self-publish because the big name publishers are watching.

The best way to attract a publisher is to write a good book, not blow thousands of dollars having it printed in POD form by a vanity press. If anything, printing your book in POD is more likely to prevent a publisher from taking you or the book seriously.

DiVita is one of a pack of POD vanity press hucksters who prey on the gullibility, desperation, and ignorance of aspiring authors. She argues that vanity presses aren't merely printers but real publishers because they pay more attention to their authors than real publishers do.  What she neglects to mention is that vanity presses like hers make the vast majority of their money off their authors, not from booksales, and that all that attention they slather on their clients (not authors, ladies and gentlemen, clients)  is to convince them to spend even more on their worthless services.  She writes:

IF authors don’t sell enough books with their publisher, POD or otherwise, the author isn’t trying hard enough. I’ve worked with traditional publishers, and they require an extensive marketing plan from authors before they will consider publication. And research shows that books published by traditional publishers sell around 150-300, on average.

That's right, blame the author for the fact that their POD vanity press books aren't sold in stores and are unlikely to sell to anyone but the client... and then back it up with pointless "facts."

I've had over two dozen books published by real publishers. No editor has ever asked me for an "extensive marketing plan" before considering my books.I've also asked a few published friends...and they have never been asked for marketing plans, either. But they are novelists, and perhaps they would be asked for one if they wrote non-fiction. So let's give DiVita the benefit of the doubt and say publishers want marketing plans along with non-fiction book proposals. To which I say... So what?  How is that a persuasive argument for going to vanity-press instead of a real publisher? You'll need a marketing plan either way. The key difference is that a real publisher will pay you and a vanity press will ask for your credit card number.

I've scoured the web and I can't find any "research" that backs up her outrageous claim that most books published by genuine publishers sell only 150-300 copies.

The closet statistic I could find to her numbers was a 2004 Bookscan study that tracked sales of 1.2 million books sold that year. According to their figures, the average book of any kind published in 2004 sold 500 copies. The study noted that only 25,000 titles sold more than 5,000 copies each, 500 sold more than 100,000 copies and only ten sold more than a million copies. But the figures are controversial, because the sales were not broken down by genre, like fiction or non-fiction, nor did they differentiate between titles from large publishers or small ones, traditional publishers or vanity presses.

But lets pretend her figures are right. How is that an argument for going to a vanity press? Authors published by real publishers whose books only sold 500 copies in 2004 were still paid to be published.  They earned money, though not as much as they'd hoped.

By comparison, most vanity press authors will lose money because they paid to be published. But don't take my word for it, let's look at the 2004 sales figures from iUniverse, the biggest name in self-publishing:

18,108: Total number of titles published

792,814: Number of copies printed

14: Number of titles sold through B&N's bricks-and-mortar stores (nationally)

83: Number of titles that sold at least 500 copies

Out of 18,000 titles and nearly 800,000 copies printed, only 83 authors sold more than 500 copies. Good God. Think of all the money that authors lost ...and how much iUniverse made. That's the business that DiVita is in...and it's a profitable one. For the printer, not the author. 

So what is the truth about POD self-publishing companies? It's obvious. Vanity presses are in the "author services business", not the publishing business which, in a rare bit of candor, even DiVita concedes on her vanity press website:

Windsor Media Enterprises specializes in author services. We  offer idea development, manuscript critiquing, editing, proofreading, formatting and cover design, for new and existing authors.

And for that, they charge you a price and that's how they make their money. That is their business. And if your book,  by some miracle, manages to sell a few copies, they make a little more. 

A vanity press will tell you any lie they can to convince you that they are real publishers (when they are merely selling editing and printing services), that self-publishing is the route most successful authors take (it's not), and that you have as much of a chance to sell books with them as you do going with a traditional publisher (you don't).

Is Yvonne DiVita really someone qualified to give writers sound advice? Or is she someone with a clear conflict-of-interest hoping to coerce naive authors into buying her product? The answer is obvious, and it came right from the founders of Beneaththecover.com  when they tried to solicit my brother Tod into being one of their experts:

Beneath the Cover is a cooperative venture for building marketing platforms of everyone involved.

That's what should be written on the masthead of their home page, not "Where book industry professionals who know almost everything go to discuss news, insights, and evolving industry issues." And it should be stated in big print on each and every piece of "advice" that they give.

Dumb and Dumber

Back in 2006, I wrote about a TV bootlegger who bought advertising on Google to promote his various websites.  Now it turns out that the moron has been using the address of a Winnipeg newspaper as one of his many false return addresses:

If you want to keep it secret that you're selling pirated DVDs, it's probably not a good idea to use a major Canadian newspaper as your return address.

Over the last few days, several packages of pirated DVDs have been shipped to the Winnipeg Free Press from disgruntled customers around the world. The packages originated from entities called DVD Avenue.TV, DVD Store, AllMyFavoriteShows.com and Expediteur,

Gary Osmond, the Canadian Motion Picture Distribution Association's director of investigations -- anti-piracy operations, said the DVDs received by the Free Press are connected to the massive seizure of thousands of counterfeit DVDs by the RCMP in Montreal just before Christmas.

More than 200 DVD burners were also seized by police and eight people were arrested who are facing fraud charges under the Criminal Code and Copyright Act.

But Osmond was surprised to hear the DVD pirates had used the Free Press' address.

"They're not too smart," Osmond said.

"In Montreal, they used post office box numbers for Canada Post or private companies. There was one legitimate address in Montreal, but it was a hole in the ground with a building being constructed.

"Yours is the only legitimate address and the first in Winnipeg."

I Knew This Was Coming

Victoria Strauss reports that BookWise has gone -- surprise! surprise! -- into the vanity press business, a natural extension of their multi-level marketing scheme. They are charging gullible aspiring writers $6000 to "publish" their books and for "intensive training" at their WriteWise (aka PublishStupid) seminars taught by "Industry Experts" who, outside of BookWise founders author Richard Paul Evans and get-rich-quick huckster Robert G. Allen, have no actual industry experience.

Their "expert" faculty consists of the teacher of the Info-Preneuring Teleclass for the Enlightened Wealth Institute, a self-published cookbook author, and three authors who write fiction exclusively for the "LDS market"  ("work consistent with the standards and principles of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ").  I guess Lori Prokop, Michael Drew, and Brien Jones were unavailable.

You will also get such amazing benefits as "an official BookWise review" and your photograph taken  with BookWise founders Evans and Allen. Wow! Where do I sign up?

BookWise thinks that "anyone who is a serious writer" would gladly pay $20-30,000 for all of this,   so six grand is a bargain. But "serious" writers know better than to take seminars from vanity press publishers and industry know-nothings who have a clear profit motive and glaring conflict-of-interest behind their "teaching."

This is no ordinary vanity press scheme. To lure in as many suckers as possible, BookWise is offering a $1000 bounty for every paying sucker their multilevel marketing associates can bring in. Prepare to be spammed. But wait, there's more, as Victoria reports:

There's another twist to the story. For writers accepted into WriteWise, Richard Paul Evans and Robert G. Allen will become their literary agents, receiving, according to the WriteWise brochure, "the standard agency fee [of] 15% of the royalties that an author receives from the publisher." The brochure makes it clear, however, that not every book will be shopped: "...depending upon circumstances, BookWise Publishing may also present your book to other major publishers." In this arrangement, most of the benefit is on the agents' side: they don't actually have to do anything for you (unlike in a normal author-agent relationship), but if they do, they get paid twice.

These guys are taking the vanity press scam to a whole new, and truly sleazy, level.

Behind the Cover of Beneaththecover.com

Book marketer/publicist Michael R. Drew has put together a site called beneaththecover.com under the guise of helping aspiring writers with expert advice...except all the "advice" is coming from publicists and self-publishers looking to sell their services to the unwary.

In an apparent bid to legitimize their effort, they have been reaching out to "hundreds" of authors, hoping to convince them to provide free content to the site. I'm one of the authors they contacted. Lehi Drew wrote, in part:

Just wanted to let you know about our trend-setting website. And I’m hoping you’ll like it enough to accept our invitation to become a contributor. You see, I’ve seen your blog site,A Writer's Life, and I think you’re a great writer..

Our website is dedicated to professionals of the book industry, and it’s called Beneath the Cover (www.beneaththecover.com).  It also has an associated blog site, Push the Key (www.pushthekey.com).

What’s in it for you? As a contributor, your name and blog site will be constantly seen by hundreds and even thousands of book industry visitors every day. At our site, we draw people from every level of the book industry, including authors, writers, marketers, publishers, editors, and agents.

Your Articles. As visitors see your articles on a regular basis and enjoy your style and the substance of your expertise, they’ll become familiar with your writing, your expert reputation, and your marketing platform.

Wouldn’t it be great if you sent a manuscript to a publisher or an agent and they responded with, “I’m familiar with your work on Beneath the Cover, so I took the time to go over your manuscript. Let’s talk.” Wow!

Wouldn't be great if a publisher got my manuscript and said "Lee is so damn witty and good looking, we'll give him a $1 million contract without reading a word!"  That's about as likely to happen as the ridiculous fantasy Beneath the Cover is trying to entice me with. I ignored Lehi's email. So, a week later, she tried again.

First, let me reassure you that this is not part of a mass mailing from a list of names/sites that I bought or got from someone else. I AM mailing to hundreds of writers like yourself, but I've been to each site personally.

So, it's not a mass mailing, but they ARE contacting hundreds of writers. Hmmm. She went on to say:

You, obviously, have had a lot of experience writing. I can see that, not only by the fact that you've done screenwriting, but by the number of books you have listed on your blog. I am confident that this shows that you have great insight into how the book industry works. 

I would very much like for you to become a weekly contributor to Beneath the Cover. I think that because you're an experienced author, that you would have advice for other authors trying to get published and writing.  I really think that, plus your knowledge of the industry, would make you a good fit with us and our other contributors.

I responded that if she really read my blog, she'd know that I wouldn't be the least bit interested in lending my time, effort, or good name to help them sell promotional and self-publishing services to writers under the guise of offering "advice."  In fact, if anything, my advice would be to avoid their site. I also said:

Your site is an outgrowth of Michael Drew's book promotion business and, not surprisingly, the majority of your contributors come from the self-publishing industry or are selling book promotion & marketing services... which creates a real conflict-of-interest when it comes to the "advice" they are giving.

Your contributors have something to sell, and so does Drew. The only thing that I or any other published author would be doing by contributing to your site would be lending our credibility to your underlying effort to advance the promotional and self-publishing services your experts are selling.

I don't see any published authors among their experts, so it  looks like their "not a mass mailing" to hundreds of authors hasn't worked. I guess real authors are a lot smarter than the hucksters think we are.

UPDATE:  They also contacted my brother Tod, asking him to contribute to their site. He asked them what they pay...and they said not a dime because "Beneath the Cover is a cooperative venture for building marketing platforms of everyone involved." At least they were honest with him about their real motives (though it's pretty obvious to anyone who visits their site). I'm surprised they haven't brought in Lori Prokop  or the experts over at Airleaf  as contributors yet...

The Mail I Get

I received this email today from a complete stranger. It's a good example of how NOT to sell a book. 

Please order my book XYZ at http://www.publishamerica.com and tell all your friends about it to. I have attached a release letter for you so you can read what it is about. Please order it and then tell all your reader friends so they can order it too. Maybe then I can become on my way to wealth. Thank you for your time.

By "release letter," she means a press release from PublishAmerica that  contains an incoherent, one-paragraph summary of the book's plot and some lies about the company being a "traditional publisher." I'm trying to imagine how anyone could think that this pitch would sell any books.

Another Get-Rich-Quick Scammer

You  know how much I love Lori Prokop and her laughable array of get-rich-quick schemes. Well, my brother Tod has found Lori's dastardly male counterpart in Nick Daws, another self-proclaimed
"bestselling author"  of books you never heard of and can't find in any bookstore. Daws' "Quick Cash Writing Course" is the funniest author scam since Lori's "Book Millionaire" debacle. But, as Tod writes:

There's nothing funny about the desperation writers feel -- spend even a few hours in a workshop and you'll see it in Technicolor -- and as a professor part of what I preach is that this isn't easy. There's no back door. The only way to succeed is by doing, by handling rejection, by improving. If you're looking for Quick Cash, maybe make up a course like the "bestselling" Nick Daws has, because desperate, foolish writers will pay you for your precious secrets.

The Mail I Get

I received a lengthy email today from a woman in her 50s. It read, in part:

Who are the publishers that PAY “unknowns” for their work?  How do I contact them? I’m an unknown author, writing a book about tragedy, near death experiences, and years of living with pain and how I learned to cope with it all; and how God miraculously healed me of a debilitating, incurable disease. My book is ready to be published. I worked with a literary agent (author coach) for about three years. He got me a contract with Axiom Press, a subsidiary of Evergreen Press.  But their cost to publish and market my book was between $3,800 & $6,500 (depending on what services I chose).  I’m not rich, do not have a big savings account and can not afford this!

[...]isn’t the biggest part of the money paid to the publisher for marketing purposes?   That’s the way it seems to me.[...]if I use a POD and have to pay for all the marketing, etc.  Isn’t that going to cost me in the long run, much more time and money that going through someone like Tate? And who will set up my book signings?

Here's what I told her: Every publisher buys books from unknown authors every day. You contact them through an agent. If they like your book, they offer you an advance against royalties. Your agent gets 10-15% of that advance, you get the rest. And if you earn your advance back in sales, you will get a royalty from every book that's sold. You don't advance the agent, or the publisher, a dime. That's how publishing works.

An agent, or "author coach," who sets you up with someone who wants to charge you to publish your book is either a fool or a fraud. Either way, it's a mistake to be in business with him, he doesn't know what he is doing. 

The money you pay a vanity press isn't going into marketing. It's going into their car lease, their house payment, and their kid's braces. It doesn't matter whether it's Tate or Jones Harvest or anybody else. They are all taking advantage of your desperation, gullibility and ignorance. 

But if you are hell-bent on paying to be published, save your money and go with iUniverse or Lulu. You'll get the same "services" for a lot less.

The fact is that no vanity press is going to do any useful marketing for you -- they will just empty your savings account (and that includes iUniverse). No newspapers or magazines are interested in reviewing any books from vanity press publishers. Nobody at a vanity press is going to set up any meaningful booksignings for you, either, because bookstores don't want to host events for vanity press authors. Why? Because the vast majority of vanity press books are ugly, horrendous crap.

It's cheaper, and more productive, to approach the bookstores on your own...something even professional authors do (and no one does it better than my friend author Joe Konrath).  Most of the successful authors I know have worked hard to establish strong, PERSONAL relationships with booksellers.

So, fire your useless fraud of an agent/coach and if you are going to self-publish,  go with iUniverse or Lulu and avoid any of their marketing packages.

UPDATE 12/29/07:  I heard back from the woman.

No, I do not want to PAY for publishing my book.  I’ve always been under the impression that a reputable place pays YOU for your work…but I was given a bunch of mis-information that they don’t do that these days.  (That’s just the way it is, and if you get it published you’ll have to pay a publisher because you are an “unknown”. ) I’m so glad I came upon your web site before I sent it to someone like Tate! Thanks again – for saving me from a horrible mistake!