Writer Beware®: The Blog

How to Spot a Ghostwriting Scam

noreply@blogger.com (Victoria Strauss) — Mon, 24 Jan 2022 18:12:00 +0000

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®

In 2018, I wrote a post that, in part, warned about a solicitation from an obviously dodgy "ghostwriting" service (one big clue: the mangled English everywhere on its website).

With a bit of digging, I discovered not only that this service was a single scammer doing business on four different websites under four different names, but that domain registration, content, and other similarities linked the ghostwriting sites with nearly 30 other scammy websites offering other kinds of services, from logo creation to accounting.

Back then, ghostwriting scams (ghostscams for short) weren't super-common. How times have changed. There are a TON of ghostscams now.

Like the ghostscams I wrote about in 2018, they offer not just writing services, but editing, cover design, publishing packages, marketing and more. They do business under multiple names--ten, twenty, even more--and many are part of even larger complexes of predatory service providers: video creation, Wikipedia page creation, illustrations, web design.

Since they're based overseas--primarily in the Philippines--their websites are littered with English-language errors. They misrepresent--and outright lie about--their qualifications, credentials, and projects. A common feature of ghostscam websites is a false claim to have worked on books from well-known, trad-pubbed authors. Many have even gone to the trouble of inventing fake staff rosters.

Based on complaints I've gotten from writers who've fallen into the ghostscams' clutches, as well as several chats with scammer sales associates (you can see a transcript of one of those chats here), costs can range from $1,500 to $3,000 for a "written from scratch" book of around 350 pages--all paid in advance, naturally. Of course the initially quoted price is always higher--but there's always a very special discount, just for you! Editing alone can be as much as $4,000, depending on manuscript length--though when I lamented that the price was more than I'd budgeted, several ghostscam sales associates offered to cut the cost by a third or more. If you want a cover and publishing services, those will set you back another $500-$1,000.

Here's the "discounted" price Efficient Ghostwriter quoted for my 350-page "romance fiction novel", including writing, editing, cover design, and publishing on Amazon, B&N, etc.:

Ghost Writer Experts was more pricey--and that's even after granting me a super-exciting 10-Year Anniversary Sale! discount. But they did throw in a $550 publishing package for free:

I've gotten complaints from writers who've used ghostscams for editing, and have received edited or copy edited manuscripts full of errors, or random and unnecessary changes. And while I've never heard from anyone who has gone all the way through the bookwriting process, I'd imagine that the quality of the finished book is equivalent to what you'd get from a ghostwriter on Fiverr--which, by the way, would cost you a whole lot less. (As noted above, all of the ghostscams' claims about their portfolios are fake, so there's no way to research people who've actually used their services.)

How to identify whether that company you're thinking of using to write, edit, and/or publish your book is a ghostscam? Following are some suggestions.

SOLICITATION

I've said this so often that I'm sure my readers are sick of hearing it, but these days, THE NUMBER ONE SIGN OF A WRITING SCAM IS SOLICITATION.

I'll say it again. The. Number. One. Sign. Of. A. Writing. Scam. Is. Solicitation.

Just like reputable literary agents and publishers, who only very rarely reach out to writers they don't already represent, reputable ghostwriters and editors will not email or phone you out of the blue to try and convince you to buy their services. Especially with something as cheesy as this:

Here's another thing no reputable company will tell you: that your book can (or will) be a best seller. That's a guarantee no one can make (well, no one who isn't a con artist or a liar), and reputable companies and individuals know better than to make it.

Bonus bogosity: the email address in the solicitation above references one ghostscam (Pearson Ghostwriting). The text references another (Paramount Ghostwriting). And the links lead to a third (Central Ghostwriting) and a fourth (Ghostwriting Publication).

TERRIBLE ENGLISH

If you're going to hire someone to write an English-language book for you, or edit or copy edit or proof your English-language manuscript, they should be capable of producing literate English prose. Right? I mean, it just makes sense.

Ghostscams--which are based overseas, primarily in the Philippines, and are created and staffed largely by people for whom English is a second language--maintain websites that are stuffed with ungrammatical, tortured, and sometimes incomprehensible English. For instance this, from Pacific Ghost Writing:

Or this, from Paramount Ghost Writing (note that they get their own name wrong):

Or this, from Ghostwriting Avenue:

As a side note, one common English-language error on Philippines-based scam sites is misuse of the word "avail." If you see something like this, it's a sure-fire tipoff that whoever you're dealing with is not a US company:

Seriously, if you want to hire someone to pen down your creativity, publish your beautifully conjured fiction, or harness your creative horses, don't overlook bad English in their self-presentation. If a company doesn't care enough, or isn't capable, of producing a grammatical, error-free website, what reason is there to assume that their writing and editing staff will be any more competent?

I am constantly amazed by how many writers ignore or overlook this huge flashing warning sign.

ABSENCE OF VERIFIABLE INFORMATION

You wouldn't hire a writer or editor who couldn't demonstrate that they have the credentials to properly do the job, would you?

A reputable writing- or publishing-related service provider should offer concrete, specific information about itself and its staff, including staff names and biographies, that make it possible for you to assess--and verify--its bona fides. The absence of that information, or info that's so vague it can't be researched, or claims that can't be confirmed or turn out to be false, are warning signs.

Something like this, for instance (from Ghost Writing Professionals) doesn't cut it:

Which bestselling authors? Which former editors? Which PhD experts? A reputable company would tell you.

Of course, a disreputable company can simply lie. A number of ghostscams provide fake author rosters, using stock photos, made-up names, and, sometimes, fake biographies.

An example: these identical rosters of Experienced and Renowned Ghostwriters claimed by The Book Writing Corp, Professional Ghostwriter, Creative Bookwriters, and Ghostwriting Avenue (note how similar all these websites look). The images are stock. The supposed authors are nowhere to be found online. And the wordy but completely specifics-free "biographies", which are as horribly written as the rest of the text on these four sites, are nonsensical.

More identical fake staff rosters from Ghost Writing Publication and Ghost Writing Solution. These guys aren't trying nearly as hard: it's just stock images and fake names.

Along with websearches on the supposed authors' names to see if you can find any professional references, reverse image searches can pinpoint a scam (you can use TinEye or Google Image Search). Some of the more advanced scams employ deepfake algorithms to produce unique images, but many just use Shutterstock or another stock photo provider. For instance, here's "Nicholas Brown" from Paramount Ghostwriters and Versatile Ghostwriters:

And here's "Nicholas", who normally resides on stock photo site Alamy, where he's described as "Attractive man in armchair looking at camera".

DISCREPANCIES

Internal inconsistencies and claims that can be disproved are also signs that a site is dodgy.

Perhaps the ghostscam claims a US, UK, or Canadian address, but its website is littered with English-language errors. Why would a company based in an English-speaking country have such trouble producing clean, grammatical text? (And why would you want a group like that to write or edit your book?)

Does the company address look like a regular business address? Google it. The fake addresses claimed by scammers are often Mailbox Depots, virtual offices, or random residential addresses--not what you'd expect from a reputable business.

Does the company say that it's been in business for X number of years? Check its domain registration (you can use a site like DomainTools). You may discover that has only been around for a few months. Chamber of Authors claims "10+ years of experience", but its web domain was registered less than a year ago. Ditto for Efficient Ghostwriters, which also claims 10 years. Ghostwriting Solution's claim of 9 years is slightly closer to the truth--but that doesn't make it truthful: its domain wasn't registered until February 2020.

Or maybe there's one name in the header of the site, but text or testimonials reference a different one. Wiki Ghost Writer's footer apparently belongs to Pacific Ghostwriting. Finest Creative Writers doesn't seem to have realized (or doesn't care) that all the text on its website refers to Book Writing Founders. All the testimonials for Paramount Ghostwriting credit Ghost Writing Guru.

It's important to carefully peruse the website and supporting materials of any service you're thinking of using, and to double check any claims.

DUPLICATE SITES

A reputable business doesn't generally need to maintain more than one website (along with a matching social media presence). Scammers, on the other hand, maximize their victim-harvesting potential by doing business under multiple names and websites. If a site looks iffy--or even just to double-check--some websearching is in order.

Does the website provide the names of writers or staff? Google one or more. For instance, searching on "Scott Truax ghostwriter" (one of the purported ghostwriters at Pro Book Author) reveals that "Scott" is featured on at least eight other sites, most of which have identical formatting and text.

Googling the site's business address can also expose duplicates (be sure to put the address in quotes to exclude irrelevant results).

Phrase searches can work as well. Copy a distinctively-worded sentence from the website (you shouldn't have any trouble finding one), and paste it--in quotes--into a browser. Try this phrase from AD Ghostwriting: "Our diversified talent pool with multiple unique skillsets has enabled us to specialize in various genres". Result: nine other ghostwriting sites using the identical phrase (some that Google has identified as dangerous).

Searching on this, from Stellar Ghostwriting--"Our team of most scintillating ghostwriters are extremely skilled in creating innovatively brilliant content for your book related to any genre"--turns up several other sites using identical language.

EXPLOITING THE BEST-SELLER DREAM

Become a Best-Selling Author! Be the Next Best-Selling Author! Fulfill Your Destiny to Become the Best-Selling Author! Win the Title of Best Seller!

These and similar hyped-up come-ons top the home pages of many ghostscams. As noted above, reputable companies don't engage in this kind of flimflam: no one can guarantee a best seller, and reputable writers and editors know this. Reputable companies don't employ these kinds of cheap recruitment tactics.

FALSE CLAIMS

In addition to fictitious staff, many ghostscams include an array of book covers featuring books by well-known trad-pubbed authors, to encourage potential victims to believe these are books they've actually worked on. Here's Book Writing Bureau:

Even if you're prepared to believe that acclaimed, Pulitzer- and Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison didn't write her own famous novel, how plausible is it that an online ghostwriting service with "10 years of experience" produced a book originally published in 1987? Or that it worked on Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, originally pubbed in 2010 (in Japanese)?

Such claims are simply ludicrous, and fall apart under the lightest of investigation.

The shameless con artsts at Creative Book Writers are claiming they ghost wrote my novel TRUE FICTION. When my brother @todgoldberg called & confronted them about it, they hung up on him. I tried calling, too, but nobody answered. pic.twitter.com/O2j9p5jh2W
— Lee Goldberg (@LeeGoldberg) January 18, 2022

Well. This was a very unpleasant, and very unexpected surprise, and it looks like I'm gonna have to break my metaphorical foot off in somebody's ass. This ghostwriting scam site is claiming to have written my book, THE HOLLOW PLACES. pic.twitter.com/F78FclweCg
— Kingfisher & Wombat (@UrsulaV) January 18, 2022

Falsehoods aren't limited to website claims, either. The (real human) sales associates who staff the ghostscams' chat windows are happy to lie:

This one didn't just lie, but embellished:

Lee Goldberg and his brother Tod have also been messing with ghostscam sales associates, with hilarious results when they're forced off script:

In a subsequent conversation, a different Susan resorted to pretending she was a bot:

THE SCAM HIVE

I'm not surprised by much in the scam space, but I confess I was astounded by the number of ghostwriting sites I found once I began to research. The sites below--all of which are related to one another by identical content, design, addresses, and more--are just what I found in a few hours of searching.

I haven't provided live links, but you can copy and paste if you want to explore.

Pacific Ghostwriting: https://www.pacificghostwriting.com/

Creative Book Writers: https://www.creativebookwriters.com/

Professional Ghostwriter: https://www.professionalghostwriter.com/

Professional Book Writing: https://professionalbookwriting.com/

Ghost Book Write: https://ghostbookwrite.com/

Stellar Ghostwriting: https://stellarghostwriting.com/

Efficient Ghostwriter: https://www.efficientghostwriter.com/

The Book Writing Corp: https://www.thebookwritingcorp.com/

Premium Book Writing: https://premiumbookwriting.com/

Pro Book Author: https://probookauthor.com/

Ghostwriting Avenue: https://www.ghostwritingavenue.com/

Central Ghostwriting: https://www.centralghostwriting.com/

Ghostwriting Publication: https://ghostwritingpublication.com/

Paramount Ghostwriters: https://paramountghostwriters.com/

Paramount Ghostwriting: https://paramountghostwriting.com/

Versatile Ghostwriters: https://www.versatileghostwriters.com/

AD Ghostwriting: https://adghostwriting.com/

Amazon Writing Hub: https://amazonwritinghub.com/

Britain Book Writing: https://www.britainbookwriting.co.uk/

Ghostwriter LLC: https://ghostwriterllc.com/

SEO Pro Hub: https://seoprohub.co.uk/lp/book-writing/

Ghostwriter Experts: https://www.ghostwriterexperts.com/index.php

Ghostwriting Author: https://www.ghostwritingauthor.com/ (defunct)

Pearson Ghostwriting: https://www.pearsonghostwriting.com/ (defunct)

Ghostwriting Guru: https://ghostwritingguru.com/

Book Writing Bureau: https://www.bookwritingbureau.com/

Chamber of Authors: https://chamberofauthors.com/about-us

Agile Ghost Writing: https://agileghostwriting.com/about-us

Suzanne Collins Academy: https://suzannecollinsacademy.com/about-us.php

Ghostwriting Express: https://www.ghostwritingexpress.com/about

Ghostwriting Solution https://ghostwritingsolution.com/authors/

Ghostwriting Publication https://ghostwritingpublication.com/authors/

Ghostwriting Founder: https://www.ghostwritingfounder.com/about-us/

Bookwriting Founders: https://www.bookwritingfounders.com/about-us/

Finest Creative Writers: https://www.finestcreativewriters.com/book-publishing/

Wiki Ghost Writer: https://www.wikighostwriter.com/about-us.php

Lincoln Writes: https://www.lincolnwrites.com/about-us

Octa Ghostwriting: https://octaghostwriting.com/about-us

FINAL NOTE

In researching this post over the past five days, I chatted with dozens of ghostscam sales associates to get an idea of pitches and price ranges for various services. The scams' chat windows are normally super-eager to engage visitors...but my explorations--plus, possibly, the brutal trolling by Lee and Tod Goldberg and the attendant social media call-outs--seems to have triggered some alarms in scamland (remember, most of these sites are connected, so it makes sense they'd notice patterns).

When I tried to use chat windows yesterday evening, as part of proofing and double-checking this post, I either could see no chat windows at all, or got a message like this:

Looks like they blocked me. Oh well.

Pink Sand Press: What Can Happen When Your Agent Decides to Become Your Publisher

noreply@blogger.com (Victoria Strauss) — Fri, 14 Jan 2022 18:02:00 +0000

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®

Last week, several people drew my attention to this article in the Des Moines Register. "Iowa Romance Writer Sues Over Efforts to Have Ghostwriter Take Over Series."

If your "conflict of interest" radar is screaming right now, it should be.

Clark's complaint (which you can see here) accuses Grishman et al. of breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty, and fraudulent concealment, and alleges a variety of malfeasance, including concealing the family connection, and invoking an allegedly non-existent contract clause to justify buying out the final two books in an uncompleted series and hiring a ghostwriter to write them. Clark is seeking to terminate both her RedRock Literary and Pink Sand Press contracts, and to receive an award of "lost profits, damages, costs, and attorney's fees based on Pink Sand's breach".

As of this writing, Grishman hasn't filed a response to the lawsuit, but he did have this to say to a local reporter:

I will have more to say about the complaint. But first...

SOME BACKGROUND

Marci Clark wears many hats. In addition to being the author of multiple novels under several pen names, including Marci Bolden, she has worked as a freelance writer and as an editor for several small publishers, including Lyrical Press. She's also the owner of Nerdy Kat Book Services, which provides design, consulting, editing, and other services for authors. According to her bio, she has an MS in publishing (keep that in mind as you read on).

David Grishman is a commercial loan officer at Bank of New England and serves on the Select Board of Swampscott, MA, where he resides. He also served for several years as CEO of Waterhouse Press, a publisher founded by successful self-published author Meredith Wild (according to this 2016 New York Times article on the publisher's founding, Grishman is Wild's brother-in-law). Grishman brokered some pretty big book deals at Waterhouse, but by September 2018, he had vanished from the company website.

Grishman seems to have set up RedRock Literary* in fairly short order following his departure from Waterhouse. Its domain was registered on the last day of October 2018, quickly followed by two Massachusetts business registrations: RedRock Literary Inc., filed in November 2018, and a conversion to RedRock Literary LLC, filed in December 2018. (As pointed out by IP attorney Marc Whipple in a lengthy analysis of Clark's complaint, the conversion to RedRock Literary LLC happened just days after Clark signed an agency contract with RedRock Literary Inc.--which contract doesn't seem to have been amended to acknowledge the change. This, according to Whipple, is "extremely unusual".)

Beyond the registrations, the lawsuit, and a couple of photos accompanying a trademark application, there's no evidence of RedRock's existence: no website, no social media, no reports of sales.

Pink Sand Press is somewhat more corporeal, with a website and a Facebook page. That's not to say it's a healthy company. For one thing, it is no longer a functioning corporation: it was involuntarily dissolved on June 30 of this year by order of the MA Secretary of State (Clark's lawsuit has been amended to acknowledge this). Again according to Whipple, that usually happens when a corporation fails to file reports on time.

Apart from the books it has published for Clark, Pink Sand has virtually no track record as a publisher. A search on Amazon turns up two other authors and five other titles--but the status of those titles is unclear. They are nowhere to be seen on the Pink Sand website, they don't appear ever to have been promoted--or even mentioned--on Pink Sand's Facebook page, and four of them--by Jeanne De Vita, writing both as herself and under the pen name Callie Chase-- have either been taken out of print or are listed as out of stock or unavailable everywhere but on Amazon. (Interesting side note: De Vita was an editor at Waterhouse Press.)

THE CONTRACTS

Both of the contracts Clark signed--the RedRock agency contract and the Pink Sand publishing contract --are attached to her original complaint.

The agency contract looks reasonably standard to me, though it imposes a three-year term that the author can terminate only in the event of breach by the agent--not ideal. It also has an arbitration clause, which could complicate things for Clark's legal effort to be released.

The publishing contract, which covers a whopping 28 titles, is another story. It includes some really terrible clauses, particularly in regard to payment.

For instance, here are the royalty rates for hardcover publication:

This is seriously nonstandard. Mass market paperback royalties are also substandard, at 5% of wholesale.

Of course, both of these provisions are moot, since Clause 4(a) of the contract stipulates publication only of "an e-book and trade paperback edition"--but there are big problems with royalties for those formats as well. Ebooks are paid at just 15% of net (even the big publishers typically pay 25% of net, and most small presses pay considerably more). As for trade paper royalties, there is no mention of them in the contract. At all. (!!!)

Subsidiary rights payments too are hugely, one might almost say rapaciously, substandard, with the publisher keeping 85% and the author getting just 15%. These include foreign language, book club, and numerous other rights that are typically allocated at least 50/50 between author and publisher.

Other lowlights: an overly lengthy grant term (10 years); no advances for certain of the many backlist titles acquired; a non-competition clause that bars Clark not just from publishing competing works, but from publishing anything until the terms of the contract have been completed; an agency clause that empowers RedRock to increase its commission for subagented rights sales beyond the commission rates stipulated in the agency contract; and a clause that empowers Pink Sand to retain rights for five years to a delivered revision it declines to publish, unless the author can find another publisher willing to hand all the author's earnings over to Pink Sand until advances have been repaid. (Good luck with that.)

It's hard for me to imagine any reputable publisher offering a contract like this, or any reputable literary agent advising a client to sign it. I see some pretty atrocious contracts from inexperienced publishers who don't know any better, but Grishman is not inexperienced. Waterhouse Press is a successful house, and he worked there for years.

Make of that what you will. Make what you will, also, of the timelines involved. David Grishman incorporated RedRock Literary (for the first time) on November 13. Less than three weeks later, on December 2, he signed Clark as an agency client. Six weeks after that, on January 15, Steven Grishman incorporated Pink Sand Press. Clark's publishing agreement was signed just eight days later, on January 23.

The whole thing has the feeling of a rush to pin something down.

THE COMPLAINT

Here are Clark's principal allegations, with my comments. (I'm not a lawyer, but I have Thoughts.)

Allegation 1. It was not revealed to Clark that Pink Sand was owned by Grishman's father until after she signed the contract. Instead, she alleges that she was told that the company was "a startup company that would be owned by Grishman and Matthew Bernard, Grishman's friend."

It's possible to imagine a situation in which the alleged statement by Grishman was not misrepresentation--at least, at the time it was made. Suppose, for instance, that the described joint ownership really was the plan in December, when Clark signed the agency contract--but later those plans fell through and Grishman turned to Dad instead.

Even in this hypothetical, though, everything would have changed on January 15, when Pink Sand's business registration was filed in Steven's name. In terms of conflict of interest, there's not a lot of difference between your agent owning your publisher, and his father owning your publisher while your agent just works there--but at a minimum, Clark should have been informed. It sure seems like there was ample time for that to happen before January 23, when Clark signed the Pink Sand contract.

Allegation 2. Pink Sand did not file copyright "applications" (presumably what's meant here is registrations) for any of Clark's works, as the publishing agreement required it to do.

I checked the public copyright catalog, and of the nineteen Marci Bolden books published by Pink Sand, sixteen are indeed registered.

I can't see any pattern that would explain the three that aren't registered, although they are the only standalone titles. They're also the only titles available solely as ebooks (the rest are available in a variety of formats). Weird.

Allegation 3. In March 2020, after a fourth novel in one of Clark's series was delayed by extensive developmental editing, Clark alleges that Grishman informed her that the publisher would be buying out the final two volumes in an uncompleted series and hiring a ghostwriter to create them, claiming that "she had no choice because of a clause in the Publishing Agreement that allowed Pink Sand to use a ghostwriter to finish the series that would be published under Clark's name."

Clark alleges that there is no such clause. I agree. I've read the contract several times, and I can find no wording that's even remotely similar to what Clark alleges Grishman told her. If this allegation is true, it would constitute some serious gaslighting.

Allegation 4. In February 2021, Clark and Pink Sand executed an amendment to the original contract that "expressly changed the Publishing Agreement to only require Clark to submit manuscripts for copy editing, not developmental editing." Clark alleges that Pink Sand breached this when it "insisted on conducting developmental edits before accepting Clark's manuscripts for publication."

Here's the amendment:

This doesn't seem to me to be as unambiguous as the complaint alleges. Yes, "developmental" is crossed out and "copy" is substituted--but only in connection with establishing a delivery date. There is no wording that explicitly excludes developmental (or any other kind) of editing. Maybe the intent was to exclude it, but to me (and again, I'm not a lawyer), the actual wording leaves something of a loophole that could enable Pink Sand to argue that it wasn't in breach: for instance, it could claim that when the works were received for copy editing, it was realized that they needed developmental editing, so Pink Sand went ahead and did that since it wasn't specifically prohibited from doing so.

Allegation 5. In May 2021, Clark and Grishman agreed on a September 24 submission date for an unnamed manuscript. But in August, Clark alleges that she was told her submission was late; and on September 15--at which point, remember, the ms. wasn't actually due yet--Pink Sand informed her that she was in default and her royalties would be withheld "until the parties came to an agreement to end negotiations and terminate the Publishing Agreement." (Clark did not turn in the manuscript.)

The complaint doesn't include any documentation of this claim. But once again, the timelines are interesting. Pink Sand was dissolved as a corporation on June 30. According to Clark's complaint and the Pink Sand contract, September 15--the day she alleges that she was prematurely told she was in default--was also the day royalties were due.

Hmmmm.

FINAL THOUGHTS

There is much here that it is impossible to know right now. The only documentation provided to address the many allegations in Clark's complaint is the two contracts, and as of this writing, the Grishmans have not yet filed a response to tell their side of the story.

There are situations in which agents or agencies that double as publishers can avoid major conflicts of interest--primarily by maintaining a wall between the agenting and publishing sides of their business (agency clients are never offered publishing, other than possibly for represented backlist works that are out of print; and publishing clients are never eligible for agenting). There's a whole section on the Literary Agents page of the Writer Beware website that addresses this issue.

Clark's situation, though, seems like a textbook case of unavoided conflict of interest. Even had the Pink Sand contract been perfectly fair, Grishman, as Clark's agent, could not adequately represent Clark's interests when presenting it to her, because as a Pink Sand employee, he was also representing the publisher's interest in having her sign it. This is why the AAR prohibits members from representing both buyer and seller in a single transaction.

Of course, the Pink Sand contract is not fair. One of the things I find most peculiar about the whole mess is that Clark was not a publishing neophyte when she signed it. She'd published several books, worked as an editor for other small presses, and had an MS in publishing from the University of Houston. Wouldn't those terrible royalty clauses--at the very least--have rung some warning bells?

I'm not casting blame. But this is one of the things that makes me think that there's a lot more to the story than is currently apparent.

Stay tuned.

* David Grishman's RedRock Literary Inc should not be confused with Renata Kazprzak's UK-based Red Rock Literary Agency.

UPDATE 1/24/22: Well, this is a surprise. Marci Clark has dismissed her lawsuit (without prejudice, which means she could re-file). The Grishmans filed several documents, including notices of appearance and a corporate disclosure, but never answered Clark's complaint.

The Best of Writer Beware: 2021 in Review

noreply@blogger.com (Victoria Strauss) — Fri, 07 Jan 2022 17:37:00 +0000

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®

Ah, 2021. The year that was supposed to deliver us from the pandemic, and instead delivered...well. You know.

At least one expectation didn't change: scammers gonna scam. Writer Beware was ready. Below are highlights of a busy year of scam hunting, scheme exposing, contract analyzing, and just plain crazy stuff.

IT CAME FROM OVERSEAS

I know I'm kind of a broken record here, because I've written so many posts about them...but the tsunami of publishing/marketing/fake literary agency scams out of the Philippines really is one of the realest and most present dangers for self- and small press-published writers, who are almost exclusively these scammers' target.

* Scam Alert: Chapters Media & Advertising and Its Stable of Imaginary Literary Agents

This was one of the more elaborate of the Philippines-based scam efforts: the creation of a large roster of fictitious literary agents, complete with fake resumes and/or websites. The "agents" are fronts for referrals to paid services.

* Scammers Taking Big 5 Publishers' Names in Vain: A Growing Trend

Scammers are increasingly using the names of top publishers and their staffs to make false claims and offers. Here's one especially brazen effort: the supposedly Big 5 publisher-sponsored sale of "tickets" that buy a "letter of endorsement" by "commissioned literary agents". Needless to say, this is not how publishing works.

* Alert: Scammers Impersonating Major Motion Picture Studios

* Scam Alert: Transmedia Agency and New Leaf Media LLC

2020 was all about scammers impersonating reputable literary agents. 2021 ushered in a wave of film studio and production company impersonations. Major studios like Universal, smaller companies like Roth/Kirshenbaum and Bluegrass Films, and producers like Todd Phillips and David Ellison were all impersonated by scammers looking to trick writers into paying thousands of dollars for a screenplay.

* Scam Alert: Silver Ink Literary Agency/Editors Press and Media/Global Review Press

This triple-barreled scammer has not just impersonated major publishers, but falsely claimed an alliance with the Authors Guild...which did not take that lie lying down. The person claiming to be the CEO of these ventures is unusually visible and flamboyant on social media (most of the people connected with Philippines-based scams go to great lengths to hide their identities).

BUT WAIT...THERE'S MORE!

* Pique Literary: Unmasking a Fake Literary Agency

From fake agent photos and bios, to unverifiable details about its background, to zero internet presence beyond a hasty website, this fee-charging agency was much less than it appeared. There are useful tips here for vetting an agency by analyzing its website.

* Two Scams To Watch For: Conference Phishing Scheme, Goodreads Extortion Scam

A fake conference promises a hefty appearance fee--but first you've got to send money for "equipment". And Goodreads trolls are targeting writers with demands for money to head off fake one-star reviews.

* Eli Bear Company, Star Alley Press: Two Writer Beware All-Stars Return

A pair of dodgy new ventures from two individuals whose previous businesses screwed writers over in a major way.

CONTRACT MATTERS

* Contract Red Flag: When a Publisher Claims Copyright on Edits

Although not common, this is something to watch for, especially in small press contracts. While there aren't any definitive legal rulings to disallow such claims, there aren't any to support them either--and, just as important, there's no obvious benefit for publishers in refusing to allow writers to re-publish the final edited version of a book whose rights they've reverted.

* Bad Contract Alert: ByteDance's Fizzo Reading/Writing App

The number of reading/writing apps and platforms like Wattpad, Webnovel, and Radish has exploded over the past couple of years, and many are aggressively soliciting for content. Unfortunately, contracts can be seriously author-unfriendly. The contract offered by ByteDance's Fizzo is no exception.

* Bad Contract Alert: NovelCat

Another reading/writing app, another terrible contract that, among other things, imposes punitive word count requirements.

* A Critical Look at Scribd's Audiobook Reprint Contracts

Scribd is engaging in a major push to acquire audiobook and ebook rights for already-published books. The contract it's offering has some issues that require careful consideration, including what could be very limited compensation, depending on how popular your book turns out to be.

ADVICE YOU CAN USE

* How Bad Contest Entry Rules Can be Mitigated: The Medium Writer's Challenge

Overly sweeping--and unnecessary--rights grants are a common feature of contest rules. One contest's inclusion of such language, why the language is problematic--and how it was changed for the better.

* Another Reason to Just Say No to That Offer to Re-Publish Your Self-Pubbed Book

These out-of-the-blue offers are almost always from fraudulent companies that want to get you in the door so they can pressure you to buy additional, costly "services." Many simply stop responding once writers get suspicious and start asking questions, or shut down without notice when complaints start accumulating...leaving authors high and dry.

SAVE YOUR MONEY

* Online Copyright Registration Services: Writer Beware

In the few countries with an official registration process, there's no legal substitute. Nevertheless, there are many fake and exploitative "registration" services that claim to offer a shortcut or an alternative. Here's one that apparently got so many credit card chargebacks from unhappy writers that it adopted an...unusual response.

* A Pay-to-Play Bookstore Scheme: The Reading Glass Books

Beware of bookstores calling out of the blue to sell you shelf space. They may be owned by a predatory publishing service that wants to sell you other stuff as well (of course, they won't tell you that).

* Pay-to-Play as Pedagogy: The Creator Institute and New Degree Press

Vanity publishing as education? New Degree Press is the publishing arm of a university course in which students are coached to produce a book. NDP presents as a publisher, but it functions like an assisted self-publishing service. Fees are crowdfunded but they're hefty, and students often wind up out of pocket.

PUBLISHERS IN--OR GIVING--TROUBLE

* Publisher Cautions: Riverdale Avenue Books, Breaking Rules Publishing, Adelaide Books

Author complaints are a familiar litany: publication delays, late or missing royalty statements and payments, unpaid staff, poor editing and production. And, in one case, a book purchase requirement that's not revealed on the company website.

* Publisher Storm Warnings: Diversion Books

Multiple author complaints include missing and inaccurate royalty statements (in some cases going back years), missing royalty payments (even where there were thousands of sales), failure to respond to reversion requests on contract expiration, and more. As sometimes happens, these were problems of very long standing that suddenly acquired critical mass.

* Author Complaints at City Limits Publishing

Late royalty payments, missed editing and other deadlines, poor communication, books ordered and never received, and major gaslighting by the company's owner. City Limits suffered a mass staff exodus shortly after I published this post, and closed its doors for good a few weeks later--leaving writers and staff unpaid.

* Small Press Storm Warnings: Hurn Publications, Dreaming Big Publications, Azure Spider Publications

All three of these publishers are the subject of author complaints of non-payment, and all three illustrate the risks of signing with publishers that are basically one-person operations: a single personal problem, family illness, or other mishap can derail the entire operation.

BAD MOUSE

Disney has acquired many publishers and imprints over the years, along with their intellectual property. In many cases, however, Disney is taking the position that, while they've acquired these publishers' contracts, they have not acquired the obligations the contracts stipulate...such as paying royalties and providing royalty statements.

In 2021, SFWA and other professional writers' organizations established the #DisneyMustPay Joint Task Force to advocate for affected authors. My blog post takes a look at the situation as of September 2021: some progress, but much work still to do.

* #DisneyMustPay Update: Disney is Still Not Paying

AND FINALLY, A SALUTE TO THE CRAZY

* Very Weird Solicitation Alert: Monica Susan Main

When was the last time you got a snail mail get-rich-quick solicitation? This one from Monica Main promises the opportunity to be a co-writer with a best-selling author in a "James Patterson kind of writing 'empire'"...you just have to watch a bunch of videos and sign an NDA! What I didn't expect as I looked into this scheme: the best-selling author is real. Monica Main is a convicted felon who was prosecuted by the Feds for commodity trading fraud. And the trademark applications are...interesting.

* An Editing Nightmare: Editor and Author Coach Christina Kaye of Book Boss Academy

Come for the lawsuit threats, stay for the insults. My encounter with highly volatile editor/author coach Christina Kaye, who is the focus of multiple client and staff complaints. She clearly didn't expect that I'd publish the threat- and expletive-laden emails she sent in an effort to get me to back off. Oops.

Online Copyright Registration Services: Writer Beware

noreply@blogger.com (Victoria Strauss) — Mon, 13 Dec 2021 18:13:00 +0000

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®

In 2014, I wrote a post about Copyright Registration Online, one of many faux and exploitative copyright registration "services" that cater to writers' anxiety about theft and plagiarism, particularly of unpublished work, by promising to register US copyright or to provide some sort of copyright verification service.

Naturally, there are fees for these services. At the time I wrote the post, Copyright Registration Online was charging $135--which was a ripoff, on two fronts. You can register copyright yourself online at the US Copyright Office for only $45. Just as important: there's absolutely no need to register copyright for unpublished work.

Some registration services are basically pass-throughs: they do submit registration applications to the US Copyright Office, just at a seriously inflated cost. Others provide their own "registration" documentation or certificates, often based on some sort of timestamp. These are completely worthless, not just because they could easily be faked and are therefore unlikely to stand up in court, but because there is no legal substitute for registration with the US Copyright Office (in the United States, you must previously have registered your copyright in order to file an infringement action). Just like so-called poor man's copyright, any "registration" received from a source other than the Copyright Office has zero legal validity.

So why am I dredging up old blog posts? Because Copyright Registration Online is still around, and it has seriously upped the disinformation factor.

Now also calling itself Copyright Registry or Copyright Registry Online, it's got a spiffy new web domain, website, and eagle-and-flag logo. Services are basically the same; prices are a little higher, but not much: "registration" for a single author with a single work will set you back $144.

Copyright Registration Online has also moved beyond the comment spam that brought it to my attention the first time. If you Google "register copyright", its ad comes up ahead of the link to the US Copyright Office:

This no doubt drives a lot of traffic Copyright Registration Online's way, with many writers probably never realizing they aren't dealing with an official branch of the US government, or realizing too late, despite this easily-missable small print on the home page:

Complaints at the BBB--which currently gives the company an F rating--further illustrate this point.

It's pretty clear that Copyright Registration Online has had plenty of experience with dissatisfied customers--so much so that there's an entire clause in its Terms and Conditions devoted to credit card chargebacks, with (probably unenforceable) financial penalties threatened against anyone who dares to initiate one:

Note also the final sentence, which ups the scare factor: "Until these fees are paid in full, Copyright Registry Online will have complete ownership and control of users [sic] copyright registration." It's unclear what that means, since only a copyright owner can own a registration made in their name. Is the company referring to the registration application? Is it threatening to hold up the registration process or to withhold the eventual certificate from the Copyright Office? Again, not clear, and it's unlikely it could actually do anything at all. But scary language, especially to an inexperienced author.

How many people read Terms and Conditions, though? So the company includes an even more outlandish threat in its email footers:

Bad author, no can haz chargeback, all your copyright belong to us!

Of course, this is a complete, brazen lie. First of all, this supposed loss of ownership is not so stated in the Terms and Conditions, which refer only (however nonsensically) to the registration.

Second and more important, this is not the way copyright works. You can't lose ownership of your work unless you explicitly agree to surrender your copyright, and there is nothing in Copyright Registration Online's application process, or its Terms and Conditions, to effectuate that.

Pure and simple, this is a scare tactic designed to discourage writers from filing disputes with their credit card companies once they realize they've been rooked. Not only is it a testament to the sleaziness of Copyright Registration Online--you wouldn't need to work so hard to head off chargebacks if you didn't get a ton of them--it may well be illegal.

There are many similar services out there. I haven't encountered any others that employ such egregiously dishonest tactics. Even so, there are excellent reasons for avoiding ANY service that claims to do or to expedite what the US Copyright Office does--whether because they'll charge you much more than you need to pay, or will furnish you with documents that have no legal value.

Also, don't forget: no matter what you may have heard, if your work is unpublished and you're still at the query stage, there's no need to register at all. By law, you own copyright from the moment you write down the words. Registration is an extra step that gives you the right to pursue an infringement claim in US court (other countries have no such requirement for filing a claim). But theft and plagiarism are vanishingly unlikely at the query stage. Reputable agents and editors won't risk their reputations by stealing; disreputable ones aren't interested in your work, only in your money. Infringement only becomes a danger when your work is exposed to a wide audience: in other words, published.

There's comprehensive information on copyright--including the many myths associated with it--on the Copyright page of the Writer Beware website.

A Pay to Play Bookstore Scheme: The Reading Glass Books

noreply@blogger.com (Victoria Strauss) — Fri, 03 Dec 2021 18:33:00 +0000

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®

I've recently gotten several reports of phone solicitations from a New Jersey-based bookstore called The Reading Glass Books.

Why would a bookstore be calling authors out of the blue? Well in this case, to sell shelf space: $350 for six months. Authors can direct the store to sell the books at whatever price they like, and will get "100% of the royalties" (which of course makes no sense, since direct sales proceeds are not royalties). And if you're thinking that the store will order the books...no, no, no, don't be silly. Authors must provide their own copies.

Paid shelf space for self-published authors isn't a new idea. Here's one entrepreneur who set up a bookstore entirely on that model (the store closed in 2019). And a few years ago there was some media coverage of independent bookstores that were renting shelf space to self-pubbed and small press writers--in some cases for a good deal more than $350.

Whatever you may think of paying for shelf space, these were all real brick-and-mortar stores in the business of selling books to the public--not exploitative schemes aimed primarily at extracting money from writers. Based on its solicitation phone calls, sketchy website, and array of other paid services, my guess was that The Reading Glass Books fell into the latter category. I wanted to be sure, though, so I did some research.

Reading Glass claims a physical address--7 Wrightstown Cookstown Road (aka County Road 616) in Cookstown, New Jersey. To my surprise, there actually is a storefront. It's located in a small strip mall on a relatively empty stretch of road. Here's an image,, courtesy of Google (note the prime location, between Air Transport International and Domino's Pizza):

You can just see that books are displayed in the window.

The mall's roadside location is not exactly conducive to the foot traffic that real bookstores count on--though I guess it's possible that Reading Glass gets some walk-ins from next-door Domino's, or from the tattoo and barber shops that are also in this mall. However, those well-shaved and freshly inked book lovers won't find the store's inside much more prepossessing than its outside. Interior photos (a number of which are present on Reading Glass's Facebook page and Google listing) show a small space with sparsely populated shelves. Here we are in December 2020:

And here's a view from November 2021--inventory is still pretty puny, but it does look like the phone solicitations are having an impact:

So okay, there really is a store. It's not in a great location, it doesn't look like it has a lot of stock, and there are no customers in any of the shots. I'm guessing that authors are lucky if they realize sales in the single digits. Even so, there's enough of a there there to suggest that Reading Glass isn't merely a $350 figment. Could it be that it isn't just a take-money-from-writers scheme? Could it be some entrepreneurial individual's misguided notion of how to "help" indie authors?

Nope.

See the Book of the Month banner? See the company name at the top?

That's Writers' Branding, a self-described "full-service self-publishing company" that sells a large range of costly Author Solutions-style publishing packages and marketing services. Most of the marketing is junk (video trailers, press releases, social media and print advertising, paid book reviews, vanity radio and TV, etc.), and there are some huge markups: for instance, fee-charging review outfit Pacific Book Reviews offers a discounted rate of $225 for its standard review service to Writers' Branding authors, but Writers' Branding re-sells the same service on its own website, with some negligible add-ons, for $1,599.

There's also a companion of sorts to the bookstore: The Reading Glass magazine, one of those faux publications that is never circulated to the public and consists primarily of author advertising and paid interviews interspersed with badly-written articles. Authors can spend anywhere from $399 for a quarter page ad to $3,999 for the whole front cover.

In other words, The Reading Glass Books is just another junk marketing offering by a "self-publishing" company firmly in the Author Solutions mold. Interestingly, the shelf space deal that's being pitched to authors in phone calls for $350 costs $549 if bought from the Writers' Branding website. And if you want to be the Book of the Month advertised on the banner in the photo above? It'll set you back $1,649.

Also worth noting: according to reports I've received, as well as others online, the phone solicitors for The Reading Glass Books don't mention Writers' Branding at all. Which makes sense, if the calls are an attempt by Writers' Branding to expand its bookstore "service" beyond its own authors.

Writers' Branding is of relatively recent origin, with a web domain registered in December 2019. It's got a business registration in New Jersey, but like so many companies of this type, it's also registered in the Philippines.

Writer Beware has gotten a number of reports of phone and email solicitations by Writers' Branding, and there are more reports and complaints online: PissedConsumer.com has a few (including phone harassment), there are a couple at the BBB (both closed, and the details aren't shown). Bizapedia, not normally known for garnering consumer reviews, shows three complaints, all involving Reading Glass Books solicitations.

Small Press Storm Warnings: Hurn Publications, Dreaming Big Publications, Azure Spider Publications

noreply@blogger.com (Victoria Strauss) — Fri, 19 Nov 2021 18:38:00 +0000

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®

HURN PUBLICATIONS

I first heard of Hurn Publications (that's a link to an archived version; the Hurn website is no longer online) not because of author complaints, but because of a contact from the company's founder, Meaghan Hurn.

Shortly after I published this post about contract cancellations and other troubles at vanity publisher Waldorf Publishing, Meaghan emailed me to say that she had a list of publishers who were willing to "help" the cancelled authors by printing new editions of their books. Regardless of the publisher, referring authors isn't something I'd ever do; Writer Beware is scrupulous about avoiding conflict of interest, and we never offer publisher (or agent) recommendations or referrals. We also promise confidentiality, and don't pass on names to third parties.

Meghan also asked me to take a look at Hurn and "see where we might be able to improve from your unique viewpoint." I give advice to writers for free, but to publishers, not so much. Nevertheless, I took a look. And I saw some warning signs. Meaghan Hurn had no apparent professional publishing or writing experience prior to founding the publisher. The company was less than a year old (there's a really high failure rate among new small publishers; it's best to wait until they've been publishing books for at least a year, and preferably longer, before approaching them); it described itself as a "collaborative" publisher (often a euphemism for pay-to-play; Hurn emphatically denied that authors had to pay for anything, but some publishers make that claim and still have a book purchase requirement); and it claimed trademark status for non-trademarked properties (I checked).

Last but not least, Hurn's contract suffered from multiple personality disorder: it required authors to surrender copyright, yet promised to register copyright in the authors' names; it claimed rights in perpetuity, yet released them after five years; and it pledged to pay royalties quarterly, but also just once a year.

So I honestly wasn't too surprised when, in late October, I began hearing from Hurn authors. They told me that on October 24, after several weeks of silence, Meaghan Hurn abruptly took down the Hurn website and closed her social media accounts.

The same day, they received this letter, informing them that Hurn was closing immediately due to Meaghan's illness. The letter does dissolve all contracts and revert all rights (a step that many small presses that go suddenly dark neglect to take) and agrees not to enforce "the portion of the contract that requires you to pay to use [your edited manuscript]" (this provision, which Writer Beware considers predatory, did not appear in the early version of Hurn's contract that I saw). But it also seeks to monetize the company's dissolution by offering to let authors buy their cover art for $350.

Especially with publishers that are one-person operations (or one person plus some freelance editors), illness or family troubles or other personal misfortunes can completely derail the business. But Hurn's sudden closure didn't come totally out of the blue. Authors told me that there were trouble signs well before October 24th: books with uncorrected errors, late royalty payments and statements, unfulfilled marketing promises, and poor communication.

As of this writing, Hurn books are still for sale on Amazon, in both print and Kindle editions. It can take some time for retailers to remove listings, and publishers do have the right to continue to sell any print editions they have on hand at the time of closure or contract termination. They should pay royalties on all of those post-closure sales, however. Hopefully Hurn will do so.

Hurn authors, please let me know.

DREAMING BIG PUBLICATIONS

I've been getting complaints about Dreaming Big Publications (not to be confused with the similarly named, and now defunct, Dream Big Publishing) off and on since 2018. These include scheduling delays, unpaid royalties, no sales information, failure to respond to emails, and in one case, publishing an audiobook that the publisher did not have the rights to.

Now, apparently things have gotten worse, to the point that authors are asking to to terminate their contracts. In late August, Dreaming Big posted this in the members-only section of its website:

Compared to some termination fees I've seen, these aren't large--still, it's not a great sign to have enough authors wanting to get out of their contracts that you feel obliged to monetize the process.

Like Hurn, Dreaming Big is basically a one-person operation that has been derailed on occasion by the owner's health issues. But that may not be the only source of Dreaming Big's problems with paying and accounting royalties. Here's the royalties clause of its contract:

That's it. No schedule of payments. No requirement that the publisher provide a royalty statement. Small presses often ignore the terms of their own contracts, so having a royalty schedule and an accounting requirement doesn't mean you'll get them. But not having them definitely increases the chances that you won't.

Something to watch for.

AZURE SPIDER PUBLICATIONS

Another one-person operation--Azure Spider Publications--is the subject of a spate of recent author complaints. These include no royalties, no royalty statments, non-response to emails and messages, and refusal (via non-response) to terminate contracts and remove books from sale despite clear evidence of breach (the said non-payment and non-provision of royalty statements, both of which are required in the contract).

I tweeted a couple of alerts about the situation, which appear to have motivated the publisher to reach out to me.

I'm always at least a little skeptical about health excuses, since I've encountered so many situations in which they turn out to be false. Covid especially provides a convenient rationale: I've seen it used frequently in the past year and a half--sometimes honestly but often otherwise--to justify non-performance. But these tales of misfortune may also be genuine, so they deserve at least the benefit of the doubt.

In this case, though, doubt has run out. The promises made in the email have not been fullfilled--at least for the authors who contacted me, who have still not received royalties, rights reversions, or even a response from Ms. Osborne.

******

Finally, an observation. As I've noted in each case, these publishers are all basically one-person operations, with perhaps some freelancers or part-timers to fill in the gaps. The owner of Dreaming Big, for instance, has admitted that publishing is a sideline: "Publishing is fun and more than a hobby, I suppose, but it's not what pays my bills".

If you're going to put your manuscript into the hands of a publisher--not to mention, sign a contract that binds you to the publisher for years if not the life of your copyright--you really want publishing to be the publisher's primary business--not something done "for fun" or as a hobby or in their spare time evenings and weekends. With the best will in the world, one-person and part-time ventures, which are often without financial reserves and don't have the cushion of regular staff, are super-vulnerable to unexpected outside events--illness, family emergency, personal misfortune, and the like. As seen above, these can lead to mistakes and delays, or even push the company into closure, leaving authors in limbo.

Again, part-time publishers may be entirely well-intentioned, and may have the savvy or drive to keep things running smoothly. But for authors, signing with a publisher that isn't a full-time operation is a risk factor. When you're evaluating whether to accept a contract offer, it's something you need to consider.

An Editing Nightmare: Editor and Author Coach Christina Kaye of Write Your Best Book (aka Book Boss Academy)

noreply@blogger.com (Victoria Strauss) — Fri, 12 Nov 2021 18:31:00 +0000

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®

I first heard about editor and author coach Christina Kaye (aka Christina Broaddus) last year, via a writer who later posted this public complaint on Facebook. The allegations: misrepresentation of services (editing by a trainee rather than Christina herself), inadequate performance (the complainant paid for content editing, and got something more like copy editing), and refusal by Christina to either re-do the edit or provide a refund.

In addition to the allegations, the complainant provided supporting documentation...including Christina's furious emails and lawsuit threats when the complainant refused to back off.

As far as I know, the lawsuit never materialized.

So who is Christina Kaye? Owner of two-year-old editing and coaching service Write Your Best Book, her resume includes a predecessor, Top Shelf Editing, which launched in September 2019 and whose URL is currently set to re-direct to WYBB, as well as stints with Limitless Publishing (publisher of several of her novels) and Dragon Street Press.

Other entrepreneurial ventures include Bon Chance Press, which started up in early 2017 and contracted several books before closing that same year without publishing anything; a registered business called Book Boss Boutique, LLC; and an Etsy storefront that sells writing-related planners and gifts. Christina also has a substantial presence on various social media platforms, hosts her own podcast, and has amassed a large following on TikTok.

The WYBB website displays testimonials from satisfied clients (of which there are apparently 300, or maybe it's 150?). And a single bad review, even one as convincingly documented as the Facebook complaint, doesn't necessarily indicate a problem business. Anyone can fly off the handle and say unwise things in response to pressure. Maybe this was an isolated incident? Maybe there was something else that explained Christina's over-the-top response?

Over the past year, however, several writers who've used Christina's services have contacted me to report similar experiences: editing that didn't fulfill what they were led to expect or the terms of the contracts they signed (such as copy editing presented as content editing, or editing by a trainee); hostile, threatening, insulting, and generally unprofessional responses by Christina to concerns and complaints (not just in email or texts but on social media); and refusal of refund requests, including in one case where services weren't just unsatisfactory, but mostly weren't delivered.

That writer went public with a video on Facebook, in which she describes paying $2,500 for editing and coaching that Christina subsequently decided she couldn't do; when the writer asked for the money back, Christina refused, claiming the payment was "in the bank" to cover future help the writer might need. The writer filed a dispute with her credit card company, which initiated a chargeback. Christina was not pleased.

(Refunds seem to be a particular issue for Christina's business. Write Your Own Book's editorial contract specifically excludes them--in ALL CAPS:

Like "we don't guarantee that you'll make any sales" clauses in publishing contracts, this suggests not so much a hypothetical situation as an anticipated one. And why would an editorial service anticipate refund requests?)

In the past couple of weeks, I've also heard from WYBB staff members who say they have not been paid (and I've seen documentation to support this).

These are all serious complaints. What really stands out for me, though, is Christina's communication style, particularly her volcanic reactions to criticism and complaint, or to people she perceives as having disrespected or dismissed her. In addition to the publicly-posted emails and messages above, I've seen many examples shared with me privately by clients, staffers, and people with whom Christina has worked professionally. Several of them told me they're afraid of her.

Since I promise confidentiality, I can't share any of those examples. But my own exchange of emails with Christina should give you a flavor of what I'm talking about.

The same day I tweeted this...

I've received several complaints about Christina Kaye of Write Your Best Book that are very similar to this one https://t.co/OPoVzoOVxR https://t.co/q96XhvAnRK
— Victoria Strauss (@victoriastrauss) October 27, 2021

...I received this:

Hmmm. I responded in my mild mannered reporter guise:

Within minutes, I got this:

Allll righty, then. (Between Facebook and Twitter, I actually have around 43,000 followers...still so sadly short of 100,000 friends, though.)

Christina did eventually agree to answer my questions. So I sent them off (you can see the exchange that prompted my first sentence at the bottom).

A bit to my surprise, she responded to at least some of what I asked.

(Right after receiving this, I emailed one of the WYBB staff members who contacted me about outstanding invoices. They provided documentation that confirmed that they were still waiting for payment.)

The TikTok Live didn't happen. But a few days later, Christina added three lengthy posts to one of her Facebook pages, in which she claimed to know who was complaining about her ("there are THREE former clients I’m aware of who are 'unhappy' with my services"), accused those people of misleading gullible fools like me with "false information and even doctored documentation", and threatened them, along with anyone who "jumps on that bandwagon", with "pending legal action." All with the greatest love, positivity, mercy, and compassion.

I always do due diligence, so I decided to reach out again.

This did not go over well.

Well, I tried.

Christina has since decided to take a break from social media.

If you're thinking of hiring a freelance editor, Writer Beware's Editors page has lots of information, tools, tips, and of course cautions, as well as links to helpful resources.

UPDATE 11/16/21: As I thought it might, this post has motivated new reports. I haven't obscured the names on these, as they're publicly viewable on Facebook

From the original Facebook complaint:

From Writer Beware's Facebook page:

UPDATE 11/17/21: Christina has deleted the three long Facebook posts referred to above. I have screenshots, if anyone wants to see them.

Christina has also changed her name and handle on TikTok, reincarnating as ED Foster (quick editing tip: add periods to indicate abbreviations, unless you want people to think your name is Ed) and @bookbossacademy.

She has posted a video, all about how to deal with "enemies".

UPDATE 11/20/21: Christina has changed the name of her Facebook page to Book Boss Academy. The company website still has the old name.

UPDATE 1/5/22: Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi! Subscribers to Christina's email list received this plea last week:

It goes on from there, but the gist is that she MUST get at least ONE new client signed up in the next 48 hours or it's goodbye Book Boss Academy.

So far, the threat of Book Boss's demise appears to be greatly exaggerated. As far as I know, neither celebration nor sign-off email has been sent, the Book Boss Academy (nee Write Your Best Book) website is still live, and Christina is still busily posting videos on TikTok (now under her own name).

Bad Contract Alert: NovelCat

noreply@blogger.com (Victoria Strauss) — Fri, 05 Nov 2021 17:10:00 +0000

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®

How cute is NovelCat's kitty logo? If only its contract were so adorable.

NovelCat is yet another of the reading/writing platforms, mostly based in Singapore and Hong Kong, that have sprung up relatively recently and are aggressively recruiting authors. A few have decent contracts, but many offer truly terrible terms, which I've explored in a couple of previous posts: EMP Entertainment and A&D Entertainment, which appear to have been deputized to recruit for Webnovel (this post includes an assessment of a number of similar companies), and Fictum, a new platform from ByteDance.

The full NovelCat contract can be seen here. It's non-exclusive, and the non-exclusivity doesn't seem to be vitiated by prohibitions within the contract (as with the EMP and A&D contracts, which include several clauses that severely restrict their supposed non-exclusivity). There's also an advance; the amount wasn't stipulated in the contract I saw, but similar platforms pay anywhere from a few hundred dollars to $1,500.

But...

The grant term is 20 years, auto-renewable for another 20 years if you neglect to "dispute" renewal or if you do dispute it and NovelCat doesn't agree (Clause 9). That's not as bad as the life-of-copyright grants I've seen in other reading/writing platform contracts, but it's still a seriously excessive grant term--especially since options for authors to terminate are very, very limited.

Did I mention that termination options are limited? Per Clause 2.2.4, you can ask NovelCat to remove your work from its platform, but it doesn't have to agree. The only other situation in which you can terminate is if NovelCat defaults on its obligations or otherwise breaches the contract. Even assuming NovelCat still exists in 20 years, that's a long time for your work to be stuck in one place, especially if it's generating little income.

Although the contract is non-exclusive, it makes claim on a large array of subsidiary rights (Clause 2.2), including "movies, TV dramas, online drama series, animations, dramas, games, audiobooks, radio dramas" (soooo much drama!), which NovelCat can "commercialize...in any form, format, language or method, or produce, use, sell, market, import, reproduce and distribute Contractual Works or derivative works." It can also use your title and character names as "trademarks on relevant commodities," and license subrights to third parties, with no obligation to inform you if it does.

For the average author, how likely is it that NovelCat will use or license any of these subrights? In most cases, probably not very (with the possible exception of audiobooks). Still, it's a pretty sweeping authorization, and if you sign a contract where something can happen, you should never assume that it won't happen.

You must grant rights not just for one work, but for all works related to that work in just about any way--even if you haven't written them yet. Here's the relevant clause, from the Definitions section:

This is one of the more greedy rights grabs I've seen.

Speaking of rights, clause 4.1.3 suggests that NovelCat can simply buy you out at an agreed-upon price, and thereafter keep all sales and licensing proceeds.

Royalties are paid monthly...but they are paid on net profit (Clause 4). The royalty percentage sounds high (50% of "distributable income"), but distributable income is defined (in the Definitions section) as "the income after channel charges, promotion fees, claw-back deductions, all costs and any other charges are deducted from sales revenue generated from works". In other words, net profit.

Since you don't know what the deducted costs will actually amount to (the contract includes no requirement that NovelCat disclose them), 50% could be considerably less than it sounds. Additionally, there's nothing to clarify how "sales revenue" is generated. Page reads? Some kind of coin or tip system? Something else? Between that lack of clarity and all the deductions, you really have no idea what you might be paid.

You also will be paid only once you recoup whatever advance you're offered, and will receive payouts only when accumulated royalties exceed $100.

As with some other reading/writing platform contracts I've seen, word count requirements are pretty stiff--as are penalties for failing to meet them (Clause 3.2). You must produce "not less than 30,000" words per month (a pace that even a prolific writer might find difficult to keep up on a constant basis). If you fail to deliver, you are "fully liable for losses arising from such failure"--an ominous phrase that the contract neither explains nor defines.

Furthermore, if that failure is "without cause", or you confirm that you can't finish, or you write "abnormally" (whatever that means) by failing to adhere to "outlines" (whatever those are), you are deemed to have breached the contract and NovelCat can simply take over the writing, and retain both copyright and income for such new writing, while still using your name as the author.

There's what amounts to a morals clause (Clause 3.2.8). You must "actively preserve the image of Party A" and can't take "any action that is prejudicial" to such image. Vague and sweeping language like this can be and is easily abused--especially since it would be up to NovelCat to decide what's "prejudicial"--and could seriously limit your ability to speak or write about your NovelCat experience.

It's not just about speech. If NovelCat deems you to have breached Clause 3.2.8, Clause 6.2.2. suggests that you could suffer quite a financial hit: "Party B shall pay Party A USD 1,000 as liquidated damages and punitive liquidated damages equal to twice the total amount of remuneration and relevant fees Party B has obtained from Party A. If such liquidated damages are not enough to compensate for Party A's losses, Party B shall be liable for all losses beyond such liquidated damages."

Disputes are governed by the laws of mainland China, and are subject to arbitration. Generally speaking, when you sign a contract with an arbitration clause, you're giving up your right to resolve disputes in court. Even without an arbitration clause, disputes can be very difficult to resolve if you're contracting with a company from overseas.

Bottom line: this is a really problematic contract. Even if NovelCat were willing to negotiate--and many reading/writing platforms absolutely are not--you'd have to do a major overhaul to make it more author-friendly. Additionally, the dense language is a chore to parse even for someone with a lot of knowledge, and its complexity can make even the kind of analysis I've done above hard to understand.

If all of that is challenging for someone like me, with years of experience reading publishing contracts, imagine what it's like for the writers NovelCat and others are seeking to recruit, many of whom are young, inexperienced, and don't have English as their first language.

Also, the explanations provided by the marketing people who approach these writers, while not actually false, is often misleading or incomplete--especially in regard to the income writers may receive from their presence on the platform. There are dozens of these platforms out there, all competing for readers: in other words, an increasingly diluted market. I'm hearing more and more from writers who've signed with one or another of the platforms and are discovering that even after months of posting segments or chapters, they still haven't made enough income to exceed the payout threshold. And because their contracts are interminable, they can't get free.

Writer beware.

UPDATE 12/4/21: I've just seen a contract from a company called MiracleNovel that is substantailly the same as the NovelCat contract. There are a few differences--a 10-year rather than a 20-year term, fewer subrights claimed, no advance, and the buyout clause discussed above isn't included--but otherwise the two contracts are word-for-word identical.

My assumption was that it was the same company doing business under multiple names. But NovelCat's parent company is HK Xinmo Technology Limited, and MiracleNovel's is Shenzhen New Generation Culture Media Co.,LTD. And while HK Xinmo Technology has the kind of web presence you'd expect, Shenzhen New Generation Culture Media doesn't appear to have any web presence at all, or none that I could find anyway.

Regardless, MiracleNovel is soliciting authors on Facebook. If you hear from them, be aware: their contract is terrible.

A Critical Look at Scribd's Audiobook Reprint Contracts

noreply@blogger.com (Victoria Strauss) — Fri, 22 Oct 2021 17:06:00 +0000

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®

This week I became aware that Scribd is engaging in a major push to acquire audiobook and ebook rights for already-published books, thanks to this post from Isobel Starling.

Starling's email exchange with a Scribd representative raised some concerns:

There are definitely some questions here. Fortunately, I was able to get hold of several copies of the contract Scribd is offering for these deals. You can see it here. (I've redacted the author's name and other identifying information, and omitted the signature page. The contracts I saw were identical.)

Salient details:

- It's explicitly a reprint contract. Scribd is looking for backlist books.

- Per Clause 3, the grant of rights is exclusive, and includes worldwide rights in all languages for audiobooks and ebooks distributed on the Scribd platform. For distribution outside the Scribd platform, English-language rights are excluded for ebooks only (this appears to be intended to allow authors to keep any current ebook editions in publication--but it's complicated. See below).

- Print rights aren't mentioned anywhere in the contract: this is digital rights only.

- The grant term is 7 years (Clause 7), and includes distribution and marketing on the Scribd platform (Scribd is an all-you-can-eat subscription service) and outside the Scribd platform via retail channels (Clause 3. Again, though, see below).

- Per Clause 5, payment for distribution on Scribd is a flat fee (between $500 and $1,000 per book in the contracts I saw; the contracts were for multiple books). Unlike some other subscription services, or reading/writing platforms like Webnovel and Radish, Scribd doesn't pay for reader/listener interaction, so for your ebook and audiobook presence on the Scribd platform, the flat fee is all you get.

- Also per Clause 5, payment for distribution outside the Scribd platform is 25% of "Scribd's net proceeds" (not defined) once production costs have been recouped by such proceeds. This kind of back-end payment arrangement would be inappropriate for previously unpublished work, but it isn't unusual for reprint publishers that acquire backlist books; Open Road Media does something similar, for instance.

Things to consider if you're offered one of these contracts:

- The grant of rights is pretty sweeping: worldwide rights in all languages. There's some limitation, in that English-language rights are excluded for ebooks (though apparently only if they're distributed outside of the Scribd platform; see my next point, below), and the contract doesn't allow Scribd to sublicense rights to others. But there's nothing in the contract to give you any say in or oversight of any translations that might be made, so you are ceding some control here.

Of course, you have no guarantee there will actually be translations: the Scribd representative who responded to Isobel Starling only said that Scribd "has hopes" of doing translations at some point. So that's an unknown.

- The grant of rights is complicated and kind of confusing and also possibly internally contradictory. Here it is:

One way to read this is that Clause 3.2, which excludes English-language rights, is qualified by Clause 3.3, which claims rights to "all languages" for distribution on the Scribd platform, and Clause 3.4, which also excludes English but applies only to distribution beyond Scribd and only to ebooks. In other words, the English-language exclusion applies only where ebooks are distributed outside of the Scribd platform.

Another way to read this is that Clause 3.2, which excludes English from the all-languages grant of rights without specifying format --just "the Works"--is contradicted by Clause 3.1, which claims audio rights in all languages, and also by Clause 3.3, which claims the same for distribution on Scribd and also doesn't distinguish between formats.

Maybe I'm getting too deep in the weeds here, but this is the kind of thing that gives agents, and contract nerds like me, migraine headaches.

- How do you feel about not getting paid for readers' and listeners' interaction with not just one, but potentially two editions of your book? Other subscription services do provide such payment (though they may not accompany it with a flat fee or advance). If your work becomes popular on Scribd's platform, that's potentially a lot of lost income over the course of seven years. This is definitely an area where Scribd could reap the lion's share of benefit, and has the potential to devalue your rights.

The writers who contacted me to share their contracts told me that they are happy with their deals, which were for books they'd published long ago and were no longer promoting, or that provided them with an audio version they wouldn't have been able to afford to produce themselves. But while money upfront is tempting, whether a flat fee is adequate compensation is definitely something to consider.

- For distribution via retailers, you do get royalties--but how likely is it that Scribd will distribute outside its own platform? Scribd can and does distribute wide: in addition to the reprint contracts with individual authors, I saw a recent audio rights contract between Scribd and a small press (English-language rights only, with a higher royalty percentage). The small press confirmed to me that the audiobooks are being sold on Audible and elsewhere, and that it is receiving payments.

According to the Scribd representative, though, wide distribution for this new rights acquisition push may not be a given. And if you look closely at the grant of rights above, you'll see that while it covers distribution of ebooks outside of Scribd, nothing at all is mentioned about distribution of audiobooks outside of Scribd. Remember, too, that this is an exclusive grant of rights. Are you prepared for the possibility that your audiobook will be available only on Scribd, and therefore only to Scribd subscribers?

- Royalties for wide distribution are paid only after production costs are recouped. As noted above, this isn't an unusual arrangement for reprint publishers. But the contract doesn't say anything about what those costs might include...narration and design, obviously, but what else? Ask for a breakdown, or at least an estimate, and be wary if that request is refused.

- Such royalties are paid on "net proceeds", but the contract doesn't define what those are. Purchase price less discounts? Purchase price less discounts less other expenses? This would be good to know.

- Clause 2.d. makes clear that Scribd doesn't need to consult you on production decisions. It also empowers Scribd to "make corrections to errors in the existing text." Hopefully this would just be on the level of copy editing, but I would want to know more about what kind of corrections and why.

- There are no freebies. The contract doesn't mention author copies.

- There's some confusion in the language of the Term clause.

First it's said that the contract will "commence upon the Effective Date" (the date the contract is signed) and continue for an "initial term" of 7 years. But according to the last sentence, the grant of rights will continue for 7 years "from date of first publication by Scribd". So what's the actual date on which the term of the grant of rights starts to run: contract signing or first publication?

- There's an arbitration clause (Clause 14). Be aware that when you sign a contract with an arbitration clause, you are waiving your right to go to court to settle disputes.

To sum up:

This doesn't strike me as a five-alarm "Writer Beware--run away!" situation. Scribd is not some sketchy startup (unlike many of the reading/writing apps that are also aggressively snapping up backlist books) and it is paying real money. But the lack of compensation for reader/listener interaction on the Scribd platform, which potentially devalues authors' rights, the uncertainties around translations and wide distribution, and the ambiguities in some of the contract language do suggest that careful consideration and caution are in order.

I'll be interested to hear from other writers who have signed or who've been offered contracts by Scribd. Please contact me (in confidence).

UPDATE 10/26/21: Since publishing this post, I've heard from other authors who signed with Scribd (for similar reasons to those mentioned above) and say they are happy with their deals. One writer told me that they were able to do some negotiating to get positive changes in the contract (they didn't provide more detail than that). So it appears that Scribd is willing to be at least somewhat flexible.

Contest Alert: Bardsy's "The Short and Long of It" NaNoWriMo Prep Contest

noreply@blogger.com (Victoria Strauss) — Fri, 15 Oct 2021 17:33:00 +0000

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®

This post has been updated to reflect changes to the contest rules made by Bardsy. Scroll down to see an addendum.

Yes, folks, it's another of my posts about problematic writing contest rules.

I do a lot of these, and the issues are often pretty similar from post to post. But because writing contests are so popular, and poor rules language is so common, it never hurts to blast another warning out there.

Bardsy offers products and resources intended to help writers "Optimize Your Writing Process", including writing tools, templates, video courses, automated tips and prompts, and something called the "Bardsy Method". Bardsy members can publish their stories to the Bardsy Library, where they can be accessed and read by other members, or submit to Bardsy anthologies for possible publication. All of this is accessible for a monthly membership fee of $12.99.

Right now, Bardsy is running a "NoNoWriMo Prep Contest" called "The Short and Long of It". Writers can enter unpublished short stories of between 1,200 and 3,000 words. The winner will get a cash prize of $299, plus a free six-month Bardsy Elite membership (Elite membership normally involves an invite from Bardsy and a higher monthly membership fee). An unspecified number of finalists will receive a 50% discount on regular Bardsy memberships for six months (a prize, in other words, that they will have to pay to take advantage of). There's no entry fee. Notably, there's also no guarantee of publication--even though Bardsy does claim publishing rights.

And that's where the problem arises. Specifically, in the Additional Rules section of the contest guidelines:

There are several issues here. First, simply by submitting to this contest, you're granting publishing rights to Bardsy--whether or not you win or are declared a finalist.

This isn't unusual: many contests include such language as a convenience, because it spares them from having to contract individually with winners or anyone else they choose to publish. But once those decisions are made and the contest ends, there's no reason to retain non-winners' rights. If there's a sweeping grant of rights like this, it should be balanced by language ensuring that the grant expires at a certain point--sooner rather than later. Unfortunately, many contests don't bother, and Bardsy is no exception.

Second, the grant is royalty free, which means that if Bardsy makes use of your story beyond hosting it on its website, you will not get paid (more on that below). I don't think I need to editorialize on why this isn't optimal.

Third, the grant is perpetual, which means it won't expire for the life of copyright, and non-exclusive, which means you could publish elsewhere. But there's a catch. Any grant of rights, even a non-exclusive one, removes your ability to grant exclusive or first rights to anyone else. You will only be able to publish the story on a non-exclusive basis. This takes quite a few publication options off the table. Submitting to magazines? Original anthologies? Not unless they accept reprints. Remember, too, that this is a contest for an unpublished short story, with no guarantee of publication even if you win. Potentially, you've given up your ability to grant first or exclusive rights on an unpublished story that will remain unpublished--at least, by Bardsy.

Finally...see the second sentence of the paragraph? In addition to making explicit that Bardsy is claiming rights it may not use, it ensures that if Bardsy does publish or otherwise exploit your story, it doesn't have to attach your name: "Bardsy will have the right...to include or omit reference to the author." Your story could be published without your name, or even under someone else's name.

The right of attribution--to be named as the author--is a component of moral rights, which the US doesn't really recognize. Even so, this is, in effect, a waiver of moral rights.

All in all, if you're thinking of entering this contest, there are some serious issues to consider. But wait--there's more.

The contest isn't an isolated example of author-unfriendly legalese. Here's the grant of rights included in Bardsy's general user terms, to which you agree simply by using the various Bardsy services--including writing and story-creation tools and templates that are not downloadable and can only be accessed by logging into Bardsy:

Here, the waiver of moral rights is explicit (see the last sentence).

Also, while the language granting a royalty-free license to "use, copy, modify, etc." is fairly standard for sites that, like Bardsy, display user content (it's not intended to sneakily grab your rights, but to enable the site to broadcast and display that content), the paragraph goes beyond that basic set of permissions by giving Bardsy the power to sublicense your content to "partners" for publication and other uses, and "to profit from such uses of your Content". Not only can Bardsy freely sublicense your work to third parties without seeking your permission or approval, it can potentially make money from doing so... while you, having agreed that any use of your work will be royalty-free, get nothing--perhaps not even, since you've waived your moral rights, credit as the author.

How likely is any of this to happen? Maybe not very. However, if you agree to something that could happen, you should never assume it won't happen. Bardsy does market itself as a program for homeschoolers for $8.99 a month--a program that looks like regular Bardsy, just re-packaged with different promotional verbiage and a lower monthly fee.

There's also the principle of the thing. Why deprive writers of the right to have their names published with their writing? That, at least, is not a theoretical concern. In the one example of a Bardsy anthology I could find (apparently published only on the Bardsy website), writers are credited only with their first names and last initials, as if they were in some writerly 12-step program.

Always, always take the time to read--and be sure you understand--the fine print of contest rules and website Terms and Conditions. If ever you're confused as to the meaning of contest legalese, or want to report language you think is author-unfriendly, please contact Writer Beware.

UPDATE 10/25/21: In response to the discussion in this post, Bardsy has modified the contest rules.

Finalists will now receive a free Elite membership for three months. And the grant of rights has been amended to release the rights of non-winners 90 days after winners and finalists are declared, and to remove the language allowing Bardsy to publish without the author's name:

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Bardsy's overall User Agreement remains the same, however, including the waiver of moral rights.

Another Reason to Just Say No to That Offer to Re-Publish Your Self-Pubbed Book

noreply@blogger.com (Victoria Strauss) — Fri, 01 Oct 2021 17:07:00 +0000

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®

One of the identifying markers for the scores of publishing/marketing/fake literary agency scams that are super-aggressively soliciting self-published and small press writers these days is an offer to re-publish or "re-brand" your book.

The offers--which always come out of the blue, by phone or email, from companies you never heard of--vary. Your book isn't priced competitively, and we can do better. We want to represent you to traditional publishers, but first you have to re-publish or "re-license" your book to escape the self-pub "stigma". We'll pitch you to brick-and-mortar booksellers, but you have to have "book insurance" or "return insurance" that your current publishing platform can't provide.

Of course, you must pay for these purported benefits. For simple re-publishing, the price tag can be relatively small (though only to get you in the door so you can be pressured to buy expensive marketing and book-to-screen services). For a larger fee, strategies to supposedly improve your book's appeal may be included in the offer: editing, re-formatting, a brand-new cover design (these may or may not be competently delivered: as many writers learn to their regret, their re-published books often contain more errors than the originals did). For even more money, a bouquet of marketing strategies may be added: video trailers, press releases, email blasts, social media advertising, internet radio interviews, book reviews (these offers are the most lucrative for scammers, since the so-called marketing is junk: cheap to provide, sold at a huge markup, and ineffective for book promotion even if adequately performed, which often it is not).

Deceptive promises, huge expenses, substandard quality, opening yourself up to aggressive sales pressure, not to mention the always-present possibility that the scammer will simply take your money and run: any one of these is reason enough to trash that email or block that phone call from the persistent "senior marketing consultant" or "executive literary agent" who is trying to sell you on re-publication.

But there's another reason to just say no--and it could impact more than your bank account.

Suppose your book gets re-published, but you realize you aren't receiving royalties or royalty reports. Or there are errors that need to be corrected, or services you paid for that aren't being delivered, or you have concerns about quality. Suppose, when you start asking questions, your re-publisher stops responding. Suppose you discover that the email address you've been using no longer works, and the phone number you've been calling has been shut off. Suppose you look for your re-publisher online, and find that its website has disappeared.

These are common situations. Re-publishing scammers routinely ghost writers they decide are inconvenient (or tapped out financially), and frequently shut down under one name as complaints accumulate, only to start up under another. Meanwhile, your book is still for sale all over the internet.

Suppose, then, you decide to terminate your service agreement or publishing contract, get your rights back, and have your book removed from sale. Maybe there's language in the agreement or contract that lets you cancel--but how do you cancel if phone numbers are dead and all your emails bounce? Maybe there's no provision for termination by the author, something you didn't worry about at the time because you didn't think there would be an issue...but that means you can't go to retailers like Amazon with the argument that your copyright is being infringed because the company ignored your contractually-guaranteed right to terminate.

Or maybe you never had a contract to begin with. Maybe your sales rep from the company that originally re-published your book moved to a new company and took you with them, claiming that a new contract wasn't needed even though your re-re-published book now carries the new company's name. (This really happened).

What do you do?

I'm increasingly hearing from writers who are in these situations. Ignored, ghosted, or contractually screwed, their work is for sale, but beyond their control. There's no clear way for them to get their books unpublished and out of their re-publisher's clutches.

Some authors have told me they've managed, with much time and effort, to wrangle takedowns from Amazon. More often, though, they're informed that only the publisher can terminate a title listing: a Catch-22 if your re-publisher won't respond or has vanished without a trace. Other writers have tried to figure out who their re-publisher is using for fulfillment and go directly to that company--but it's not always possible to find this information, and the fulfiller may not be receptive in any case. Either way, begging Amazon or Ingram to deliver what your re-publisher won't is not something any writer should be forced to do.

Of course, all of these problems and do happen with real publishers. You know that if you're a regular reader of this blog. But several factors make the re-publication scams uniquely dangerous:

Their overseas location (their purported US and Canadian business addresses and registrations are just for show), which insulates them from legal and law enforcement action from writers in other countries.
Their elusiveness, with most actively concealing the identities of their principals and operating in their home country under entirely different names. For instance, PageTurner Press and Media, which aggressively solicits authors for re-publication and "re-branding", does business overseas as Innocentrix Philippines and presents itself as an outsourcing service. Bridgebooks, also located in the Philippines, claims to be an advertising and marketing firm, and solicits writers as four supposedly US-based companies: Chapters Media & Advertising, PaperBytes Marketing Solutions, Blueprint Press, and Quantum Discovery.
Their flexibility: with trained staff in place and an established (read: endlessly duplicatable) business model, they can close down one business name and start a new one the same day.
Their willingness to lie, not just about the quality, benefit, and scope of their services, but about who they are: falsely claiming major publisher or movie connections, appropriating the names of legit but defunct companies, impersonating real publishers and agents.

Bottom line: if you succumb to an unasked-for pitch from a company you never heard of to re-publish or re-brand your book, you stand to lose much more than money. Writer beware, indeed.

#DisneyMustPay Update: Disney Is Still Not Paying

noreply@blogger.com (Victoria Strauss) — Fri, 17 Sep 2021 16:31:00 +0000

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®

This past April, I wrote about writers' struggles to get Disney and Disney-owned publishers to provide unpaid royalties and missing royalty statements--in some cases, going back years--and the formation of the #DisneyMustPay Joint Task Force in response.

The problem: Disney has acquired many publishers and imprints over the years, along with their properties and contracts. In many cases, however, Disney is taking the position that while they've purchased the rights to those properties, they haven't acquired the corresponding obligations stipulated in the contracts...such as payment and reporting. From the Task Force website:

Creators may be missing royalty statements or checks across a wide range of properties in prose, comics, or graphic novels. This list is incomplete and based on properties for which we have verified reports of missing statements and royalties.
LucasFilm (Star Wars, Indiana Jones, etc.)
Boom! Comics (Licensed comics including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, etc.)
Dark Horse Comics (Licensed comics including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, etc.)
20th Century Fox (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Alien, etc.)
Marvel WorldWide (SpiderMan, Predator, etc.)
Disney Worldwide Publishing (Buffy, Angel)

Drawn from multiple professional writers' groups, the Task Force's mission is to identify and advocate for writers who are owed money and accounting. There has been movement since April: several writers--including Alan Dean Foster, who was the first to go public--have successfully negotiated with Disney and have been paid. BOOM! Studios, which holds licenses for multiple Disney-owned comic book and graphic novel franchises, has offered to work with the Task Force to resolve royalty issues for comics writers and other creators (though to date little progress has been made). And two additional important writers' organizations, WGA East and WGA West, have joined the Task Force.

This is just the start, though. Disney has not been pro-active in seeking out affected writers, and it has refused to post a FAQ on its website or provide procedures for resolution, leaving writers and their agents on their own to try and figure out what's going on and whom to contact. In many cases--especially for books published years ago--writers may not even be aware that their publisher was acquired or that their books have been published in new formats or editions.

Also, while a few higher-profile novelists have been paid, several lesser-known writers and their agents are still in negotiations with Disney. And although there has been movement on the novel front, for comic book creators there have been almost no resolutions.

Accordingly, the Task Force is reaching out to all comic book and graphic novel creators who are missing royalty payments and statements from their work on Disney-owned properties. From the recent press release:

“Writers, artists, illustrators, letterers, and other artists are valued members of the creative teams that produce art and literature that is enjoyed by millions,” said Mary Robinette Kowal, Task Force Chair. “We are inviting these talented artists to share their stories and we will fight for them to receive the money that is owed to them.”...

The Task Force’s goals are to ensure that all writers and creators who are owed royalties and/or statements for their media-tie in work are identified and that Disney and other companies honor their contractual obligations to those writers and creators after acquiring the companies that originally hired them.

How can you be part of the fight?

If you're an affected creator, or suspect you are, SFWA is hosting this form that you can fill out to let the Task Force know. The purpose of the form is to provide the Task Force with information so it can review your case and then follow up (not every case is something the Task Force can help with, unfortunately). All information submitted is confidential; nothing will be shared outside the Task Force without your permission.

Additionally, the Task Force strongly recommends that, regardless of whether or not you’re affected, you continue to seek timely royalty statements (when appropriate).

If you're a fan, use the hashtag #DisneyMustPay (the Task Force suggests some sample social media messages). Blog about it. Write about it. Post the press release on your website. The Task Force asks that you not boycott, as this would disproportionately affect creators who are being paid. But getting the word out, shining a light on the issue, is hugely important. Public pressure works: Disney is taking notice, as the resolutions reached by Alan Dean Foster and others show.

In closing: this is personal for me. The late Ann Crispin--bestselling author, Writer Beware co-founder, and my dear friend and fellow scam hunter--wrote for two Disney-owned media properties, including her bestselling Han Solo Trilogy and the novelization of Alien: Resurrection.As with other affected writers, Ann's estate has not received royalty statements and/or payments for some editions of those works.

I'll be following developments closely. Watch this space.

Very Weird Solicitation Alert: Monica Susan Main

noreply@blogger.com (Victoria Strauss) — Fri, 03 Sep 2021 19:41:00 +0000

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you know I like the weird stuff. And this is definitely weird.

Several writers have recently contacted me about a strange snail mail solicitation (there are also a number of reports online, so clearly this is a sizeable mailing).

You can read the letter yourself by clicking on the images, but if you have better things to do, here's a quick synopsis.

The curiously old-school letter--complete with fake handwritten notes, just like that junk mail you got so much of before email spam was a thing--is addressed to you by name from someone you never heard of called Monica Susan Main, who claims to have met you at a conference (conveniently not specified).

Monica remembers the heartfelt conversations you two had about your dreams of becoming successful writers, and she's distraught about the current state of publishing--especially the influence of Amazon and the hordes of "hacks and talent-less [sic] crack-pots" who self-publish their "trash novels" via KDP.

Not to worry: Monica has had a brainstorm!

What if you could vault yourself out of the "soul-sucking" "chaos" of Amazon and get instant credibility by co-writing a novel with a New York Times bestselling author? Wouldn't that be awesome???

Amazingly (or maybe not), Monica can offer just such an opportunity! A "long-reigning #1 New York Times Bestseller stemming back to the early 1980s" is looking to start a "James Patterson kind of writing 'empire'" that would release multiple co-written books a year. And you--yes, YOU!!!--could be one of those co-writers!

Of course, Monica can't tell you just who this bestselling author is. It's top secret! If you want to proceed, you even have to sign an NDA! But there's a very special video, just for you (it even has your name in the URL), and if you watch it, All Will Be Revealed. But hurry! There's only one more slot left to fill! If you don't click RIGHT AWAY, you'll miss the boat!

(Here's an earlier version of the solicitation, which pairs the co-authoring pitch with the shilling of Main's Living the Writer's Dream pamphlet--just $10!)

So who is Monica Main? According to her official website, she's "a serial entrepreneur with over 25 years of real-world experience in all types of businesses and investments." While there's nothing to suggest she has ever worked in publishing, she does claim to be "a Best-Selling Author in THREE Categories!" on Amazon (where you can be a bestseller with only a handful of sales if the category is obscure enough). She also runs several get-rich-quick-style satellite sites, retreats, and super-sekrit workshops. Whatever her actual credentials, she clearly has a doctorate in flim-flam.

If you're bowled over by Monica's snail mail letter pitch (or just curious about where the whole thing might go, like me), and type the personalized link on page 2 into your browser, you wind up here, with Monica and a video pitch. I watched so you don't have to: it basically reiterates everything in the letter, and concludes by inviting you to click on the link below the video.

That link lands you at a second video, in which some dude named Robert "The Blade" Robinson--a "professional brand spokesman" who appears to have been hired for the purpose--makes the pitch yet again, and also details what happens next. Step 1: you sign an online NDA (conveniently present below the video). Step 2: you submit a writing sample. Step 3: All Will Be Revealed!

How could I resist? Using one of my burner names and emails, I signed the NDA, which took me to the writing sample page. To the accompaniment of yet another video (a woman claiming to be one of the chosen co-authors, though naturally she can't provide her name or the title of her book) I pasted in 500 words from one of my own novels, and clicked "Submit". That whisked me to a fourth video, in which, at the end of a long spiel about the fabulousness of this "incredibly rare" opportunity, "The Blade" closes the circle by inviting me to set up my "strategy session" with Monica Main.

He also provides the big reveal. The famous #1 New York Times Bestselling Author is Judith McNaught.

I have to admit I was surprised--not just because there actually was a reveal (I was expecting more obfuscation, or possibly a demand for money in order to get the secret info), but because Judith McNaught is exactly what Monica Main and her video pitchman claim: a famous, bestselling romance author who has written a lot of books and has a devoted fan base. Definitely not what I expected. Also, in the fourth video "The Blade" goes into some detail about the writing and collaboration process, which--again to my surprise--sounded fairly credible, or at least comparable to how legitimate co-writing arrangements really work.

Looking closer, though (and you know I always do), some oddities appear. 77-year-old McNaught hasn't published anything since 2005. Her website is badly outdated, as is her Facebook page, where the last post was written in 2018. That's the same year a new McNaught novel, The Sweetest Thing, was announced, but the book has yet to appear (on Amazon, it's listed as publishing in 2045; even so, fans are still pre-ordering it). Worried fans are wondering why, and asking where in the world is Judith McNaught?

Oddest of all: I could not find a single word about this co-authoring venture from McNaught herself or any official McNaught representative.

It certainly seems plausible that a highly successful writer might want to set up a co-authoring franchise like James Patterson's. But wouldn't it make sense to handle this through their publisher or agent or business manager? Wouldn't they announce it? Why outsource such an important endeavor to someone like Monica Main, of whom the most charitable thing that can be said is that she is not someone with substantial publishing industry experience? Why the whole top secret schtick, the multiple layers of reveal, the absurd NDA? This is definitely not how things work with legitimate publishing projects.

What's really going on here?

Being the cynical person that I am, I initially assumed the entire scheme was a figment, a take-the-money-and-run play of some sort (which of course may still turn out to be the case). But the "disclosing party" in the NDA writers have to sign to proceed into the scheme is LWD International Inc., a publishing company incorporated in April 2020, of which Monica Main is, basically, a one-woman band: CEO, Secretary, CFO, and Director.

LWD International has filed several recent trademark applications, including two using the name of Judith McNaught: one for a mark, the other for "the category of downloadable series of fiction books". Both of the McNaught applications were submitted in May and July 2020 (note how close those dates are to LWD's incorporation), and both were registered in May 2021.

The M.S. Main registration application, submitted in June 2021, is for "categories of series of fiction works, namely, novels and books". It's still pending.

So it looks like Monica Main is planning to become a publisher, and the McNaught co-authoring thing is a real endeavor of some sort (though the trademark description indicates that the books will be ebooks, rather than glossy hardcovers adorning bookstore shelves, as the pitch videos encourage writers to assume).

The question remains, though: why would someone like McNaught put her publishing franchise in the hands of someone like Monica Main?

I will go far for Writer Beware, but not so far as to subject myself to a 45-minute phone conversation with Ms. Main. So don't know the answer, at least not yet. But I will keep digging. McNaught's last-published book, Every Breath You Take, was repped by Suzanne Gluck at William Morris; I've reached out with a question, and will report back if I get a response.

UPDATE: So, wow. It gets darker. Monica Main has a rap sheet.

A reader directed me to this 2007 article, which describes a Federal prosecution against Main and her husband for fraud. According to the article, more than 1,200 people signed up for a trading system sold by the Mains, and lost a total of $3 million. I looked the case up on PACER: the court ordered the Mains to pay a $9 million penalty plus the $3 million customers lost, and permanently enjoined them from engaging in any commodity or options trading.

That's not all.

The couple operated the fraud, which involved a bogus software program called Trade Pro and “boot camp” training seminars, from 2001 to 2005, according to the CFTC. Despite Monica Main’s false claims to clients that she was a millionaire, she actually lost money with the small amounts she traded, and she went bankrupt in 2003, according to court records.

Under the Commodity Exchange Act, the Mains should have informed customers about Monica Main’s bankruptcy and her felony conviction....

Fearing a loss of business, the couple failed to inform clients that Monica Main had been convicted of felony mail and wire fraud in connection with an advance-fee loan scam, according to court records.

The name cited in the article--Monica Schiera Main--is different from the name she's using for the Judith McNaught solicitation, but in this 2019 interview, which includes a photo, her bio admits to "a short stint in federal prison, a personal bankruptcy, and a devastating two-year civil lawsuit with the government".

Monica Main and her company, Success for Life, Inc., were also sued by InfoUp, LLC for allegedly infringing its intellectual property to promote her own book.

InfoUp won a default judgment in March 2021, granting it a permanent injunction, statutory damages, and attorneys' fees.

I have to give a shout-out to Bryan Young @swankmotron, who encountered Monica Main last April and, in a long Twitter thread, unpacked her unsavory past.

UPDATE 9/9/21: I'm digging deeper into the "Judith McNaught" trademark applications, and what I'm finding is...interesting.

The initial trademark application, made by Monica Main's company, LWD International Inc., on July 13, 2020, was refused on August 24, 2020 because "applicant submitted what appears to be an advertising display of book covers, and not the actual series of books applicant provides. Moreover, there is insufficient context to ascertain whether the goods depicted in the specimen are in fact a downloadable series of books".

Here are the referenced book covers, which incorporate the applied-for trademark, but otherwise look like they were purchased from a pre-made cover service. Also, one may not be able to judge a book by its cover...but the kinds of stories suggested by the titles and art don't exactly seem like a seamless fit with McNaught's previous work.

Responding to the application refusal, LWD's lawyer produced a new series of images that appear to show the books for sale online. Here's one of them.

If you click on the image to enlarge it, you'll see a URL at the bottom: www.judithmcnaught.net. This is not the URL of McNaught's official website. It leads here:

Pretty cheesy, am I right? The three books do appear to be orderable from the website--but not from anywhere else; they aren't present on Amazon or any other retailer that I could discover. Also, see that smiley photo, which visitors will surely assume is McNaught herself? It's a stock image.

(UPDATE: Sometime in October or early November--i.e., after I published this blog post--www.judithmcnaught.net was set to re-direct to www.judithmcnaught.com, McNaught's official website, which does not include any mention of the three new books. The .net site survives on the Wayback Machine.)

But wait, there's more. If you look at the top of the "Reign" image above, you'll see, in tiny print, "Paris Steel Books". I googled Paris Steel Books, and found this:

Looks an awful lot like the cheesy McNaught website, doesn't it? That's no coincidence. "Paris Steel" is trademarked by Living the Writer's Dream Co., another of Monica Main's companies. The "Steel" trademark application was submitted on June 21, 2020, just a couple of weeks before the "McNaught" one. As for Paris Steel herself, she's not just evasive, but nonexistent: her only web presence is this website, which, in another similarity to the McNaught website, is the only place her books (if they even exist) can be found.

Why would a Paris Steel header appear on the order page of a Judith McNaught book? Well, if your trademark application got refused because you hadn't shown that the books you were touting as proof of your publishing venture were actually for sale anywhere--maybe because you'd registered a domain name but hadn't yet gotten around to building a website--you might hastily paste the covers into the order page of a website you already controlled, as a stopgap measure. I'm guessing that's what happened here. Another indication that the McNaught website has been sloppily adapted from the Steel website: the meta tags on the Judith McNaught order page still point to Paris Steel.

Getting back to the trademark application...the August refusal also required clarification of whether the applied-for mark referenced "a particular living individual", and if so, instructed the applicant to provide "a written consent personally signed by the named individual."

Here's the relevant section of the response by LWD's lawyer.

And here's a screenshot of the written consent. Note the date: four months after the initial trademark application was submitted.

Anyone out there with a signed McNaught book?

On January 15, 2021, the trademark application was refused again, this time because the applied-for mark "identifies only the name or pseudonym of the author of a written work; it does not function as a trademark to identify and distinguish applicant’s goods from those of others and to indicate the source of applicant’s goods."

The response to this new refusal apparently satisfied the USPTO examiners, because the mark was published on March 2, 2021, and registered on May 18, 2021.

Whatever else one might make of all of this, or guess about what's really going on here, it's just very, very sad that the name of such a beloved author has been attached to such a sketchy, tacky, unprofessional venture. Judith McNaught deserves better.

Scam Alert: TransMedia Agency and New Leaf Media LLC

noreply@blogger.com (Victoria Strauss) — Fri, 13 Aug 2021 18:56:00 +0000

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®

A quick warning about a new impersonation scam.

I'm getting reports from writers who've received email solicitations from what appear to be real film companies. Here are a couple of examples:

Note the identical language.

Roth/Kirshenbaum and Bluegrass Films are real enterprises, with real track records. So if the writer--who may be a bit dubious because of the out-of-the-blue contact and the poorly-written text--does a websearch, they'll learn that these companies actually do exist. There are some odd discrepancies: there's no "&" in Roth/Kirshenbaum, and Scott Stuber left Bluegrass for Netflix in 2017. Still, the realness of the companies themselves makes it easier for hopeful writers to dismiss any niggling doubts.

Of course, the whole thing is a bait and switch. The clue is the "trusted literary firm" that can "furnish" the screenplay that the writer undoubtedly doesn't have. After some back and forth, the writer receives this:

"Trusted literary firm" TransMedia Agency*--aka the scammer that's running the whole scheme--has what's essentially a placeholder website, providing just enough web presence to deflect the suspicion that might arise if it had no website, but containing virtually no meaningful content. The ungrammatical text and generic, unverifiable "about us" information are both major warning signs.

The writer also receives a "Screenplay Agreement Form" with a lot of legalistic mumbo jumbo about warranties, security, limitation of liability, blah blah blah. It's all window dressing for this:

So TransMedia is guaranteed to get at least $5,000 even if it never actually delivers the screenplay, and even if the writer smells a rat and doesn't hand over the installment payments. Not a bad payday for sending out a few emails and a fake contract.

As is the case for many scammers, TransMedia's Illinois address is a virtual office. Its LLC is registered in the name of Colin Carroll of 1063 Inverness Drive in Antioch, IL; most likely Mr. Carroll is just a beard, and TransMedia is really operating out of the Philippines. I would also guess that Roth/Kirshenbaum and Bluegrass Films aren't the only real companies that TransMedia is impersonating.

Remember, writers: REPUTABLE FILM COMPANIES DO NOT OPERATE THIS WAY. They don't contact you out of the blue. They don't refer you for paid services. You're safest if you treat ANY unasked-for solicitation as a potential scam.

* Not to be confused with this Transmedia Agency.

UPDATE 9/6/21: TransMedia is also soliciting in the name of Todd Phillips Productions. Much of the language is identical to the two solicitations above; note the addition of some fulsome flattery.

UPDATE 10/26/21: This fake production company solicitation was sent out by New Leaf Media LLC, posing as producer David Ellison. It's word for word identical to the Todd Phillips one above, sent out by TransMedia Agency. The writer was referred back to New Leaf Media to get their screenplay written, to the tune of several thousand dollars.

Scam Alert: Silver Ink Literary Agency / Editors Press and Media / Global Review Press

noreply@blogger.com (Victoria Strauss) — Fri, 06 Aug 2021 18:18:00 +0000

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®

Last week, the Authors Guild sent out this warning:

Writer Beware has been getting complaints about Silver Ink Literary Agency for some time. It's included on our list of more than 100 similar Philippines-based publishing/marketing/fake literary agency scams. (UPDATE 10/28/21: Silver Ink is currently soliciting from a "silverliteraryagency.com" email address.)

The Authors Guild isn't the only group whose name Silver Ink has taken in vain. It has also faked emails from Penguin Random House...

...in order to share an equally fake memorandum about PRH's supposed new submission guidelines...

...in aid of lending false credibility to the editing and other overpriced and substandard services Silver Ink pushes on its victims.

Here's what else Writer Beware has found out. (Note: Silver Ink has changed its website since I published this post, so some of the links below will be to archived pages.)

Interesting parallels exist between Silver Ink and another self-styled publisher/agency, Editors Press and Media, aka Editors Creative Media. There's identical website content (compare the content on their marketing pages), identical (and seriously ungrammatical) language in contracts and other documents, and both have used Heather Allen's name in faked-up emails. (Ms. Allen, who now works for Abrams, has posted an alert on her LinkedIn profile.) I've also had confirmation of the connection from a couple of the snitches who occasionally contact me to blow a whistle or rat out their competitors.

Editor's Press is actually the earlier scam; its business registration was filed in November 2019, while Silver Ink's was filed a year later, in October 2020. Whoever ported Editor's Press content over to Silver Ink's website slipped up in the proofing department:

Like Silver Ink, Editor's Press plays the impersonation game to bamboozle writers into paying for editing. Its chosen target for fakery is HarperCollins:

You can read more about Editor's Press's impersonation scheme here.

Silver Ink has a sibling, Global Review Press. Both are registered to the same individual, Sandra Herrera of Reno, NV.

Global Review is the youngest of the three; its business registration was only filed in April 2021. Again, there's identical content on Global Review's marketing page--including, amazingly, the same uncorrected proofing error noted above:

One person claiming to be the CEO of these ventures is Gary Serdeña, aka Shawn Serdeña, aka Shawn Gatewood. According to his Facebook profile, Shawn (the name he apparently prefers) is from Tacloban City in the Eastern Visayas region of the Philippines, and enjoys posting photos of himself conspicuously consuming the income generated by his author-fleecing companies.

Shawn's personal FB feed includes many references to Editor's Press, such as this pose in front of the Editor's Press logo, and this post from a couple of months ago celebrating a brand-new business location. There's even a first anniversary party video! Ripping off authors is lucrative!

Shawn is not an island: he acknowledges the help of two others in lifting his business into the stratosphere. Here's the text of a recent speech, which he delivered on the second annivarsary of Editor's Press and Media (the event also generated this awesome video). You don't have to read it all--just this snippet:

"He", in context, is God. Editor's Creative Media appears to be the name under which Shawn does business in the Philippines (actually Editor's Creative Media OPC). But who are "BM" and "SH"?

Well, as noted above, Editor's Press and Media was registered in Virginia in 2019 to one Bobby Morrison (Shawn has thanked Morrison by name in at least one other video speech). Approximately a year later, in 2020, Silver Ink filed its Nevada business registration, with Sandra Herrera designated as registered agent (she is also the registered agent for Global Review Press). Under the circumstances, it's not a huge stretch to guess that the "SH" Shawn thanks so fulsomely is Sandra Herrera.

I confess I don't understand the exact nature of the relationship between Shawn and BM/SH. Are they donors? Investors? Beachheads for US operations? Just figureheads? Regardless, it's pretty clear that both BM and SH, whoever they are, are key components of Shawn's business empire.

(In a letter from her attorney, Sandra Herrera claimed to be the sole owner of Silver Ink and Global Review.)

(UPDATE: Scammers like Shawn are among my most faithful followers. Shortly after I published this, Shawn deleted all the posts and video I initially linked to in this article [lucky I have backups!]. He also appears to have deleted the original Facebook page for Editor's Press and Media [unfortunately not archived by the Wayback Machine], and created a new one [currently with almost no content]. Additionally, he has changed his name on Facebook and Instagram: he's now going by Denzel Agaton, and claiming to live in California [a claim somewhat contradicted by his many posts and check-ins referencing Cebu]. The URLs of his FB and Insta presence memorialize his real name, however, and you can still see him posing in front of the Editors Press and Media logo.)

Shawn is an interesting example of how these publishing/marketing/fake agency scams evolve and spawn. He has posted photos of various awards he has won; in addition to documenting the several names he uses, they show that he worked for Author Solutions (the progenitor of the scam phenomenon of which Silver Ink and its siblings are a part) and then for Innocentrix--the name under which scammer Page Turner Press and Media does business in the Philippines--before starting Editor's Press in 2019.

Shawn can also be found on Instagram. He has two TikTok accounts.

Silver Ink is the subject of complaints at the Better Business Bureau. More complaints have also popped up on PissedConsumer.com.

Editor's Press has a C- BBB rating, due to one unanswered complaint; it has also acquired a number of complaints on its Bizapedia listing. No online complaints currently exist for Global Review...likely because it's new enough that they haven't yet started stacking up.

Last but not least...I know I'm a bit of a broken record here. But the number one way to protect yourself against scammers like Silver Ink is to assume that ANY out-of-the-blue solicitation is a scam.

Sound extreme? It's not. Reputable publishers and literary agents rarely reach out to authors directly. For scammers, on the other hand, it's their primary recruitment method. With Silver Ink and the more than 100 outfits like it aggressively trolling for victims, you are safest if you treat all solicitations as non-legit, at least until you've investigated (you can search this blog, or email me).

Mistrust, and verify.

UPDATE 9/21/21: Somewhere a tiny violin is playing.

UPDATE 10/12/21: Gee, the name change didn't last long. On his Facebook page, Shawn is Shawn again, sharing inspirational thoughts and evidence of conspicuous consumption.

UPDATE 10/29/21: The impersonation game revolving around Silver Ink Literary Agency is alive and well. Check out this bogus "letter of intent", supposedly from Penguin Random House (bonus bogosity: the "certified true copy" stamp at the bottom). The carrot: a supposed $30,000 "initial author royalty". The stick: in the contract attached to the letter, the author was required to pay a $2,000 "rights and licenses" fee (there's no such thing).

(In a letter from her attorney, Ms. Herrera denied that the Letter of Intent was sent by Silver Ink. She provided no information on who she believed did send it, stating only that its origin was "unclear". You'd think, if someone out there were sending out fake letters with your business name on them, you'd be a bit more more concerned. But that's just me.)

UPDATE 12/1/21: Silver Ink has updated its website. Among other things, it has re-worded some of the text on its Advertising Services page so that it's not quite so obviously a carbon copy of the text on the equivalent pages of the Editor's Press and Media and Global Review Press websites...and also to correct the embarrassing proofing error noted above (which as of this writing still survives on the Global Review Press website).

An Important Message for Writer Beware Email Subscribers

noreply@blogger.com (Victoria Strauss) — Tue, 03 Aug 2021 16:19:00 +0000

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®

As of mid-August, the service that handles Writer Beware email subscriptions and RSS feeds, Feedburner, is terminating its email service.

Blogger, the platform I've been using for the blog, is very limited in functionality, and there doesn't seem to be any alternative to Feedburner that will work with Blogger and won't cost me an arm and a leg.

I'm working on a solution--as well as an overhaul and facelift for the Writer Beware blog. But this will take several weeks, and that unfortunately means you'll stop receiving Writer Beware emails sometime this month. Rest assured, however: a fix is underway and it's only a temporary interruption.

There won't be any interruption to the blog itself: I will continue posting all the latest news about the schemes, scams, and pitfalls that infest the writing and publishing worlds.

Feedburner has disabled new subscription signups, so if you're not on the email list and would like to be added, please contact me. If you're already a subscriber, you don't need to do anything: you'll be automatically opted in to our new subscription service (whatever that turns out to be).

In the meantime, our RSS feed still works, and you can always visit us on the web.

Any questions, please let me know, and thank you so much for your support!

How Bad Contest Entry Rules Can be Mitigated: The Medium Writer's Challenge

noreply@blogger.com (Victoria Strauss) — Fri, 30 Jul 2021 16:59:00 +0000

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®

That's right, boys and girls--it's another of my posts about hinky contest rules.

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you'll know I publish a lot of these. That's not because I like repeating myself...it's because bad contest legalese is depressingly common, especially in contests conducted by high-profile organizations or individuals, such as HBO's "Lovecraft Country" short story contest, or T.A. Barron's Once Upon a Villain flash fiction contest, or the Sunday Times/Audible Short story award, or any number of others. Because it's so common, though, it never hurts to put out another warning....especially when a contest offers the kind of prize money that's sure to attract droves of writers.

In a twist, though, I'm not just going to talk about greedy legalese, but also about how one contest sponsor responded to criticism and made it better.

The Medium Writers Challenge is an especially rich contest, with a $50,000 grand prize, $10,000 for four finalists (one of the finalists will be the grand prize winner, so one person will actually win $60,000), and 100 honorable mentions who will each receive $100.

To enter, writers choose a prompt, create an essay of 500 words or more, and publish it on Medium. A prestigious slate of judges that includes such luminaries as Roxane Gay and Natalie Portman will select four finalists, one for each prompt, and then choose the grand prize winner and the honorable mentions. The deadline to enter is August 24, 2021.

Moving on to the fine print, namely this paragraph of the official rules:

I got several emails and some social media pings about this paragraph yesterday. The concern was with the license writers grant simply by entering the contest, the wording of which gives Medium "an irrevocable, royalty-free, worldwide, nonexclusive, sublicensable, assignable" license to do pretty much anything it wants with any entry, whether or not it's a winning entry.

This kind of language is extremely common, especially, as I've mentioned, in high-profile contests. The intent isn't so much a nefarious scheme to steal writers' rights or bind them to eternal servitude, as it is a shortcut for contest sponsors, who don't have to fuss around with contracts for winners because they've already agreed to terms. It's very easy to mitigate such language--for instance, by releasing non-winning entrants from the license once the winners are declared--but, carelessly or lazily or just sharkily, depending on how many lawyers formulated the rules, many contest sponsors don't bother, even though it means that they retain rights they likely have no interest in and no intention of ever using.

In Medium's case, though, they did take steps to mitigate. Note the second line of the paragraph, which limits the license to one year from the end of the contest period (presumably that's the August 24 deadline). In other words, this is not the perpetual license that some other contests demand: it has an endpoint, after which it expires.

Here's the interesting thing, though. Paragraph 10 didn't always read the way it does now. This is the original version, the one that got people upset:

Note the difference: there's no limit on the grant period. In this version of the contest rules, the license really is perpetual.

Writers asked questions and spoke out on social media. To its credit, Medium took notice.

(1/3) We’re seeing some questions around the rules to the #MediumWritersChallenge. We’ve updated the language to clarify our intent: 🧵

➡️ You own the copyright to your work, as with all work on Mediumhttps://t.co/30w6ZJMHYi https://t.co/7XR4KU8JBT
— Medium (@Medium) July 29, 2021

(2/3)

➡️ You are granting us non-exclusive rights, which means you can monetize your writing however you want, after the contest ends. Keep in mind the story can only appear on Medium during the contest period https://t.co/30w6ZJMHYi
— Medium (@Medium) July 29, 2021

(3/3)
➡️ We’ve replaced the perpetual license with a one year license

Our license is limited to promoting the content on Medium and across Medium channels [link]https://t.co/30w6ZJMHYi
— Medium (@Medium) July 29, 2021

This is what can result when an organization re-thinks pointless legalese. I wish that happened more often.

Don't get me wrong. Medium's license language is still excessive, in my opinion, because there really is no reason for them to retain non-winners' rights once the winners are declared. Still, a year is better than forever.

Entrants also need to consider what they're granting if they do win. There's a lot of potential uses Medium can make of their work (it isn't clear to me that the license language limits Medium's use of entries in the way the third tweet claims), including creating derivative works and "incorporat[ing] the Submission, in whole or in part, into other works." $10,000 is a decent payday for that kind of grant. But is $100?

As always, read--and make sure you understand--the fine print.

Bad Contract Alert: ByteDance's Fizzo (Fictum) Reading/Writing App

noreply@blogger.com (Victoria Strauss) — Fri, 23 Jul 2021 17:49:00 +0000

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®

Over the past year, I've gotten a flood of questions and complaints from writers who've been approached by reading/writing platforms or apps based in Hong Kong or Singapore.

There's a growing number of these platforms, and they are aggressively soliciting for content, including on established platforms like Wattpad. While most of the solicitations target writers directly, agents are receiving approaches as well.

Some platforms appear professional, with contracts that are fairly reasonable and straightforward. Others...not so much. Last October, I wrote about the terrible contracts offered by A&D Entertainment and EMP Entertainment, two companies that are deputized to recruit for Webnovel.

A new player in the reading/writing app field is Fictum (domain registered just this past November). Available on Apple and Google Play, it's owned by ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, and is currently recruiting writers with existing published books, as well as writers willing to produce 200,000 words or more of new material for its Long English Story Project. (UPDATE: Since I published this post, Fictum has re-branded as Fizzo. I've changed all references going forward.)

For new material, Fizzo offers both exclusive and non-exclusive contracts, with different levels of financial remuneration that are rather confusingly described here. You must first publish 30,000 words in order to apply for a contract; once you're contracted, you must fulfill punishing word counts and maintain a grueling schedule in order to earn. For the exclusive contract, for instance, you must publish at least 1,000 words a day in order to receive a "daily update bonus" of $200 per month. More words equal more cash: if you can bang out 100,000 words a month, you get $400. Time is money, though: you can't take more than four days off in a single month, and if you fail to produce for more than four days in a row at any time, you forfeit payment.

I've seen one Fizzo contract, offered for an existing published book. You can view it here. To put it mildly, there are issues of concern.

- The Grant of Rights is non-exclusive and time-limited--but it is also irrevocable. In other words, you aren't stuck forever--but you have no right to cancel.

There was originally a clause allowing the author to terminate for cause, but in the contract I saw, that clause had been blacked out. The deletion wasn't as effective as someone thought, though, because when I converted the contract to PDF, the excised words showed up:

This isn't much better than saying "no, you can never cancel". You'd have to wait a year, and you could only invoke the clause if not a single person had accessed your work in all that time (which might be hard to show, given that Fizzo doesn't have to tell you how your work is performing--see below). Talk about crafting an option so that it practically never happens! Plus, if even if you were unfortunate enough to fulfill the requirements, you'd still be screwed, because you'd have to give money back to Fizzo:

Let me know if you can make sense of that formula.

- You must waive your moral rights. Moral rights include the right of attribution (the right to be identified as the author) and the right of integrity (the right to protect your work from changes that would be prejudicial to the work or to you). If you waive your moral rights, you surrender both. Among other things, this means that your work could be published without your name, or under someone else's name.

Moral rights aren't really recognized in the USA, but they are important in other countries, and the Fizzo app is distributed in multiple nations across the world.

- The initial 2-year term auto-renews (at the publisher's discretion; the author doesn't have a say), but the language isn't clear.

Does this mean auto-renewal for a single 1-year period? Or for successive one-year periods? It's not clear. This is the kind of thing that really needs to be unambiguous.

- There's no fixed payment schedule, payment terms are opaque, and Fizzo doesn't have to give you performance data.

The payment scheme detailed in the contract is different from what's described on the Fizzo website, likely because this contract was offered for a finished book rather than for a serial work not yet written. Collectively called a License Fee, payment consists of a "fixed royalty" (equivalent to an advance); a "contingent royalty" (a KDP Select-style payment based on reading metrics), and a performance-based bonus granted "from time to time".

The fixed royalty (based on word count--around $600 for the book this contract was offered for) is payable 20 days after contract signing or manuscript acceptance, whichever is later. It must be recouped by contingent royalties; once it is, those royalties become payable.

So far, so good. However, the formula for calculating contingent royalties is not exactly transparent:

Nowhere is it explained what's meant by "effective reading time", or "unit rate", or how either one is calculated, except to say that it's at the publisher's discretion. Nowhere is there a payment schedule to indicate when and how often contingent royalties are paid once the advance is recouped, other than to vaguely promise, further on in the contract, "commercially reasonable efforts to inform Author...in [Fizzo's] discretion from time to time." (Might this suggest that Fizzo doesn't expect it will have to regularly pay out contingent royalties?)

Equally concerning: nowhere is there any language requiring Fizzo to share performance data, such as how many readers have accessed your work.

Bottom line: beyond the advance, you have absolutely no idea what financial remuneration you might receive, and no guarantee that you'll get any insight into how your work performs on the Fizzo app.

- The grant term is time-limited, but Fizzo's right to use and exploit your work is not. There are two areas where this applies. First, even after the contract ends, your work will continue to be hosted on Fizzo's servers in order to service customers who've downloaded it, which they do on a "perpetual" basis. (This is a common feature of such apps and platforms; it's not so much a "beware" as it is a "be aware".)

Second, Fizzo claims copyright on derivative works created by it in connection with its exploitation of your rights as granted in the contract, and can continue to exploit these derivative works "perpetually". So what exactly is meant by derivative works? The contract doesn't really say.

A previous clause discusses derivative works in the context of promotion, such as creating short video clips based on a work's characters or setting. Other than this, though, "derivative works" is not defined, and the word "including" in the final sentence of the clause above suggests that such works may not be limited to promotional materials.

- Anything you write during the term of the contract is subject to first refusal by Fizzo. Not just work related to the contracted work: anything.

This is an onerous requirement.

- And finally, language like this is never an encouraging sign:

There's a lot of competition out there in the reading app sphere, with dozens of companies vying for content. Most have little or no name recognition. That's not true of ByteDance, which likely gives it a substantial recruitment advantage.

That's unfortunate, not just because of the unfavorable contract terms discussed above, but because the writers being approached by the apps, many of whom are teenagers or college students, are among the most naive and least savvy I've ever encountered (at least, judging by the many questions and panicked "I signed up without reading the contract, how can I get free" pleas I'm receiving). Considering how long I've been doing the Writer Beware thing, that is saying something.

UPDATE 12/23/21: I've just seen another non-exclusive contract from Fizzo (this one follows its re-brand with the new name).

It still includes most of the problems I've identified above, and remains significantly author-unfriendly. But there are some changes, which I've outlined below. A couple of these are improvements. Most...are not.

This contract too was for a completed work.

- The contract term has been extended. ;It's now 5 years instead of 2, with the same ambiguous renewal language.

- There is still no right of author termination.

- Provisions have been added for termination by Fizzo. There's now a 7-day "termination period" during which Fizzo can continue to exploit all granted rights...but does not have to pay for such exploitation. And if termination is due to breach by the author, Fizzo "is entitled to demand a refund of paid License Fee." (Financially penalizing authors for contract termination is a common feature of reading app contracts.)

- The payment provisions--collectively known as the License Fee--have been re-worked. There's no Fixed Royalty. Instead, there are two new categories: "Gratis Basis" (the work is free to read on Fizzo's distribution platforms) and "Non-Gratis Basis" (the work is pay-per-view or something equivalent).

For Gratis Basis, payment is the same confusing Contingent Royalty discussed above. For Non-Gratis basis, payment is 40% of Net Receipts--but Net Receipts in this instance actually means net profits, because there is a menu of deductions:

That's...a big list. Your work would have to be generating a pretty big chunk of change on a regular basis for any revenue to survive all those deductions.

It's rare to see such detail in a net profit royalty contract, and sheds light on why net profit royalties are great for publishers but lousy for authors.

- The Option clause discussed above, which obliged writers to give Fizzo first refusal on any additional works created during the agreement term, has been removed.

- A payment schedule has been added. Payment is now said to be "no later than the last day of the calendar month that is subsequent to the month during which the License Fee becomes payable or is accrued." Fizzo still doesn't have to give you performance data, though.

- A gag clause has been added. It's buried in the Promotional Activities section, and forbids the author to "in any way denigrate or derogate Publisher, its affiliates, assigns and successors, and any of its and their officers, directors, employees, agents and advisors, or any product or service or procedure of any such person". The applies "whether or not such denigrating or derogatory statements shall be true". This covers a very large amount of ground, and could significantly affect authors' ability to speak truthfully about their experiences.

Alert: Scammers Impersonating Major Motion Picture Studios

noreply@blogger.com (Victoria Strauss) — Fri, 02 Jul 2021 17:40:00 +0000

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®

I've written a number of posts about scammers impersonating literary agents and publishers. Writers should be aware that they're also impersonating major motion picture studios.

Here's one example, from a scam that does business under at least four names: Orions Media Agency, Fox Media Studios Agency, Silver Fox Media (note the way these scam names reference real companies), and PageTurner Press and Media. Despite their apparent US addresses and phone numbers, all are based in the Philippines (you can read more about the huge proliferation of overseas scammers here). (UPDATE: The scammers have added a new name: Experttell, aka Experttell Media.)

This is the initial pitch--which arrives, as always with this type of scam, out of the blue:

This is not the way things work: literary agents aren't "assigned" to represent you without your knowledge, and major film studios don't randomly stumble on books and reach out to agencies you never heard of, which then cold-call you. In fact, real agents only very rarely reach out to writers directly. For scammers, on the other hand, it's their main recruitment method.

Any out-of-the-blue solicitation or offer should be treated with suspicion.

If the writer bites, they receive this.

Note Allison's email address, which doesn't match Universal's email address protocol. It's always a good idea to search on this, and also on the email address itself; you can discover interesting things, such as that the universalpicturesacquisition.com domain was only registered this past March--not very plausible, given Universal Pictures' long history. In another revealing discrepancy, Allison Gray is a real person...but she works for Paramount.

"Allison" doesn't mention money. This is strategic: as any scammer knows, it's harder to say no when an offer is (purportedly) on the table. And money is definitely involved. The writer who responds with excitement to this INCREDIBLE OFFER learns that the "cinematic trailer" will cost them $3,500 (a cost the scammer may promise to share), and the "relicensing" of the book (there's no such thing) requires a further $1,099.

I shouldn't need to say--again--that this is not how things work. If a film studio is interested in your work, they will pay you, not the other way around. Plus, the demand for your driver's license and passport suggests that it's not just your cash that will be stolen.

Here is the promised "pre-production agreement" (this time from another dba of this scam, Fox Media Studios Agency). "David Benson" does not appear to be an employee of Universal--or any film company. Allison Gray is cc'd, though at a different, and equally bogus, email address. Note also the identical scary pseudo-legal language at the bottom, which is likely intended to discourage writers from contacting people like me:

The money grab in this one is for the "Director's professional fee" as well as the supposed permits and clearances, which no doubt amount to several thousand dollars. Keep in mind that the writer has already paid nearly $5,000 for a (likely crappy) book trailer and the mythical book re-licensing.

Yet again, this is not how the industry works. Authors are never asked to bankroll their own films (at least, they're never asked to do so by reputable film companies). To the contrary: if a film of your book has been greenlighted, you will previously have received a considerable sum of money.

A final word. It's every writer's dream to have their book made into a movie. But the hard truth is that this is among the rarest of all outcomes of publishing a book. The vast majority of books--even very successful ones--never sell or option film rights. Where they do, it's via real, reputable agents or entertainment lawyers with track records that can be verified--not unknown parties who contact you out of the blue.

Remember: solicitation is the number one sign of a scam. And there are more scams aggressively soliciting authors than ever. Be careful out there.

UPDATE 8/7/21: The scam is also soliciting as Netflix. Some of the language in the solicitation below is identical to that of the first fake Universal email above; note also the identical scary disclaimer in italics, and the fact that, although this came to the author as a direct solicitation and not through the filter of a fake agency, the scammers were too careless, or too lazy, to remove the references to "your agency".

As they often do, the scammers are using the name of a real person--except she's an actress, not a Netflix executive.

UPDATE 9/2/21: The scammers have added a new name: Experttell (aka Experttell Media), which is sending out email "offers" from Warner Bros. that are identical to the emails above.

UPDATE 11/25/21: The Orions Media Agency website is dead, and writers are reporting that their emails go unanswered. I'm guessing that the abandonment of this particular business name had something to do with its D+ BBB rating, as well as the proliferation of online complaints.

Other names associated with this scam--Page Turner Press and Media, Fox Media Studios Agency, Silver Fox Media, and Experttell--are still alive and well.

Eli Bear Company, Star Alley Press: Two Writer Beware All-Stars Return With New Ventures

noreply@blogger.com (Victoria Strauss) — Fri, 25 Jun 2021 16:35:00 +0000

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®

Among the interesting phenomena of the universe of failed and dodgy people in and around writing and publishing (at least, interesting to me) is how often they just can't quit it.

Agents outed for scammery start new agencies under new names. Ditto for disgraced publishers. This is one of several reasons why it's so important to know who owns and works for publishers and agencies, and why it's problematic if that information isn't present on company websites.

Here are two individuals previously covered on this blog who appear to be attempting a comeback.

WID BASTIAN

Formerly: Genius Media

Now: Eli Bear Company

Wid Bastian, aka Widstoe T. Bastian, was the founder of Genius Media, which--among other activities--recruited writers to participate in various themed box sets. In exchange for a buy-in of $750, writers were promised placement on the USA Today bestseller list plus a pro-rated share of sales income, the bulk of which was to go to charity.

But it was all a bait-and-switch. Via creative accounting, the projects were made to show a loss--so there were no donations and no royalties, and the only person who received any money was Bastian himself. This was not out of character: Bastian, it turned out, was a convicted felon, with a long history of embezzlement, money laundering, and bankruptcy fraud.

You can read my December 2019 writeup of all of this here.

Fast forward to today. Thanks to a tip from an alert Writer Beware reader, I learned that Bastian has started a new writing-focused business: Eli Bear Company, which provides copywriting and content writing (examples of its stylings can be seen here). Bastian lives in Utah, but it's no accident the business is incorporated in Wyoming.

The company was initially incorporated in November 2019--just before the sh*t with the box sets hit the fan--as Genius Publishing Inc. (note the similarity to Genius Media, Bastian's box set promo company), and switched to its current name in March 2020. The Eli Bear domain name was registered shortly thereafter, in May 2020.

It's interesting timing, given that Bastian filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in January 2020...

...and received a bankruptcy discharge in May 2020, releasing him from personal liability for most of his debts. Creditors included a number of box set participants.

Bastian is nothing if not a multi-tasker: in addition to the writing-focused Eli Bear Company, there's the real estate management Eli Bear Company, which promises to buy your crappy house for cash and solve all your annoying landlord problems.

Not surprisingly, Bastian's name doesn't appear anywhere on any of these websites. There is, however, a bear.

MYRA FIACCO

Formerly: Filles Vertes Publishing

Now: Star Alley Press

Myra Fiacco started Filles Vertes Publishing in 2016 or 2017. As is often the case with small press founders, she didn't have an abundance of relevant professional experience.

FVP managed to publish just 18 books over the course of four years, with big, irregular gaps between pub dates. While you don't want a small press to bang out books willy-nilly, author mill-style, a slow and irregular publishing schedule can also be a warning sign. And indeed there was trouble at FVP, as the author complaints I began to receive in 2020 indicated: non-payment of royalties (of long standing), multiple missed pub dates and deadlines, poor communication, contract breaches, and more.

Authors began demanding their rights back (for several, Fiacco attempted to impose onerous liability releases and confidentiality terms). FVP staff departed en masse (some were asked to sign multi-page NDAs). I unpacked the whole saga in this blog post in August 2020. Less than three weeks after my post went live, FVP closed for good.

Fiacco wasn't done, though. As I recently learned via a tip from another Writer Beware reader, she has started a new publishing venture called Star Alley Press. Star Alley's focus is "Hollywood, film, TV, stage, and other performing arts", and its business plan is unusual:

Fiacco's name doesn't show up on Star Alley's website, domain registration, LinkedIn page, or the press release for the single forthcoming book (and there's no reference to Star Alley on Fiacco's own LinkedIn page). But Star Alley's business registration tells the tale:

Worth noting: Star Alley was incorporated just a month after FVP closed down--allegedly without paying staff or authors the salaries or royalties they were owed. Star Alley's current book offering was originally contracted to FVP; according to former staffers, work had already started on it when FVP folded.

Author Complaints at City Limits Publishing

noreply@blogger.com (Victoria Strauss) — Fri, 11 Jun 2021 17:00:00 +0000

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®

I first heard of City Limits Publishing (CLP) in September 2020, via a question about author-unfriendly guidelines in a contest it was running (simply by entering, writers granted "a worldwide royalty-free perpetual license to publish"). At the time, CLP had published just eight books, all by the same two authors (you can take a peek at that version of its website courtesy of the Internet Archive), and was calling for submissions.

To me, CLP looked like a self-publishing endeavor that was trying to expand into traditional publishing. This doesn't always work out well, since not all self-publishers have a solid knowledge of publishing (or, necessarily, any business experience) and may unintentionally disadvantage writers with nonstandard business practices, or author-unfriendly contracts, or both. And indeed, CLP's original contract had some problems. It included a transfer of copyright, a major red flag in a non-work-for-hire contract...

...that was directly contradicted by a clause stipulating the printing of copyright notices in the author's name (not the publisher's, as would normally be the case with a copyright transfer), as well as an extremely generous termination clause allowing authors to cancel their contracts post-publication at will for any reason. This kind of internal contradiction is something I see not infrequently in small press contracts, and is a red flag all on its own: it suggests that the publisher has a less than perfect understanding of its own contract terms.

CLP appears to have recognized this at some point, because the copyright grab disappeared from its contracts in September or October 2020 (the generous termination provision remains). CLP's catalog has ballooned to over 40 titles, including those original eight, and it has big ambitions for 2021, with plans to publish more than 50 books in total. That's a very large list for a small press--something that can (and often does) lead to trouble if staff and resources aren't adequate to handle the load.

CLP's online presence appears professional, from covers to web design--but on a closer look, there are some oddities. As of this writing, all four books shown on CLP's homepage as "coming soon" appear to have missed their original pub dates by weeks or months. (See my Update, below.) (NOTE: CLP's website is no longer functional, and there's no archive of the version that was current when I wrote this post, but an older version can be seen here, courtesy of the Wayback Machine.)

Google Books shows pub dates for three of these books in June and July (the fourth, Love is Not Tourism, doesn't show up anywhere)--but as of this writing, only one of the titles has an Amazon listing.

Multiple other books appear to show a May 5 pub date on CLP's website but are still listed for pre-order (you can see examples here and here). Again, these titles can be found on Google Books with upcoming June and July pub dates (examples here and here), but have no Amazon listings--including this one, which Google Books says was supposed to publish on June 10:

(UPDATE: Robert Martin, CLP's owner, contacted me after this post went live to say that CLP has "never moved or delayed a publishing date. Ever." The dates on the CLP website listings, he says, are actually "pre-sale" dates [I assume this is the date the book goes live for pre-orders]; the reason they're labeled "publish" dates is because "[t]he Shopify theme we purchased automatically uses the date we put the product into our online store as the Publish date." CLP's web developer is apparently working to change this.

When I asked why, if the books are available for pre-order on the CLP website, they aren't also available on Amazon and other retailers, he told me "As for why they aren’t all on retail sites yet, we put them up as we are able and as projects come to a close, but I don’t feel like we have to explain ourselves for every little thing we do."

It's worth noting that CLP authors dispute this statement based on their own experiences, and there's also the example of the book pictured above, which as of this writing has clearly missed its pub date.)

Also of concern: the multiple documented complaints I've recently received from CLP authors. These include late royalty payments, missed editing and other deadlines, difficulty getting CLP staff to respond to questions and concerns, free author copies and books ordered at author discount not received or received months late, books ordered by readers not received or received months late, formatting and other errors in finished books that authors struggled to get corrected (for instance, the author's name spelled wrong on the spine), substandard editing and proofing, and copyrights not registered as required in contracts. Some writers reported problems with CLP's heavily hyped online author portal--confusingly named AuthorCentral--which they said suffers from frequent crashes. I also heard from an audiobook narrator who told me that they weren't informed when CLP lost the rights to a book the narrator was in the process of recording, posing payment issues for the narrator, who was working on a royalty-share contract.

Authors also highlighted issues of transparency: being told that copyright registrations had been filed and later discovering they had not been, claims that print runs of thousands of copies were being done when in fact CLP uses on-demand technology to produce books in much smaller batches as ordered. (I've seen supporting documentation on all of this.)

Several authors have taken advantage of CLP's generous termination clause, and canceled their contracts and reverted their rights.

I contacted CLP's founder, Robert Martin, for comment on all of the above. He gave me the following statement, which I have edited to remove mention of an individual author (not by name, but likely recognizable even so).

When I started City Limits Publishing, I committed to full transparency and I’ve tried to provide that from the very beginning. Through our bi-weekly author newsletter to frequent direct updates and notices from me to all of our authors, I’ve kept them appraised of shipping issues related to COVID, updates to our financial systems, implementation of our new author intranet system that would provide them greater access to information and updates, as well as any challenges we’re facing as an organization. And, being a new, small press, there are many. The authors who have stuck with us have been absolutely amazing and their support is inspiring. Together, we’re building something great here. Many of our authors have emailed me thanking me for the transparency they’re getting and have been so encouraging even when receiving direct, unsolicited messages from a handful of authors on a war path.

We're aware of the situation and some of the issues a small group of former authors have brought up. First, with regards to late royalty payments, we were delayed in sending out payments as we both moved to a new system and I had a personal matter that required my attention and took me away from work for a bit. The payments were made up in full with tracking and confirmation of receipt, along with my sincerest apologies, and a promise that our next payout, July 20, would be made in full and on time, with the exception of authors who have entered into final accounting after requesting to be released from their agreements. Their final payments are being made this month as agreed during termination discussions. We're in the process of hiring a Business Manager that will take help ensure we are not late in the future. Our royalty statements were delayed in April as we made the transition to RoyaltyTracker (MetaCommet). Their implementation schedule caused us delays in sending out statements. We made a major investment in this new system so that going forward everything would operate more smoothly. With progress comes growing pains.

With regards to author copies, we have committed to making sure that our authors receive at least half of their author copies in the weeks leading up to their release, and half within 90 days of release. Author copies are a large expense for the company. We're a small business trying to get started during a global pandemic. As for ordering problems, we admit that during our early months we faced many delays, especially with our original printer and our transition to the IngramIgnite program. Still, all orders were fulfilled, and we're now shipping out daily with no delays.

With copyright registration, we did drop the ball on some of our earlier titles. Before we brought on a full team, I was working mostly on my own with operations. I'm human and did make mistakes with copyright registration of some of our earlier titles. Now, we have a system in place to make sure registration happens within 90 days of publication, as outlined in the agreement. And, we have made steps to help educate authors on the copyright registration process. It's not a fast process, so we've made sure to provide information to authors on timelines and how that process works.

Other complaints mentioned: Our early editing process was not as refined as it is now. We were just getting started, and we really learned a lot. We’ve even gone back through older titles for extensive checks and proofing to ensure we’re putting out the highest quality of work. Authors complained about books going to print with errors, but we do require all of our authors to initial the bottom corner of every page of their book before it goes to print. So, respectfully, that’s a shared mistake, and one we’ve worked extremely hard to rectify, now having four sets of eyes on all works published. Additionally, we do still have a contract with ACX and with Audiobook Universe. We were temporarily suspended from ACX for a contract mix-up where exclusive rights were selected when non-exclusive was intended. We removed the book from our website (it had not sold any copies) and our contract was reinstated. With regards to our printing, we originally used an up-front printing method, but were approached by Ingram’s IngramIgnite program (a program specifically for small presses) about using their system. We transitioned to their system, but still process upfront orders of copies of books and fulfill them to bookstores in the US and Canada that are ordered directly from us through our marketing efforts. Additionally, we make sure our wholesale pricing is competitive to get our books listed with as many retailers as possible, and we’ve enjoyed great success with the help of our partners at Ingram.

Are we perfect? Absolutely not. Are we learning from our mistakes and putting in place processes to ensure they don’t happen again? Absolutely.

(I'm not familiar with IngramIgnite; websearches don't turn up any information.)

To his credit, Martin admits mistakes. But fostering an us-and-them mentality (hints of this come through in the statement, and it's clear from my communications with Martin, as well as what CLP authors--both pro and con--have shared with me, that the complaining authors are being badmouthed internally), and blaming writers, if only partially, for mistakes such as poor proofing (authors certainly owe their publisher the duty of checking their proofs, but ultimately it's the publisher's responsibility, and not the author's, to make sure books are error-free), doesn't seem like the most positive way forward.

I did hear from some authors who said they are happy with their CLP experience so far. Though all acknowledge mistakes, they feel these have been addressed to their satisfaction, and that CLP is well-intentioned and "trying to do its best".

Good intentions are all very well. But most of the publishers I've featured on this blog had good intentions, at least to start. Writers need to keep in mind that good intentions--like responsiveness, enthusiasm, praise, and all the other non-publishing-related things that so often entice writers into questionable situations--aren't a substitute for knowledge, experience, qualified (and adequate) staff, and working capital--all of which are far more important factors in a publisher's success. Just as new writers can get into trouble if they set out to get published without taking the time to learn about publishing, inexperienced publishers can run into difficulties if they start up too quickly and attempt to learn on the fly.

In effect, such publishers are using their writers as subjects in a kind of science experiment. Sometimes the experiment succeeds, against odds and errors. Sometimes it doesn't. But while unwary writers' screwups harm only themselves, a publisher's screwups harm its authors. The nature of CLP's problems suggest that lack of experience is at fault, rather than ill-will or deliberate malfeasance. But to the authors who experience these things, there is little difference.

UPDATE 6/21/21: Writer Beware has learned that three senior staff members have recently left City Limits Publishing. So it isn't just authors. I'll post more info as I receive it.

UPDATE 6/25/21: The City Limits website is offline.

UPDATE 7/6/21: Today, CLP authors received emails from Robert Martin announcing that CLP will be closing its doors as of July 21, just over a year after starting up.

For authors whose books were not released, the email serves as notice that their contracts have been voided. For authors whose books were published, the picture is a bit more complicated.

The email also promises that orders of books that haven't been released will be refunded, and orders of books that have been published will be shipped.

Authors and staff who are owed royalties and salaries, please let me know if you receive payment.

A final note: City Limits' story is a common one in the small press world: inexperienced person starts a publisher, tries to learn on the fly, gets in over their head logistically and financially, resorts to obfuscation and deflection to keep things going while staff and authors get ever more dissatisfied, and finally goes out of business (sometimes without any warning or rights reversions; thankfully that does not seem to be happening in this case, but it's early days).

I wish I didn't hear this story so often. But as an object lesson, it points up how important it is for a would-be publisher to have experience--not just publishing experience, but business experience (and even then there are no guarantees)--and also why it's a bad idea to sign on to a new publisher with a limited track record. This is why I advise writers to wait at least a year before submitting to new small presses.

CLP authors and staff, please keep me updated on whether you're receiving payments and rights reversions, either by emailing me or commenting below.

UPDATE 7/20/21: Apparently City Limits isn't the first failed business associated with Robert Martin. Under the name Robert Coles, he co-founded a web design and social media agency in 2013 called Coles & Colomy, which collapsed after a short time under similar allegations of non-payment and misrepresentation.

UPDATE 8/17/21: The City Limits website is gone. On Amazon, CLP books are still for sale, but Kindle listings have been removed, so I'm thinking that this is an effort to sell off print stock (for which royalties should most definitely be due). CLP's Bookshop.org page is still online, but all the books show as "backorders."

In the comments on this post, people are reporting that orders they've placed for CLP books have not been filled. (Surprise!)

Authors, have any of you gotten the second quarter royalty payments that Robert Martin promised to pay out on July 20?

UPDATE 8/18/21: In response to my question yesterday about second quarter royalty payments, I've heard from a number of CLP writers who say they have received precisely nothing. (Again: surprise!) No payments, no statements, no updates or even excuses from Robert Martin--who, writers tell me, is not responding to any attempts at contact and has gone dark on social media.

I've also seen documentation that Robert under-reported sales (by half) in at least one case (confirmed in writing by IngramSpark). In other cases, he over-reported sales (but did not pay the corresponding royalties). It's a puzzling tangle of untruths, but the through-line is that Robert lied, repeatedly, to the authors to whom he had a contractual duty of responsibility and transparency.

It also seems pretty clear at this point that no money will be forthcoming--even though CLP's inventory of physical books is for sale on Amazon (something that will complicate writers' ability to re-publish, even if they regained their rights before CLP shut down, because it puts them in competition with themselves). It's all just disgraceful.

Reports have been made to local law enforcement, but to date I'm not aware that there have been any consequences.

UPDATE 10/25/21: Ex-City Limits author and staffer Peter Fenton has made a video about his experience with the publisher. It really brings into sharp focus the extent of the deception and gaslighting to which Robert Martin subjected everyone in his orbit. Much more than the large sums in royalties and back wages that are still owing, or even the disappointment of sabotaged books, this emotional manipulation is the source of the anger and hurt that CLP authors and staff feel so keenly.

Two Scams to Watch Out For: Writers' Conference Phishing Scheme, Goodreads Extortion Scam

noreply@blogger.com (Victoria Strauss) — Fri, 14 May 2021 17:11:00 +0000

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®

"We are Seeking Qualified Writers and Poets for our Conference"

This is an active, ongoing scam. See the updates below.

Back in January, I heard from a writer who'd received a conference participation solicitation that looked to be a scam.

Although the company named in the solicitation, Crown Castle, was real, it had nothing to do with publishing, and the poor phrasing and lack of detail--such as the conference's name--was equally suspicious. The writer contacted the company to ask, and, unsurprisingly, was told that they had no employee named James Gilbert and were not planning any conferences, let alone one for "qualified writers and poets."

Deciding to lead the scammer on for a bit, the writer pretended interest. They got this reply:

Presumably this is some sort of phishing scheme, and if the writer had provided their name and address they would have been asked for bank account information or some other financial disclosure.

I received no other reports of the fake Crown Castle solicitation, and couldn't find any references to it online. Although it was clearly a fraud, I didn't quite know what to make of it. Was it a one-off? A recurring ripoff scheme, like this long-running speaker scam?

A couple of days ago, I got the answer, via a Twitter post from a writer who received this:

The scammers have switched up some stuff--the solicitor's name, the subject line, the company name (like Crown Castle, Smart Asset is also a real company), and the remuneration--but otherwise this solicitation is nearly word-for-word identical to the one I saw in January.

So it's obviously an ongoing phishing scam that changes its details from time to time to evade discovery, and borrows genuine company names so that anyone who does a websearch will turn up a real website (and hopefully won't be too concerned that the companies have nothing whatever to do with writing or publishing).

The email addresses look authentic also--at least, to a quick glance. Look closer, and you'll notice discrepancies. "Nora Droste's" address has an extra "t" (smarttasset.com rather than the company's real email address, smartasset.com), and "James Gilbert's" has an extra word (crowncastlelogistics.com, as opposed to the authentic email format, crowncastle.com).

This scam is a bit more difficult than some to immediately recognize, because while reputable agents and publishers are highly unlikely to solicit new writers with too-good-to-be-true offers, authors do legitimately receive requests from conference organizers. Be on your guard, do your research--and if you're unsure, contact Writer Beware.

UPDATE 6/23/21: According to additional reports I've received and also this comment below, if you indicate you're interested in participating, you receive a contract requiring you to send a $450 money order for the "high quality" camera and other equipment. Supposedly this will be reimbursed by check after you pay it. In reality, of course, once you send the $450 you'll never hear from the scammers again.

UPATE 7/24/21: Here's the latest iteration of the scam, which as you'll see, is even more deceptive:

Here is the bogus contract writers receive if they bite.

There really is a Kristen Pecci who works in HR at Macmillan (though her title isn't Manager), so a quick websearch could lend credibility to this email (if you don't think too hard about why an HR professional would be recruiting for a writers' conference). However, dig deeper and you'll spot what is often a clue to a scam approach: the email protocol is not what Macmillan uses. Nor would a real email address mis-name the company (it's Macmillan Publishers, not Macmillan Publishing).

UPDATE 8/6/21: Here's the email writers receive from "Kristen" if they sign the contract. Note the "hurry up" pressure:

Here's Brian Bas:

4558 Broadway is a US Post Office. So--assuming Brian Bas is a real person--it looks like this scam is being run by a twenty-something dude with a PO box in New York City.

Regardless, I'm pretty sure this qualifies as mail fraud. If you've been contacted by this scam--and especially if you've received a bogus check and/or have been asked to send a money order to Brian Bas--I urge you to report it to the US Postal Inspection Service.

UPDATE 11/16/21: Important info: this scam is not just targeting writers. Here's a comment that was just left on this post by a dietician. Once again, the scammer, Brian Bas, has co-opted the name of a real company to add fake legitimacy to the scam.

The beauty of this scam (for the scammer) is that it can be tailored to pretty much anyone. I expect I'll be hearing from other kinds of professionals who have also been targeted.

UPDATE 12/20/21: "Andrew Ibis" aka Brian Bas is still contacting nutritionists, but he's now demanding a ton more money. Here's the contract he is currently sending out. Here's the relevant section:

As before, the victim must pay in the form of money orders, sent by postal mail to Brian Bas at the PO Box above. This victim actually received the bogus $5,000 check, which looks quite convincing as long as you overlook "Official Check" in lieu of a company name and address:

I've tried, but can't decipher the signer's last name (and of course, there's no reason it should be real).

I urge anyone who has been a target or a victim of this scam to report it to the US Postal Inspection Service, which you can do here, and to the FTC, which you can do here.

UPDATE 12/31/21: The scamming goes on! I just heard from a musician solicited for a supposed music conference. They received a contract identical to others I've seen except for the money demand, which has jumped again: to $10,000. Scammer Brian seems to be making a pretty common scammer mistake: getting greedy. That tends to make your marks more likely to be suspicious.

He's still using the names of Andrew Ibis and C&R Press.

The Goodreads Extortion Scam

Recently I received an email from a writer who described an extortion scheme that had targeted them on Goodreads. The scammers threatened to post a blizzard of one-star reviews and ratings if the writer didn't hand over money to "buy our paid review offers". Here's the first email the writer received. (Apologies to anyone who's sensitive to bad language; this apparently is typical of the scammers' communications.)

When the writer refused to play, they got this:

The scammers then made good on their threat and bombed the writer's books with 1-star reviews. Fortunately, the writer was able to get Goodreads--which is not always overly responsive to author complaints--to remove the reviews, along with the profile that had posted them.

It's been a long time since I gave much thought to Goodreads. I largely quit interacting there after Amazon acquired it, at which point the already toxic atmosphere increased while the responsiveness of the people running the site underwent an equivalent decline. I too have been 1-star bombed--more than once, actually, including just recently, as I discovered when I visited Goodreads for the first time in forever to research this post and found that a profile called Photography had left1-star ratings on all my books (including a non-existent book that I've tried repeatedly to get Goodreads to remove, and a book to which I contributed a single chapter):

All of Photography's ratings are 1-stars (a classic sign of a fake profile), and all 12 of them are for me. In other words, this is a profile set up for the sole purpose of trashing my books. That's a not-uncommon tactic on Goodreads, where review-bombing is a known hazard. I never got any demands for money, though (mostly, I figure attacks like this are a result of my work with Writer Beware), and I'd never heard of an extortion scheme like the one the writer described. Was their encounter with cyber extortionists unusual? Or was this something that happened more often?

Apparently, the latter--though it does seem to be a fairly new phenomenon. This blog entry posted in January lays it all out--not just the "pay up or we'll trash your books" threat, but a more sneaky scheme where the 1-star reviews appear first and then after a few days the writer is contacted by someone who claims they will get rid of them...for a fee. There are several threads on Goodreads discussing this, with posts from writers who've been targeted:

Here are the kinds of reviews that get posted:

And here's the kind of response writers get from the scammers if they push back, or if they manage to get Goodreads to remove the reviews (apologies again for language):

In January, Goodreads claimed to be "working with our engineering teams to investigate possible solutions to prevent this from happening in the future." It's now May, and it's still going on.

I imagine this is a difficult problem to police, and Goodreads does seem to be fairly responsive in replying to authors' complaints and removing reviews and scammer profiles. Clearly, though, this is an ongoing problem, and if you're active on Goodreads, you should be aware of it.

UPDATE: SFWA has issued a statement on Goodreads harassment, and is working with Goodreads to address it. If you're a SFWA member, you can report harassment or extortion using this form.

UPDATE 8/12/21: Time magazine has a lengthy article on review-bombing and extortion at Goodreads.

#DisneyMustPay: Authors' Groups Join Forces to Advocate for Writers Owed Money by Disney

noreply@blogger.com (Victoria Strauss) — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 17:22:00 +0000

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®

Last November, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) published a letter from author Alan Dean Foster detailing his struggles to get Disney to provide unpaid royalties and missing royalty statements for multiple novels and novelizations that he'd written for several media properties whose rights Disney had acquired.

You continue to ignore requests from my agents. You continue to ignore queries from SFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. You continue to ignore my legal representatives. I know this is what gargantuan corporations often do. Ignore requests and inquiries hoping the petitioner will simply go away. Or possibly die. But I’m still here, and I am still entitled to what you owe me. Including not to be ignored, just because I’m only one lone writer. How many other writers and artists out there are you similarly ignoring?

Disney's argument was that they'd purchased the rights of the contracts they'd acquired, but not the obligations (such as paying royalties). After SFWA took the matter public, a resolution was reached, and Mr. Foster's payment issues were resolved. However, SFWA reports that a number of other authors have contacted it about similar issues, also across a wide range of Disney properties, and that Disney has refused to work with the organization.

SFWA has now joined with other writers' groups to form the #DisneyMustPay Joint Task Force. Members of the task force include Authors Guild, Horror Writers Association, National Writers Union, Novelists, Inc., Romance Writers of America, and Sisters in Crime, along with individual writers representing each of the organizations, such as Neil Gaiman, Tess Gerritsen, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Chuck Wendig.

The group has issued a press release urging Disney to address these key areas:

Honor contracts now held by Disney and its subsidiaries.
Provide royalty payments and statements to all affected authors.
Update their licensing page with a FAQ for writers about how to handle missing royalties.
Create a clear, easy-to-find contact person or point for affected authors.
Cooperate with author organizations who are providing support to authors and agents.

According to the press release, when presented with these steps, and offered the opportunity to provide a statement to the task force organizations' members, Disney declined.

The task force is asking for contact from affected writers, who can report their experiences using this form hosted by SFWA (anonymity is guaranteed). How do you know if you may have been affected?

To raise awareness, and to get the word out to writers who may need the task force's help, the task force is urging people to use the #DisneyMustPay hashtag on Twitter (it offers several suggestions for possible tweets) and to discuss the issue on social media generally. It also asks that the public not boycott, as that could penalize Disney writers who are being paid.

I'll update this post as I receive more information.

The Case of the Purloined Blog Post: How a Fake DMCA Notice Failed to Silence Writer Beware

noreply@blogger.com (Victoria Strauss) — Fri, 23 Apr 2021 16:08:00 +0000

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®

I have a gmail account. I hate gmail, so I don't use it for correspondence and rarely check it. But one day a couple of weeks ago, I did, and to my surprise I found a takedown notice for one of my Writer Beware blog posts, alleging that I'd infringed someone's copyright.

The post in question discussed the 2018 implosion of small publisher Fiery Seas Publishing, about which I received a flood of author complaints following owner Misty Williams's abrupt announcement of "re-structuring" due to poor sales. A couple of months after my post, Fiery Seas closed for good.

I checked, and the post had indeed been taken down (though I was able to view it thanks to the Wayback Machine). For the life of me, I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to have infringed. Maybe Misty Williams's announcement email, which I'd reproduced in full?

After some permissions applications, I was able to work my way to the actual DMCA complaint.

Say what? Who the hell was Bella Andreas, and why was she claiming that she'd written my blog post? Navigating to the "Original URL" link on what purported to be Bella's blog, I found a large portion of my post reproduced verbatim:

Note the date. I published my post on September 28, 2018. Bella's post is dated September 3, 2018. In other words, she'd stolen the bulk of my post, backdated it to make it look as if she were the original author, and gotten my post taken down with a fake DMCA notice.

I was stumped. Fiery Seas is dead. The authors who were caught up in the publisher's collapse have moved on. So, presumably, has Misty Williams, who, if she objected to what I wrote about her, has had plenty of time to protest. What purpose could this fakery possibly serve?

Bella's blog struck me as odd in general, even beyond the stolen blog post, with its peculiar name (Comusa: blog you deserve), motto ("Blog about the thuth [sic] Not for everyone. For you."), lack of info about Bella herself, and random-seeming array of other posts over what appeared to be a period of several years--most of them about financial fraud, but also consumer issues and scandals of various kinds.

Digging into the posts themselves, I discovered something interesting. Every single post had been stolen and backdated, just like mine. For instance, here's Bella, with a purported date of 1/5/2020:

Here's the original article, dated 2/4/2020:

Bella, dated 3/19/19:

Original article, dated 3/21/19:

I could go on. Every post is like this. Every. Single. One. Moreover, the date fakery isn't limited to backdating. Posts are dated as far back as 2014, yet Bella's domain name didn't exist before October 2016. And regardless of their apparent publication dates, source code indicates that all of the posts were in fact published between early December 2020 and late March 2021.

My stolen post falls right in the middle of that brief time period. Bella published it on January 26, 2021--the same day she filed the DMCA notice. That's additionally confirmed by the date on the image upload:

I filed a counter-claim with Google on April 5, providing all of the information above, and received the usual "we'll get to it when we get to it" response. In fact, they got to it much more quickly than I expected.

The post has been re-instated in its original location.

******

So what the hell was it all about?

Who is Bella Andreas, and what's her beef with my blog post? Could she be someone I pissed off somehow? A disgruntled author? An outed scammer? But she doesn't show up in any of my email or other Writer Beware records. And websearches on her name and variations of it are inconclusive. She doesn't appear to be a writer (you'll probably have noticed, as I did, the similarity of her name to that of bestselling author Bella Andre). I can't find any indication that she's associated with any part of the publishing industry. Assuming that "Bella Andreas" is a real name at all.

And what's the deal with Bella's blog, with its weird typo-ridden motto and its bizarre collection of plagiarized, backdated posts? Could it have been created solely in order to take down my post? I know that sounds farfetched, but consider. All of Bella's blog posts were created in a short span of time, which her DMCA claim falls exactly in the middle of. Also, apart from the various news articles Bella plagiarized, for which she couldn't plausibly claim infringement, several of her posts have been stolen from blogs like Writer Beware. For instance, this one (here's the original post) and this one (original post) and this one (original post). If fake-DMCA'ing was her game, she could easily have had them taken down based on the same pretext she used for mine. But all are still online. Mine is the only one that was (if only temporarily) removed.

Finally, why that post? Fiery Seas and its collapse are old news. And why now, more than two years after the post was published?

It all seems completely, weirdly random. Except...

At the end of my post is a postscript, in which I mention A Certain Agent who is known for his efforts to get references to himself removed from the web. Last spring, he contacted me to demand the takedown of certain of my tweets, a discussion on the Writer Beware Facebook page...and my Fiery Seas blog post.

I did not comply. You can't DMCA tweets and Facebook threads, but you can DMCA blog posts. And remember I mentioned that Bella stole most of my post, but not all of it? She omitted the intro, which linked back to Writer Beware. But she also omitted the postscript.

Coincidence? You be the judge.

Publisher Storm Warnings: Diversion Books

noreply@blogger.com (Victoria Strauss) — Fri, 16 Apr 2021 17:07:00 +0000

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®

Founded in 2010 by Scott Waxman of the Waxman Literary Agency, Diversion Books was one of the earliest of the literary agency-powered publishing ventures that sought to take advantage of the growing digital market, including the opportunity to bring their clients' backlists back into circulation (others include Arthur Klebanoff's RosettaBooks, Andrew Wylie's Odyssey Editions, and Richard Curtis's E-Reads).

Diversion has since expanded into traditional print, audio, and subsidiary rights representation. It has also, over the past few weeks, become the focus of author complaints.

I first heard about problems at Diversion much earlier than that, though, in 2018, from an author who cited late and missing royalty statements, multiple errors on the statements they did receive (including mis-allocated subsidiary rights income), and failure to register copyright as contractually stipulated. (To this day, this individual is still struggling to obtain a full and correct accounting of their book's sales and income, and believes they have not been paid all the royalties they are owed.)

To me, the seriousness of the problems the author reported, as well as what appeared to be Diversion's difficulty in addressing them, suggested a larger pattern rather than a glitch affecting just one person. I didn't have confirmation of that, though, until last week, when I received an email from a group of Diversion authors who are working to publicize what they describe as long-standing issues with the publisher--issues very similar to those reported by my original complainant three years ago.

Recently several authors published with Diversion banded together to notify various author groups that we have not received royalty statements and/or payments from Diversion for years. One writer spent over $10,000 in legal fees to get her rights returned. Another author said she was offered her rights back only if she would sign an agreement not to seek past royalty payments from them. The stories are myriad and heartbreaking.
So far, we have sent letters outlining various cases to the Mystery Writers of America, International Thriller Writers, Romance Writers of America, Sisters in Crimes, American Association of Literary Agents (AALA) and the SFWA. Some of the groups have formal grievance committees who are actively investigating the cases. Others have “preferred publishers” lists, and we are asking that they remove Diversion from those lists.

I also began hearing directly from Diversion authors who described their own experiences, including:

Missing royalty statements (in some cases going back several years).
Royalty statements with errors, such as erroneous chargebacks, that authors and their agents struggled to get Diversion to correct.
No royalty payments, even in cases where there appeared to have been thousands of sales. Diversion has a practice of recouping several hundred dollars in production costs (between $500 and $800 in contracts I saw) from initial sales proceeds, before authors are eligible for royalty payouts (a setup that's reasonable for re-publishing backlist books--Open Road Media, which specializes in backlist titles, offers a similar arrangement--but is not typical practice for first-time publication). This seems to play some part in why royalties have been withheld--but without a full run of royalty statements, authors can't trace the figures back to verify or even understand them.
Failure to register copyrights as contractually stipulated.
Failure to respond to reversion requests once the four-year contract term expired.
In 2019, a unilateral switch from a quarterly royalty reporting/payment schedule to a semi-annual one, despite contract language requiring that no such changes be made "unless in writing and signed by both parties."
Promises by Diversion to some authors and their agents to provide missing royalty statements by the end of March 2021--with no statements appearing by that date.

On Monday of this week, I reached out to Scott Waxman for comment. He referred me to Dawn Reshen-Doty of Benay Enterprises, which was hired in 2019 to handle Diversion's royalty accounting and other back office tasks. Dawn gave me the following statement:

We apologize greatly for any delay in the processing of royalty statements and payments. While we can’t speak to the entire history of these issues, when Benay Enterprises Inc. took over as the business management and back office company for Diversion in March 2019, we took on the responsibility of updating the internal systems and making the process smoother for the authors and agents. It has taken some time to take corrective action, especially during the pandemic. We are continually learning and striving to accomplish this with each statement period. We are currently up to date on royalties and all of our backend obligations, and addressing any concerns or questions from the authors and agents. Our goal is to pay authors in a timely way, and of course accurately.

As of this writing, Benay appears for the most part to have caught up on royalty statements for the most recent reporting period (second half of 2020, courtesy of that unilateral switchover to a semi-annual reporting schedule). Many of the writers who emailed me with complaints last week confirmed that they'd since gotten at least that statement (though none report receiving a check). However, there seems to be some inconsistency. Some writers who are missing multiple statements say they've received just the latest statement, while others have gotten all their missing statements. And one writer told me they got nothing at all.

I contacted Scott again to ask when authors who are still awaiting royalty statements might expect to receive them. He responded: "As we have an archive of all statements, we will be happy to furnish any missing statements upon request." Which raises the question of why the statements weren't furnished in the first place, not to mention why so many writers and their agents say they haven't been able to get Diversion to respond to earlier requests to provide them. (Interestingly, all the Diversion contracts I saw include this sentence in Clause 6, which covers payment schedules: "The Author or his/her representatives may request information about his/her [royalty] account at any time, and will receive this information within six weeks of this written request.")

It's also worth noting that Benay took over Diversion's royalty accounting more than two years ago, yet it wasn't until the past few weeks that writers who'd been missing statements going back to 2019 and even earlier finally started receiving them. (Part of the impetus may have been International Thriller Writers' decision last week to suspend Diversion for six months pending resolution of author complaints.) It's encouraging that statements are finally going out, but this late and apparently hasty effort just casts the reported problems into sharper relief.

At any rate, Benay has given me an email address that authors can use: Diversion-Benay@benayei.com . They seem to be responsive; one author who wrote to inquire about missing statements told me that they received them the next day.

In addition to International Thriller Writers, other writers' organizations are investigating complaints from members. I'll keep following the situation, and will post updates as I receive them.

UPDATE 10/8/21: I've now heard from a handful of Diversion writers who say they are receiving royalties and royalty statements on time (though one writer has told me they are still having difficulties with accounting and payment). It's an encouraging sign, though I don't have enough info to judge whether it's the new normal or case by case.

If you're a Diversion author who has had the difficulties described in this post, would you please let me know what your current experience is? Names and any other identifying information will not be shared.