sàds

Hi, Folks! Ann Crispin here, with warm good wishes to everyone. I wish everyone a terrific New Year. May your ideal agent say "yes," and may every publisher pay you promptly! Writer Beware just learned some excellent news. Yet another scammer has bitten the dust, and this is reason for much holiday cheer. Many kudos to Bonnie Kaye and her fellow authors for bringing about the official investigation into Airleaf that has caused this rip-off company to SHUT DOWN as of December 19, 2007. Way to go, Bonnie! The world is now a little safer for authors thanks to Airleaf's demise. What a nice Christmas present for the writing world! Have a safe and happy holiday season, everyone. -Ann C. Crispin Chair, Writer Beware www.writerbeware.com

Writer Beware is taking some time off from blogging for the holidays. We'll return January 2 with a fresh crop of schemes, scams, and Very Bad Ideas. Wishing all our readers a wonderful holiday season, Victoria, Ann, and Richard

Last week, I saw a news article about Libby Rees, "Britain's youngest author," who at 12 is about to publish a self-help book for children called At Sixes and Sevens . It's actually her second book; her first, another children's self-help manual entitled Help, Hope and Happiness , was published when she was just 9 years old. One off note in this happy story struck me: the name of Libby's publisher, Aultbea Publishing. Writer Beware has never received any direct complaints about Aultbea, but the Inverness-based publisher was exposed as a vanity press (cost: £10,000) in a series of critical blog posts by Michael Allen, a.k.a. Grumpy Old Bookman . Libby Rees isn't Aultbea's only youthful author. Its first was 13-year-old Emma Maree Urquhart, whose novel Dragon Tamers was published by Aultbea in 2005. According to this article in The Independent , the book's claimed success--50,000 copies sold in the first few weeks of release, a figure that Ault...

An "interminable agency clause" (sometimes called an "interminable rights clause" or a "perpetual agency clause") is language inserted into an author-agency agreement whereby the agency claims the right to remain the agency of record not just for the duration of any contracts it negotiates, but for the life of copyright. In other words, once the agency sells your book, it has the right to represent that book for as long as the book is in copyright (currently your life plus 70 years). Why is this a problem? Suppose you decide to move to a new agency, as often happens. If your old agency's agreement included an interminable agency clause, you might not be able to bring with you any of the rights your old agency sold for you, even if the contracts covering those rights had long expired. Those rights, which can sometimes be profitably re-sold (especially if you score a success with a new work) are one of the things that can make you attractive to a new age...

Once upon a time, there was a Washington state-based ghostwriting studio/publishing house "hybrid" (read vanity publisher) called The Empty Canoe, LLC (a bizarrely appropriate name, as it turned out). Here's how the company was decribed by founders Mike and Kristina Canu (a.k.a. Kristina Valocchi) in a 2004 press release : The Empty Canoe's growth has been attributed to the fact that primarily, it is a publishing house. By offering the service of ghostwriting, the company is able to get a quality of both idea and client which otherwise would be missed. For centuries the art of ghostwriting, writing eloquently on another's behalf, has been used. Until recently though, only the rich or famous have been able to afford such a service. The Empty Canoe has implemented a business plan that enables a lower initial ghostwriting fee in exchange for the right to publish. The studio gets into the proverbial storm of publishing with its clients. There was a storm, all right, t...

Some interesting items I've picked up in my travels around the Internet. It sucks, but we love working here... In October, Publishing Trends published the results of its First Annual Industry Survey , in which publishing professionals were asked how they feel about the wacky world of publishing. Interesting stuff. Here's a taste: - What respondents felt were the worst aspects of the industry: compensation (39%) and the instability of the market (38%). - Over half of all editors responding also identified themselves as writers. - When asked about the best and worst aspects of the industry, twice as many respondents wrote in with complaints as with praise--yet about 32% say they'd never consider leaving their jobs, and another 18.5% only rarely feel frustrated enough to consider quitting. Writers, get moving! Writing is a notoriously sedentary activity. Whether you're "in flow" and have lost all track of time, or are paralyzed in front of your computer screen b...