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With the rash of small presses, both print and electronic, going out of business lately, it's a minefield out there for authors. A recent example: Rain Publishing, a Canadian publisher with a seriously nonstandard contract that abruptly closed its doors this month, supposedly due to the ill-health of the owner. This thread at Absolute Write follows the depressing saga from start to finish. As I've noted before, publisher closures can be a nightmare for authors. While some presses do the right thing and formally release rights before shutting down, others simply vanish, yanking their websites, abandoning their email addresses, refusing to respond to letters and phone calls--and failing to terminate their contracts. Having your rights encumbered by a still-existing contract may make it extremely difficult to interest a new publisher in your book, even if the original publisher is clearly out of business. Writer Beware has gotten hundreds of complaints over the years from writers...

WEBook has improved its terms of use, but concerns still remain. See my followup post . This post has been updated. Always on the lookout for strange new phenomena in the world of writing and publishing, I recently discovered a brand-new collaborative writing website called WEbook . WEbook describes itself as "an online publishing platform that allows writers, editors, reviewers, illustrators and others to join forces to create great works of fiction and non-fiction, thrillers and essays, short stories, children's books and more." How does WEbook work? According to its FAQ page , writers can initiate public collaboration or anthology projects, to which anyone can contribute, Wiki-style. They can form groups for private collaborations, with a limited number of contributors. Or, if they' prefer to work alone, the WEbook platform can be used to produce a single author work. Completed books can then be opened up to the entire WEbook community for ratings, in order to ...

You've finished and polished your manuscript. You've assembled your submission package. You've compiled a list of agents or publishers. You're ready for the next step: sending out your work. So you start submitting--via email if you can, via snail mail if you can't. And you wait. You try not to obsess, but you can't suppress that tingle of anticipation whenever you open your email program, every time you fetch the snail mail from the mailbox. And then--oh joy! Requests start coming in. Requests for partials. Requests for fulls. It's time to do some research to see if those agents or publishers are reputable. Wait. What's wrong with this picture? Here's another version of the story. You've finished and polished...etc. Requests come in...you mail off your material. And one day, the moment you've been dreaming of arrives: you get an offer of representation or publication. It's time to do some research to see if the agent or publisher is repu...

Items that piqued my interest over the past couple of weeks. Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest Winner Sauron...excuse me, Amazon.com has announced that the winner of the Breakthrough Novel Award is Bill Loehfelm, author of the mystery novel Fresh Kills . Loehfelm wins a $25,000 publishing contract with Penguin, which will issue the book via its Putnam imprint on July 31. As with the first First Chapters competition , the rush to print is no doubt intended to beat the public's short attention span and take advantage of the publicity generated by the award. According to PW , Penguin hopes to have a galley on hand at the upcoming BEA. Russell Grandinetti, Amazon Vice President for Books, said that "the contest received a tremendous response, and hit its cap of 5,000 submissions two weeks before the deadline. Submissions came from 18 countries and every state, and more than 30,000 Amazon.com customers downloaded excerpts of the submitted novels." Will that translate into sal...

I received this email from the Authors Guild today, with permission to re-post. ********* Last week Amazon announced that it would be requiring that all books that it sells that are produced through on-demand means be printed by BookSurge, their in-house on-demand printer/publisher. Amazon pitched this as a customer service matter, a means for more speedily delivering print-on-demand books and allowing for the bundling of shipments with other items purchased at the same time from Amazon. It also put a bit of an environmental spin on the move -- claiming less transportation fuel is used (this is unlikely, but that's another story) when all items are shipped directly from Amazon. We, and many others, think something else is afoot. Ingram Industries' Lightning Source is currently the dominant printer for on-demand titles, and they appear to be quite efficient at their task. They ship on-demand titles shortly after they are ordered through Amazon directly to the customer. It's...

It's rather a tradition here at Writer Beware to make a joke post on April Fool's Day. I think this is the third or fourth time I've done it. To me the idea that PublishAmerica could actually acquire DISNEY was so patently absurd that the joke would be obvious. Apparently, however, there are a number of folks who just didn't get it. To those individuals, I apologize for spoofing them, seeming self-centered, conceited, etc. Just for the record, everything I wrote up until the point where I mentioned Atlanta Nights and Touchstone happens to be true. After that, it was a complete fabrication, cooked up in my febrile little brain, intoxicated by the rites of Spring and a warm April 1st. -Ann C. Crispin

You folks know I'm a private person. I don't usually write about what's going on in my life. That's not the purpose of this blog. But I just got some very bad news, and I feel I need the support of my friends...and you, the supporters of Writer Beware, have always been people I've regarded as friends. Until this morning, everything was going so well...I was energized and excited by my two new projects. But now...everything has fallen apart. I'm afraid my writing career may be over. You see, I had signed last year to do a very important project for Disney. I was so proud to be chosen from among many writers in my genre to be the first writer contracted to do a full-length Pirates of the Caribbean novel. I LOVED those movies, and it seemed like a dream come true that I'd get to be the first writer to write a full-length novel in that universe. Even when I found out I wouldn't get to meet Johnny Depp, I just nodded and kept smiling. (Can't blame a girl...