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India-based Mirage Books , which describes itself as "a publishing house dedicated to promote writers across the globe," has been advertising a short story contest on its website. Red flags abound. The website is poorly written, suggesting to me that English is not the writer's first language. Paid editing services are offered--a clear conflict of interest for a publisher. There's much verbiage about how the horrid old hidebound big publishing world hates new authors and won't give them a chance (completely false, and often a marker for an amateur publisher). To date, the company appears to have published just two books --one by Nikhil Khanna, to whom Mirage's URL is registered , the other by Huned Contractor (here's his profile on Writers Net), whose name appears on Mirage's correspondence under the title of "Editor." I suspect a self-publishing endeavor that is trying to expand. From the perspective of this post, the biggest red flag is ...

The Authors Guild, the AAP, and several large publishers have reached a $125 million settlement with Google regarding library participation in Google's Book Search project. The settlement will allow Google to continue to expand its ambitious program of digitizing millions of books and making them searchable online, while preserving the rights of copyright holders. From an email I received today: The Guild had sued Google in September 2005, after Google struck deals with major university libraries to scan and copy millions of books in their collections. Many of these were older books in the public domain, but millions of others were still under copyright protection. Nick Taylor, then the president of the Guild, saw Google’s scanning as “a plain and brazen violation of copyright law.” Google countered that its digitizing of these books represented a “fair use” of the material. Our proposal to Google back in May 2006 was simple: while we don’t approve of your unauthorized scanning o...

Like any alternate universe, the writing community has spawned its own mythology. Ann and I have covered a few of these myths in this blog and on the Writer Beware website: the notion that you have to know someone in order to get published, the fear that agents and editors can blacklist writers, the conviction that " just getting it out there " (via self-publishing, for instance) is enough to jump-start a career, the idea that getting published is some kind of crapshoot , the many fallacies about copyright . Such myths are not only incredibly persistent, resisting both logic and rebuttal, they can also be pernicious, causing writers to behave in ways contrary to their own best interest. For instance, the myth that "any agent is better than no agent" throws thousands of writers into the arms of amateur literary agents, who can damage careers as much as or even more than scam agents can. The myth that's the subject of this post is extremely common, and it goes l...

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a writer in possession of an unpublished manuscript, must be in want of an agent. This is not news, I know. But because it is a universal truth, there's never any shortage of Wonderful New Ideas or Nifty Innovative Tools designed (supposedly) to make the process of agent-hunting easier, or at least a bit less frustrating. Manuscript display sites and query and submission services have both held out the promise of bypassing the tedious research-and-submission process, the former by enticing agents to come to you rather than the other way around, the latter by letting you farm out the work to someone else, rather than doing it yourself. To date, neither has managed to become a viable alternative. The latest agent-hunting "innovation" is the literary agent directory--an online compilation of literary agent listings with contact information, submission guidelines, what the agency is looking for, and often some info on clients an...

A few days ago, I got a spam--er, a targeted media announcement from a company called BookRix . Founded in Germany and launched last week in the USA, BookRix joins a growing number of writing-related social media websites-- EditRed , ABCTales , Booksie , GoodReads , and HarperCollins's slush pile experiment, Authonomy , to name just a few. Using a proprietary platform called ViewRix, BookRix lets aspiring authors upload their stories or manuscripts, format them into "web books" (these look more or less like scans of printed books, and mimic the turning of pages), share them with the BookRix community, and get feedback from other members. Books can also be shared with friends and family, or embedded on blogs or other social networking websites. In addition to members' writing, BookRix's library includes public domain works (Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, Louisa May Alcott), presumably in a bid to attract readers as well as authors. If you hover your cursor over a ...

Some of you may be aware of the issues surrounding yet another troubled small publisher, Blu Phier Publishing . It's a familiar story: A light bulb goes off over the head of someone with an interest in writing/publishing, but no professional experience in either. He starts a publishing company. Because he doesn't have the proper knowledge base, and can't be bothered to spend time acquiring it, he crafts a nonstandard contract (here's a brief analysis by me), provides inadequate editing and copy editing, cannot maintain professional design or production standards, and, unable to distribute or market in any meaningful fashion, puts the onus of making sales on his authors. The upshot: The publisher gets into logistical and financial trouble. Delays occur. Monies due aren't paid. Excuses, recriminations, and abrupt changes in policy ensue. The publisher limps on for a while. Eventually it goes belly up, with or without returning its authors' rights. Well, that last...