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If, like me, you've been frantically devoting hours to reading up on Google Book Settlement in an attempt to make up your mind about what to do in the final days before the May 5 deadline...take a breath. PW reports that "In a surprise move, New York Judge Denny Chin today granted a four-month extension to a group of authors, led by Gail Knight Steinbeck, delaying the May 5 deadline to opt out or object to the Google Book Search settlement to early September." So you've got until September to decide. I've pretty much made my decision, and was planning to blog about it this week...but I think I'll delay until closer to the date. What I will say now is that this is a historic settlement that presents the possibility of sweeping changes in many different areas, and has far-reaching implications for authors and publishers. If you're tempted to bury your head in the sand and do nothing (and I completely sympathize with that feeling--the volume of information ...

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have a small obsession with author reality shows. It's the kind of concept that would seem like a complete non-starter--watching authors sit at their desks for hours at a time? Or, alternatively, avoiding sitting at their desks for any time at all? Not exactly riveting viewing. Yet over the past few years, no fewer than five author reality shows have attempted to get off the ground. Let's recap. - Book Millionaire . The brainchild of Lori Prokop, owner of her very own vanity press, this show was to feature "Eight people with dreams of seeing their book ideas become published and being the next author launched to best selling and celebrity status." It never got beyond the video audition stage. - The Ultimate Author . Created by journalist and self-published author Lauren Spicer, this show promised contestants "go[ing] toe-to-toe in a writing competition that tests their ability to develop attention-grabbing content....

Once upon a time, there was a pair of literary scammers named George Harrison and Janet Kay Titsworth. The Titsworths lived in San Angelo, Texas, and ran a "literary agency" called Helping Hand Literary Service (later re-named Janet Kay & Associates) that charged its victims an "expense reimbursement" of $100, $200, or $300, depending on how many publishers they wanted the Titsworths to contact for them. For the money, writers received a "submission packet" consisting of a set of pre-printed publisher address labels, a form query letter on agency letterhead, and a return envelope. They were instructed to stick a stamp on the return envelope, place the letter, envelope, and accompanying materials (the writer's own query letter, synopsis, and sample chapters) in a manila envelope, affix the pre-printed label and sufficient postage, and drop the packet in the mail. So unprofessional were these submissions, and so inappropriate the lists of publishers,...

Until very recently, www.Poetry.com was the Internet home of the infamous International Library of Poetry (ILP), the nation's premier (and I use that adjective with irony) vanity poetry anthologizer . But in early March, the Poetry.com domain was purchased by self-publishing service Lulu . Why was the domain for sale? According to Wikipedia , "Publish Today and Noble House Books, the branches of Poetry.com that managed the publishing and printing of their books, have gone out of business." Wikipedia is never the most reliable resource, but Lulu appears to confirm this report on the new Lulu Poetry website: "Lulu.com, an award winning Internet company, recently purchased the URL 'www.poetry.com' from the previous failed business that owned it." Here's PW's coverage of the purchase. And here's Lulu's rather arch press release . I covered the vanity anthology scheme recently in a post on brand-new vanity anthologizer Eber & Wein , bu...

On the Writer Beware blog, we talk a lot about the danger to book writers of reading fees, submission fees, and vanity or "partnership" publishing arrangements. But being forced to pay for the promise (not necessarily the actuality) of exposure isn't just a danger for aspiring writers--it's a problem in all areas of the arts. Our guest blogger today, writer and playwright Jill Elaine Hughes , provides a fascinating expose of fees and pay-to-play in the theater world. ************** In the United States, the theater world is, for the most part, not-for-profit. Only Broadway productions and national tours (think shows like The Producers, Rent, and Jersey Boys ) actually make money (on paper, anyway). Theatres are generally nonprofit, tax-exempt organizations that are chartered under the 501(c)3 section of US tax code, and rely heavily on donations for their income. Even when these theatres charge hefty admission prices for their shows (and they often do; the average pr...

Last May--largely as a result of tireless campaigning by writers' activist Bonnie Kaye--the Indiana Attorney General's Office filed suit against fraudulent vanity publisher Airleaf and its CEO, Carl Lau. The suit seeks restitution for 120 identified authors (the true number of the defrauded is closer to 450), civil penalties of up to $5,500 per violation, and reimbursement for the cost of the investigation. In addition, complaints for criminal charges were filed with the Indiana U.S. Attorney’s office. But last week, Bonnie learned that the U.S. Attorney has decided not to proceed with bringing criminal charges against Lau and Airleaf. I just received this letter from Bonnie, which I'm publishing in its entirety. If you can help by signing Bonnie's petition to reverse the U.S. Attorney's decision, please contact her at Bonkaye@aol.com . You don't have to be an Airleaf victim--just a concerned member of the writer community. Dear Victoria, As the organizer of th...

The growth of the self-publishing industry is a popular journalistic subject. Some articles on self-publishing, such as the New York Times's recent Self-Publishers Flourish as Writers Pay the Tab , provide reasonably balanced coverage of the issue, while others, such as Time's Books Gone Wild: The Digital Age Reshapes Literature , are fatuous and overstated, with a distinctly triumphalist "old publishing is dead, and good riddance!" feel to them. With each of these articles, I get a flurry of emails from writers wanting to know what I think. Is it really true that that print publishing is "over?" Has the self-publishing stigma really vanished? Are publishers really combing through offerings from self-pub services for likely prospects? Has paying for POD really become a viable way for a new author to break into commercial publishing? So with the latest example, Elham Khatami's April 6 article for CNN, More Authors Turn to Web and Print-On-Demand Publishi...

Consolidation continues in the self-publishing sector: the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Author Solutions (which already owns AuthorHouse, iUniverse, and Xlibris) has acquired Trafford Publishing . As with its January 2009 acquisition of Xlibris, terms of the deal were not disclosed. As with Xlibris and iUniverse prior to their acquisition, Trafford appears to suffer from relatively few consumer issues. Writer Beware has received no substantive complaints about Trafford over the past few years, and there's not much complaint to be found on the Internet either. Not so for AuthorHouse--something that, post-acquisition, seems also to have become true for iUniverse. Which prompts the question: whither Xlibris and Trafford? In blogging about the Xlibris acquistion, I wrote the following. It's even more true now: This new merger is not good news for authors in another sense: it reduces the field of choice. As choices decrease, so does the pressure to compete, and decreased ...

In March, there was Queryfail , an initiative in which literary agents Twittered their worst queries ever. The intent was to let writers know where queries go wrong, and while many people appreciated the straight-from-the-source info, others were less happy . There was some talk of an Agentfail day on Twitter, with authors giving tit for tat. As far as I know, that never came off. However, the lovely ladies at BookEnds decided to make April 1 Agentfail day on their blog. More than 250 comments have been posted so far, and they're still mounting up...and some are pretty angry. Nathan Bransford comments on this in his blog, offering some thoughts about why one of things that seems to make writers angriest--agents who have a "we'll respond only if interested" policy--shouldn't. He concludes, I understand that the publishing process can be frustrating and that the people who really ranted in that post are in the minority, and that these responses were all requested...