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Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware    If you're a self-published erotica author, you're probably aware of the crazy events of the past few days, including the wholesale deletion of erotica ebooks and the shutdown of entire retail operations. If you're not, here's how things went down. An expose in The Kernel that found numerous self-published rape and incest porn ebooks for sale at major ebook retailers precipitated a media frenzy in the UK . Amazon and Barnes & Noble began pulling titles from their stores . Other ebook retailers went farther: WH Smith shut down its entire website , and Kobo, which initially just deleted selected titles, suspended the sale of all self-published ebooks on its UK website --a shutdown that has since spread to Australia and New Zealand --in order to inventory its catalog and purge ebooks that violate its content guidelines . As the story unfolded, authors who don't write erotica saw their titles removed , as did author...

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware   A few years ago, I blogged about early termination fees, a.k.a. kill fees, in publishing contracts, and why they are not a good thing. For obvious reasons, kill fee clauses are onerous for authors, who in some circumstances might have good reason to want to end a contract early, and can't do so without opening up their wallets. Plus, many publishers employ kill fee clauses abusively, holding them over the heads of unhappy authors, or attempting to use them as an income source by offering to jettison dissatisfied writers at the slightest provocation, or terminating the contracts of writers who've pissed them off and demanding the fee even though termination wasn't the writer's decision. Here's an actual example of this kind of abuse. Problem publisher No Boundaries Press, which apparently stopped paying its authors sometime in 2012, closed its doors at the end of this summer . According to reports received by W...

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware   Writers & Artists --the Bloomsbury Publishing-owned writers' handbook that's the UK equivalent to the USA's Writers Market --has just launched a free self-publishing provider comparison service . Here's how it works . Detailed questionnaires cover a variety of areas: editing, ebooks, design and formatting, marketing, and printing. Writers can fill out any or all of these. At the end of the process, they're presented with a list of self-publishing service providers selected from W&A's database , ranked in order of relevance. From this list, they can request up to a maximum of five "personalized quotes." To test the service, I filled out the questionnaire for ebooks. My assumptions: I wanted ebook conversion and distribution to multiple platforms in Europe and North America, in ePUB and Mobi formats, for a manuscript of 100,000 words. I was willing to accept a distributor cut of up to 45%, and want...

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware So a week ago, I stumbled on this news item in a generally reliable venue: The [growth of ] self-publishing has created a new publishing market that totals $52 billion in revenues, according to a new report from media technology firm New Publisher House . According to the report, this is twice as much money as the traditional book publishing industry in the U.S. brings in in its current total annual sales revenue. The State of Independence 2014 report looked at insights gathered from publishing executives, Amazon, Google and industry data to come up with its conclusions. The report also revealed that the number of aspiring self-published authors that have completed manuscripts is more than 100x the number of actual published authors. In addition, according to the report, self-published titles are 8x the number of mainstream published new titles. Wow, I thought, interesting news! There's so little solid data on self-pub...

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware As reported by a number of sources, including USA Today , Macmillan is launching Swoon Reads , a new teen romance imprint, under its existing Feiwel and Friends imprint. It's looking for submissions of previously unpublished manuscripts. The twist: Swoon Reads is a "crowdsourced" imprint , with readers commenting on and rating the posted manuscripts. Highly-ranked manuscripts will be considered by Swoon Reads' publishing board, and those selected for publication will be offered a standard Macmillan publishing contract plus a $15,000 advance. Books will be published in both print and electronic format. Here's what Swoon Reads is looking for . I don't find any major pitfalls on the website or in the Terms and Conditions (the Terms and Conditions for manuscript submission are separate from the general Terms and Conditions , and are available only to those who sign up for Swoon Reads). But there are some things that wr...