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Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware Writers, don't fall for this offer from Global Talk Radio that's currently doing the spam circuit. Here's a new and FUN way to promote your book, business or website! Talk about it "on the air" in your own words... reach a highly-targeted audience and you might open doors to new opportunities! A RADIO INTERVIEW CAN SET YOU APART FROM EVERYONE ELSE! Global Talk Radio produces 5-minute and 10-minute professional interviews with authors and entrepreneurs for our top-rated "In The News" program. Interviews are pre-recorded by telephone, and you supply "talking points" to help focus the conversation on what is most important. Recent guests included Emmy-nominated writer/producer Dr. Kenneth Atchity, authors Nick Quintanilla and James Conaway, Ben Bluml (Senior VP at the American Pharmacists Association Foundation) and entrepreneur Jenny Ta of Sqeeqee.com. You could be next! Your promotional intervi...

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware If you're a regular visitor here, you may have noticed a change in our masthead. I'm delighted to announce that the Horror Writers Association has joined the Mystery Writers of America in providing additional support for Writer Beware (our main sponsor, of course, is the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America ). We're thrilled to be collaborating with another professional genre writers' group to further Writer Beware's mission of educating and empowering writers-- all writers, new or established, regardless of subject, style, genre, or nationality. Together, we'll continue to work to make the publishing world a safer place. Thanks, HWA!

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware Literary feuds are entertaining: famous and not-so-famous authors holding grudges, slinging insults, or sabotaging one another with bad reviews (both anonymous and not). But what about author feuding in real time? Can the spectacle of writers racing one another to finish a story, or competing to make the best elevator pitch, hold an audience riveted? Will viewers mourn as authortestants fall by the wayside, and cheer for the last author standing? A new Italian reality show, Masterpiece , aims to find out . At stake: a deal with Italian publisher Bompiani, and an eye-popping first print run of 100,000. Here's how it works . Prospective contestants submit a manuscript of an unpublished novel – nearly 5,000 flooded the offices of “Masterpiece” when the call went out, according to the NYT . Readers select a dozen contestants for each of six episodes, which judges then winnow down to four hopefuls per show. Each of the four contestants parti...

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware If you're a writer, I'll bet you've been spammed by JM Northern Media . Don't recognize the name? Maybe these will ring a bell. The Los Angeles Book Festival . The Hollywood Book Festival . The Paris Book Festival . The Beach Book Festival . The Halloween Book Festival. Animals, Animals, Animals Book Festival . And at least nine other annual festivals, all owned and operated by JM Northern Media (click the Properties tab). Why, you might ask, would one company own so many book festivals? To make money, of course. JM Northern's "festivals" aren't really festivals at all, but textbook examples of a moneymaking awards program. Here's the M.O. - Solicitation. To maximize entries, moneymaking awards programs do email blasts. JM Northern is no exception--if you get on its list you'll be relentlessly spammed with calls for entry to any or all of its fifteen "festivals." - High entry fees. For ...

  Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware Have you recently been solicited by a company called Bloggingbooks that wants to publish your blog in book form? Millions of people share their point of view with the world in real time – This is how blogs have become part of our everyday lives. Blogs focus on the present and thereby provide continuous commentary on daily happenings. Events and content, that are presented in a chronological order on the internet, get a new dimension through books. By turning blogs into books we create a systematic snapshots through collecting, compiling, categorizing and commenting. The eccentric English is no accident: Bloggingbooks is a German company--and not just any German company, either. As its domain registration information shows , it's part of what's probably the biggest author mill in the world (that's right, it's got PublishAmerica beat): VDM (Verlag Dr. Mueller) . I've written several blog posts about VDM and its multitud...

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware Last summer, I wrote about a police investigation of Michigan-based pay-to-play publisher 2 Moon Press , which closed its doors in May amid competing claims of wrongdoing by its former and current owners. In the process, it left large numbers of authors in the lurch--many of whom had paid thousands of dollars and never seen a single book. Despite the police investigation, dozens of author complaints, an F rating from the BBB (click the Complaints tab to see the kinds of troubles authors encountered), and a lawsuit by at least one author , prosecutors declined to bring charges against former owner Don Semora--even though he has a prior history of fraudulent activity, and has served time in prison--or current owner Melinda Lundy. Sadly, this isn't an unusual outcome. Even where the fraud is egregious and tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars are involved, a combination of bias (it's vanity publishing; authors have only themse...

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware Back in August, I blogged about the latest effort by Cheryl Lee Nunn, owner of vanity publisher American Book Publishing Inc. , to expand her author-fleecing efforts with a network of new publishers, bogus publishing organizations, and triple-barrelled aliases. Following my expose, Nunn slapped ludicrous "for sale" notifications on the websites of the fake orgs and two of the new publishers, Alexis Press and Atlantic National Books. The one that brought her scheme to my attention, however-- All Classic Books --remained active, possibly because it was the only one that had actually recruited authors. Now it appears that Nunn, who runs All Classic Books under the name Rebecca Reece Winslow, is throwing in the towel on All Classic as well. But when you've put a lot of effort into a scheme, it's tough to let it go without at least some return on your investment, right? In a move reminiscent of those Nigerian spam-scams where ...