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  Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware An article in PW last week caught my eye .  WinePress Publishing, a Christian self-publishing company, has closed its doors, according to an announcement yesterday on the company’s Web site. The house had been plagued in recent years with accusations of fraud, complaints from authors and former employees, and financial problems. WinePress itself had filed a number of lawsuits against its critics and unhappy authors. Last May, WinePress staff member Malcolm Fraser was convicted on two counts of first-degree child rape and two counts of first-degree molestation of a child. Fraser was a staff member of WinePress Publishing and a pastor of Sound Doctrine Church in Enumclaw, Wash., which owns WinePress. Fraser avowed his innocence, as did WinePress executive publisher Timothy Williams, who retired as senior pastor from Sound Doctrine Church five years ago and stated that no church funds had been used in Fraser’s defense....

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware Here at Writer Beware, we love the weird stuff--the nutty, fring-y, even, dare I say, totally freaking insane things that are always cropping up at the boundaries of the publishing world, often spawned by people who haven't really taken the time to think things through. Or maybe they're just idiots. Hard to tell sometimes. So...playing now on Kickstarter, a project called Story Surgeon (I've embedded a screenshot at the bottom of this post to immortalize the concept). Created by aspiring author Ryan Hancock, Story Surgeon is: An eBook notation app that saves your personal edits as a separate file, and can be shared with anyone who owns the original eBook. In other words, Story Surgeon is an app that enables anyone to alter a published book in any way they like, and spread the alterations around at will. Although it will be a complicated app to develop, the idea is simple. Buy an eBook in ePub format and download it to your iPad...

  Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware   Last week a literary agent contacted me on Twitter. "Ever heard of these folks?" she asked. "They've been spamming us all day." The link she gave me led to a service called Agent Artery . Agent Artery is a service with both writers and agents in mind, helping literary agencies and agents manage and keep on top of requests for representation from new authors, and helping writers to easily keep track of their submissions. Our system has been designed to provide both agents and authors with better tracking and processing when it comes to managing submissions. As readers of this blog will know, such services--all of which purport to give you an advantage by streamlining the submission process with a one-stop-shopping approach--are nothing new. I've written a number of times about query blast services (and why agents and editors hate them ), and also about manuscript submission services and why they'r...

  Posted by Michael Capobianco for Writer Beware I was contemplating what to write for my first Writer Beware blog post, when a subject popped up out of the blue, packed with all kinds of fascinating questions. Some of you may remember when SFWA tangled with the online “digital library” Scribd back in 2007. Scribd was loaded with unauthorized uploads of copyrighted material, but SFWA screwed up big time by sending a sort-of DMCA notice (it wasn’t really) to get works by many sf writers removed from the site. It was an embarrassment for SFWA, and over time made it less and less likely that the organization would do anything directly about illegal uploads, even though a plan had been developed to do so for members who had specifically authorized SFWA to act as their agent. Since everything to do with online piracy left a decidedly bad taste in my mouth, I decided I would not go looking for illegally uploaded copies of my or other authors’ works, and I didn’t check to see if Scrib...

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware Welcome to 2014! (I've been hibernating for the past week, working on revisions for my latest novel, so this is actually the first time I've written out the date.) Every January, I look back over this blog and pick out what I think were the most useful, interesting, and/or important posts of the previous year. Here goes. JANUARY Vanity Publisher Vantage Press Closes its Doors :  Founded in 1949 as a classic print vanity publisher, Vantage attempted to adapt to the 21st century by re-branding itself as a self-publishing service, while still charging the same enormous fees. But at the end of 2012 it did a bunk--closing its doors without notice and leaving authors, who in some cases had paid thousands of dollars for books that were never produced, high and dry. FEBRUARY Second-Class Contracts at Random House's Hydra Digital Imprint : Launched with much fanfare in late 2012, Random House's digital-only genre imprints (Hydra, A...