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Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware NEWS FLASH: on May 4, 2017, Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter filed eight felony charges and one misdemeanor charge (apiece) against Ryan and Richard Tate for alleged fraudulent business practices. For details, see my post: The Law Finally Catches Up With Tate Publishing & Enterprises . A summary of this extremely long post: so-called Christian vanity publisher stiffs authors, staff, and creditors; gets sued for millions of dollars and fails to show up in court; goes bust with no notice; rises from the dead to seek new victims, only for the founder and CEO to get busted. The tale unfolds in my initial post and the dozens of updates that follow. Most recent news is at the bottom. Since putting this post online, I've received dozens of questions about whether there's a class action lawsuit against Tate. To my knowledge, the answer currently is no. I don't think that's the best option, anyway, because given all the co...

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware I've been getting some questions about the BookLife Prize in Fiction , a new award for unpublished and self-published novels. Prizes include a "brief critical assessment" from Publishers Weekly reviewers for all entrants ( BookLife is owned by PW), a book blurb from "a bestselling or award-winning author" for semi-finalists, and a grand prize of $5,000 for a single winner. BookLife claims to "[tap] the experience, integrity, and authority of Publishers Weekly to help indie authors achieve their goals." It offers a free submission portal for writers who want to submit self-published books for review, along with "editorial content—success stories, interviews, author profiles, how-to pieces, news, and features". There's also a Service Directory , whose DIY entries --some of which are paid ads --are subject to restrictions via BookLife's Terms & Conditions , but otherwise appear to be...

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware I don't often post about personal stuff here. But I wanted to let you all know why I vanished abruptly at the beginning of May (which is also why, for the past couple of years, this blog has been idle for weeks at a time). My mother, Alice Fellows , died on May 14, after a long illness. Probably taken in the early 1950s, when she was in her 30s Who was my mother? There are many ways I can answer that question. I can say that she was born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in 1926 (or possibly 1928--she was famously cagey about her age) in a house that is now on the National Historic Register . That she attended Hudson Strode's famous creative writing class while at the University of Alabama; that the novel she began there, Laurel , was published by Harcourt Brace when she was just 22 , to praise from the New York Times and Kirkus, among others. That, eager to escape the South, she moved to New York City in the early 1950s to attend graduat...