Bowker likes to claim that their ISBN book serial numbers (the ones that come with a free side of credit card fraud) can be used to count the number...
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Beware the Vanity Press in Sheep’s Clothing
Vanity presses like Author Solutions will do everything they can to hide the fact they are running a scam. Smaller operations will change their name so they can try...
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Updated: Simon & Schuster’s Vanity Press Launches Writing Contest to Exploit More Authors
Update: This post was originally published in November 2017, and was updated in March 2018 to reflect S&S's ongoing exploitation of authors. Of all the major publishers, Simon &...
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8 Ways For Authors to Waste Their Money
Publishing a book can get quite expensive. A good cover designer can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars, and the editorial costs alone can set you back even more....
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Books-a-Million Outsourced Its Self-Pub Unit to an Iffy Services Company
When Books-a-Million launched its self-pub division, BAM Publishing, in 2015, it outsourced the actual work to FastPencil, a respectable publishing services company. FatPencil was still the tech partner when BAM...
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Scammers Cheated Their Way on to the Kindle Best-Seller List Yesterday, But to What End?
The strangest case of scamming in the Kindle Store crossed my desk on Sunday, and I am still scratching my head. On Sunday several authors started commenting on Kboards...
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B&N Cuts Ties with Vanity Press Author Solutions
Yesterday's story about the Nook Press platform has turned up a newsworthy detail about the platform which had so far gone unreported (I would also have missed it, had David...
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Buy a Book From Packt Publishing, and They’ll Bill You for an Unwanted Subscription
Packt Publishing was at one time one of the better technical publishers. They sell their ebooks DRM-free at reasonable prices and used to come highly recommended. But after their...
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Innocent Authors Are Getting Burned in Amazon’s Fight Against KU Bot Farms
Remember earlier this year when authors were being punished for putting a table of contents at the end of their ebooks? As David Gaughran inferred and Amazon confirmed, those authors...
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The Star Trek Writing Contest Was a Feeder Pool for Vanity Press Author Solutions
When Simon & Schuster revived the Star Trek: Strange New World Writing Contest last October, I was dismayed to learn that S&S was letting its vanity press business partner, Author...
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Amazon Comments on TOC Crackdown, Inadvertently Confirms Kindle Unlimited Page Count Scam
News broke on Friday that Amazon was cracking down on authors and publishers who had put their TOCs at the end of the Kindle ebook, rather than at the...
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The Bookseller Whitewashed Author Solutions With Puff Piece Interview
The Bookseller has always been weak when it came to covering the Author Solutions and the more reprehensible parts of the publishing industry. It largely ignored the several lawsuits...
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S&S Revives Star Trek Writing Contest, Lets Vanity Press Author Solutions Run It
Starting in 1998 and running through 2007, Simon & Schuster published an annual Star Trek anthology consisting of stories by amateur writers. The stories were selected through the Star Trek:...
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Forgotten Books Buys 500,000 ISBNs, Makes Bid for Title of World’s Largest Spam and Scam Book Publisher
Buyer Beware. A "publisher" by the name of Forgotten Books has just gave us another reminder that there is enough money in ebooks to attract scammers. Forgotten Books supports a website where it...
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PSA: BestNovel.Website is a Scam of Some Kind, But Not Necessarily a Pirate Site
There's a link going around on Twitter this week that a terrible new pirate site has popped up. Yesterday Lisa Bradley tweeted: Authors may want to google their names...
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