Scam

Updated: Simon & Schuster’s Vanity Press Launches Writing Contest to Exploit More Authors

15 March, 2018 // 4 Comments

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 & Schuster is [Read More ...]

8 Ways For Authors to Waste Their Money

26 November, 2017 // 22 Comments

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. While there are many important [Read More ...]

Books-a-Million Outsourced Its Self-Pub Unit to an Iffy Services Company

6 February, 2017 // 2 Comments

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 [Read More ...]

Scammers Cheated Their Way on to the Kindle Best-Seller List Yesterday, But to What End?

31 October, 2016 // 9 Comments

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 that obviously fake ebooks [Read More ...]

B&N Cuts Ties with Vanity Press Author Solutions

26 October, 2016 // 3 Comments

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 Gaughran not brought it [Read More ...]

Buy a Book From Packt Publishing, and They’ll Bill You for an Unwanted Subscription

23 June, 2016 // 7 Comments

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 latest stunt I do [Read More ...]

Innocent Authors Are Getting Burned in Amazon’s Fight Against KU Bot Farms

17 June, 2016 // 17 Comments

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 were getting [Read More ...]

The Star Trek Writing Contest Was a Feeder Pool for Vanity Press Author Solutions

5 May, 2016 // 5 Comments

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 Solutions, [Read More ...]

Amazon Comments on TOC Crackdown, Inadvertently Confirms Kindle Unlimited Page Count Scam

14 March, 2016 // 30 Comments

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 beginning. On Monday Amazon confirmed the report [Read More ...]

The Bookseller Whitewashed Author Solutions With Puff Piece Interview

29 February, 2016 // 3 Comments

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 filed against [Read More ...]

S&S Revives Star Trek Writing Contest, Lets Vanity Press Author Solutions Run It

13 October, 2015 // 5 Comments

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: [Read More ...]

Forgotten Books Buys 500,000 ISBNs, Makes Bid for Title of World’s Largest Spam and Scam Book Publisher

7 July, 2015 // 22 Comments

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 [Read More ...]

PSA: BestNovel.Website is a Scam of Some Kind, But Not Necessarily a Pirate Site

6 June, 2015 // 8 Comments

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 & "bestnovel(.)website to [Read More ...]

Scammers Now Trolling Indie Authors With Bogus DMCA Notices

3 March, 2015 // 8 Comments

The copyright notice and takedown provisions of the DMCA may help creators by shielding sites like Youtube and the Kindle Store from liability, but that same provision can still be used as a weapon [Read More ...]

Got an Unpublished College Thesis? This Vanity Press Will Help You Get it into Print

24 March, 2014 // 3 Comments

Self-published authors have long known to be wary of vanity presses like Author Solutions and other Penguin Random House subsidiaries, and this may have inspired one predatory operation to pursue a [Read More ...]

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