self-publishing
I’ve heard many blanket statements from clients and those shopping for PR and marketing services in the past 25 years:
One that sticks out more recently, is that radio provides no value. The medium is dead they declare; only podcasts really matter.
After having lunch last week with my colleague and friend Terry Cater, co-owner of Playback Producers, a publicity production company for authors, publicists & podcasters, it seemed a good time to address the truth about radio and podcasts with someone in the trenches.
I’ve heard many a time from clients that radio is dead and podcasts are it. In the same breath, clients ask to be on NPR and a good number believe they are a perfect fit for Glennon Doyle’s podcast We Can Do Hard Things? Unpack this for us, Terry.
Radio is alive and kicking! In fact, 8 in 10 Americans ages 12 and older listen to radio – that’s according to recent data released by Nielson Media Research. Your question comes in a timely fashion – August 20th is National Radio Day. There’s a reason this medium gets an entire day of awareness. Radio has survived the test of time and is often considered a trustworthy source of information. While podcasts seem to be all the rage, there are varying degrees of the quality and listenership of the shows. A podcast can be less established with a modest listenership, less regulated, and harder to find stats (especially when it comes time to figuring out your ROI).
With that said, podcasts are great when targeting a certain audience including fiction readers. Podcasts listeners also tend to be book buyers. In general, for a successful PR campaign, I recommend securing both radio and podcasts interviews to promote your book. Radio interviews will get you conversations with hosts who have a reliable audience and established metrics. Podcast interviews are great if you have a target market. Don’t underestimate the power of radio and be specific when going after podcasts.
Who is your ideal client?
Playback Producers’ ideal client is an author who is open to an honest discussion about the interviews we can score and the PR campaign we can produce for you. While we know everyone would like to be on a top show like NPR All Things Considered or Glennon’s podcast, we want a client who will listen to our candid advice on the number and type of shows we can book. This is because not everyone will get interviewed on those coveted shows. It’s always our goal to get you the most exposure possible, but we want to manage your expectations. Playback’s been doing this for almost 20 years, so we can help steer you in the right and fruitful direction.
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If you ever have a marketing and PR question, feel free to email me – am@getredpr.com – or drop a comment in the Writer Unboxed Facebook Group and tag me @Ann-Marie Nieves. I’ll do my best to answer in future posts. This question was posed by Leslie Budewitz last week and it’s a great one. Let’s unpack.
Last month’s post on book bans opened with a quote from historian Thomas Zimmer, which I’ll repeat here for reference:
There is indeed something going on in America, and it does make a lot of people…really uncomfortable. We are in the midst of a profound renegotiation of speech norms and of who gets to define them. And that can be a messy process at times. But it’s not “cancel culture.” From a democratic perspective, it is necessary, and it is progress.
I believe this is an accurate statement of where we are culturally, and that one of the most apparent arenas undergoing renegotiation is publishing. One specific example of that is the increasing role of sensitivity readers, especially in YA fiction, though the practice is extending to adult fiction, film, and TV.
The major impetus behind the implementation of sensitivity readers was publishing’s recognition of the obvious fact that it was overwhelmingly white—and that white writers, in the wake of the social justice movement that emerged in the wake of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, wanted to address that imbalance by writing across racial and ethnic lines.
The results were, shall we say, mixed. White authors were taken to task for patronizing, stereotypical, or harmful representations of minorities or for resorting to racial tropes in their work.
In September 2015, author Corinne Duyvis created the hashtag #OwnVoices as a way to recommend books on Twitter that featured authors who shared the diverse identity of their main characters. At the same time, publishers and agents began subtly (or not so subtly) discouraging white writers from “straying from their lane” in writing about protagonists or even secondary characters outside their personal realm of “lived experience.”
The sensitivity reader emerged as a possible solution to the problem of authors needing input into the lives of members of diverse communities different from their own race, ethnicity, gender identity, faith, and so on. This was done to help prevent any more representations deemed “problematic,” a euphemism that rather quickly became a new term of art.
The Term “Sensitivity” Itself is “Problematic”
In a Writer’s Digest article titled, “The Problem with Sensitivity Readers Isn’t What You Think It Is”), author Anna Hecker remarked:
“Sensitivity” … is a loaded word if there ever was one. It suggests thin skins and easily bruised emotions—a potentially dangerous combination if one perceives these readers as the gatekeepers to publication (which, it should be pointed out, they are generally not).
No wonder the censorship watchdogs are wringing their hands. The term “sensitivity reader” may be triggering to the very people who loathe the term “triggering.”
Consequently, some have chosen to use the terms “authenticity readers” or “diversity readers” instead.
There. Solved it.
If only.
For a distinctly contrarian view, we can turn to author Larry Correia, self-described “Writer, Merchant of Death (retired), Firearms Instructor, Accountant.”
A Sensitivity Reader is usually some expert on Intersectional Feminism or Cismale Gendernormative Fascism or some other made up goofiness who a publisher brings in to look for anything “problematic” in a manuscript. And since basically everything is problematic to somebody they won’t be happy until they suck all the joy out of the universe. It […]
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If you’re a fan of epic fantasy or of Fantasy BookTube, our guest today will need no introduction. For the rest of you, Philip Chase is medievalist with a PhD in English Literature. He has taught courses on writing, medieval literature, and fantasy literature, among other things. His special interests include Old English, Old Norse, Middle English, nineteenth-century medievalism, comparative mythology, and fantasy. Other inspirations include time spent in places like Germany, the United Kingdom, Nepal, and the Northeast and Northwest of the United States.
Those of us who are fans of his eponymous YouTube channel, which is dedicated to exploring fantasy literature, have come to know him affectionately as Dr. Fantasy (after a regular segment on his channel). Many of us have also recently come to know him as the author of The Edan Trilogy, which begins with his recent debut, The Way of Edan. I was lucky enough to get an early chance to read, and I can tell you that his expertise and dedication shine through in every sentence of this wonderful book. I’m a fan twice over!
I also had the honor of hosting the discussion below, in an effort to ascertain the root causes—and lifelong consequences—of an affliction I share with today’s interviewee: a fervent love of fantasy. Please help me to welcome Dr. Fantasy himself, Philp Chase, to WU.
Vaughn Roycroft: You and I met in the comments of your YouTube channel. You’ve gained quite a large following there (rightfully so, in this fan’s humble opinion). Can you tell us your Fantasy BookTube origin story, and a bit about how running your channel fits into your writing life? It seems the channel has been a boon to the recent release of your debut. Did you have publication or platform-building in mind from the onset? How do you see the channel fitting into your career going forward?
Philip Chase: My YouTube channel began a little more than three years ago as an attempt to enhance a course I created and had been teaching for years at my college on fantasy literature. In the beginning, I imagined the channel as a forum where my students and I could exchange ideas on readings and on fantasy as a genre. I was completely ignorant of the community of book lovers on YouTube – I had no clue what a “TBR” or “tag video” was – but was delighted to find myself suddenly in the midst of so many people who love the genre that I believe is incredibly rich and deserving of critical exploration. My channel has always been part of the same passion that feeds my teaching, my reading, and my writing. It has turned out to be a lot of work to run a YouTube channel, but it rarely feels like work because of how much I enjoy reading and discussing fantasy literature and writing. Since I recently self-published the first book in a trilogy that I’ve been working on for more than 18 years, the channel has indeed become a boon for getting the word out. I would like to continue the conversations that take place on my channel within the “BookTube” community as a […]
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When this article, The Ten Awful Truths About Publishing by Steve Piersanti of Berrett-Koehler Publishers, landed in my inbox, I breathed a deep sigh of relief. Warning: It’s a positively frightening read that will make you want to hide underneath your covers… or hurl a glass across the room. If there is bourbon in that glass, down it quickly, read the article, and then throw the glass across the room.
So why did I breathe a sigh of relief?
Because someone else far more important than me said it – all the things I’ve been thinking, saying, that have made me change the way I work. A publisher said the things. The things about the many, many books on the market; how they sell or don’t; and the constant change due to disruptors (TikTok) and disruptions (supply chain issues).
So now we know about The 10 Awful Truths about Book Publishing. And now we understand that we have to think differently, reset expectations, and get to work. But first, we take inventory:
What’s the key takeaway for you in Steve Piersanti’s article? Are you ready to take inventory? What are […]
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Kathleen Troy and Dylan
I’m very excited to present today’s Author Up Close featured writer to the WU community. I met Kathleen Troy through her publicist and have been delighted to follow her journey to publication. Kathleen is an author, movie producer, and a writing and law professor at Cypress College, but her passion is dog training. She has combined her love of writing with her love of dogs in her Middle Grade mystery series Dylan’s Dog Squad. Three books in, Kathleen’s learned a lot about the industry, including why it’s important for authors to understand the difference between publishing their work and finding distribution for it. In this Q&A, Kathleen shares lots of valuable insight, and one of the most important lessons she says she’s learned along the way: find good people who can help you achieve your goals.
GW: Thanks for agreeing to share your writing and publishing experiences with the Writer Unboxed community. I like to start by asking writers about their author origin story; it’s kind of like a superhero origin story but with a pen. What’s yours?
KT: Writing has always been a part of my life. When I was growing up, if I had a bad day at school, I just came home and wrote myself a better one. No denial there. In undergrad, I minored in journalism. My father always liked to read my stories. When he was diagnosed with cancer at forty-seven, we were told from the onset it was fatal. So when he was in the hospital, I started writing a murder mystery novel for adults. When I visited with him, I would read him a new chapter. Sadly, he died before I finished the book, and I put it away.
One night I was at a very bad play, and I told my friend that my book was better than the play. He said, “Everyone always says that.” I insisted my book really was better and decided to finish writing it. I got an agent on my first try and an offer on my first submission. I was excited until I learned the offer was to sell the novel outright. It would no longer be mine. I really, really wanted to be published but I turned down the offer. I’d written the book for my father, and I realized that I didn’t want to sell a memory.
GW: You write Middle Grade fiction, and specifically, you’ve written a series about a group of friends and their dog, Dylan, solving mysteries together. How did the idea for the series come about?
KT: The Dylan’s Dog Squad Series is largely based upon Dylan, an American Cocker Spaniel, and his true-life experiences, adventures, and training.
In the series, Casey’s brother Aiden, an American professor living in South Korea, bought Dylan but got frustrated with the dog and sent him to Casey, his twelve-year-old brother in California. Casey is thrilled to have a dog, his mother less so. Casey and Dylan have thirty days: Casey to learn the responsibilities of dog ownership and Dylan to learn to be a good dog—or else. They form an inseparable bond, are never apart, and, in each book, they continue to grow as a unit.
The idea for the […]
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If you’re considering self-publishing and wanting to maximize potential income, do yourself a favor and take a peek at Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform.
If you haven’t already heard about Kindle Vella, it’s a place where you can serialize your novel over an extended period, instead of publishing one whole story all at once. Instead of chapters, you are publishing “episodes,” much like a television series.
This isn’t a new concept. Serialized novels first popped up as early as the 17th century and really took off in England during the 19th century when novels were published episodically in newspapers and magazines.
This allowed poorer overworked readers to enjoy stories that would have been too expensive for them to read as leather-bound volumes. In the modern era, Kindle Vella readers are reading on their phones, often during short breaks in their busy days, like while standing in line at the DMV or waiting in the carpool lane.
There was (and still is) a benefit to authors for writing serially. Many unknown 19th century authors were able to establish an audience and grow in popularity by first publishing in serialized format, including but not limited to Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Many modern-day authors are having similar success, building their fan bases through Kindle Vella. Why couldn’t this be you?
In a nutshell. The first three episodes of every Kindle Vella story are free to readers. After which, readers must redeem tokens to unlock future episodes. The number of tokens it takes to unlock an episode corresponds to the length of the episode. For example it takes 6 tokens to unlock an episode that is in the 600-699 word length. It takes 12 tokens to unlock and episode that is 1200-1299 words in length.
Readers can buy tokens in bundles of 200 ($1.99), 525 ($4.99), 1100 ($9.99), or 1700 ($14.99).
As they read, readers can give feedback such as marking your story as a “favorite” or giving an episode a “thumbs up.” This feedback will affect your bonus. More on that later.
How to get started. It is ridiculously easy to set up an author account. If you do not already have an Amazon account, start there. Once you have an Amazon account, access Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). Once you sign in to KDP, access the “Kindle Vella Library.”
After that, KDP will take you through the step-by-step process of entering your name/pen name, the title of your story, the genre, and the key words.
As for the cover image, you don’t have to pay for an expensive book cover. Traditional book covers aren’t even allowed. Instead, choose a simple image with no words on it that conveys the tone, theme, and genre of your story. You can find many images for free online. For example, explore Canva. The dimensions of a Kindle Vella cover image should be 1600 x 1600 px.
Here are some examples of cover images from Kindle Vella (the platform will make your square image round):
Writing the Perfect Episode. Kindle Vella allows episodes to be anywhere from 600-5000 words; however, there does seem to be a “sweet spot” with readers. Because they’re often reading on their phones to […]
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So much is expected of authors these days: not only the writing and editing of our work, but also promotion, speaking, social media, newsletters…the list goes on.
One efficiency tool used by many authors to help with promotion and social media is Canva, an online graphic design tool that can be used either on a computer or via an app on your phone. The benefits of Canva are endless: designs are professional-looking, easy to create, downloadable, and entirely customizable. You can mix and match designs (copy & paste is your friend here!) to achieve precisely the design you’re wanting. Canva also has an incredible “Help Center” full of design tutorials and content suggestions.
Most Canva design tools are free to use, though an upgraded “pro” version is available for $120/year for anyone desiring premium content. This gives you access to more fonts, branding kits, scheduled social media, and more.
Below, I’ve listed several design ideas for authors looking to get started with Canva. Or, for those of you already using the tool, perhaps something below will spur a new idea!
Canva design idea #1: E-books
This design idea is great for social media to advertise and promote that your book is available in e-book format. Simply choose a design template that you like (try element keyword searches like “kindle” or “ebook”.) Then, upload an image of your book’s cover and overlay it onto the template.
Don’t forget to utilize Canva’s resizing tool, too: it can quickly resize images to fit Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and so on! No need to recreate the image every time.
In this image below, as indicated by the red arrow, I’ve overlaid my book’s cover onto a “blank” e-reader. I can then download this image and use across any social media.
Canva design idea #2: Audiobooks
The process for this is almost identical to the above, however I used the keyword search “audiobook.” Remember, as you look through Canva’s image results, try to choose ideas that are aligned with your social media or brand aesthetic.
Also, for both e-books and audiobooks, don’t forget that by posting promotional images, you also need to include purchase links so your followers can buy what you’re promoting!
In this image below, as indicated by the red arrow, I’ve overlaid my book’s cover onto a “blank” phone screen, which is situated next to a pair of headphones. I can then download this image and use across any social media.
Canva design idea #3: Press kits and speaker resumes
Press kits make an excellent addition to your website, so event organizers can quickly access key information about your work, location, social media reach, etc. Similarly, speaker resumes are beneficial if you’re seeking speaking engagements or want to partner with a speaker’s bureau.
Thankfully, Canva has countless templates for this. Whether you’re going for something edgy, whimsical, basic, or anything in between, you’re bound to find a design you like. Below are a few screenshots to give you an idea of Canva’s offerings in this space.
Canva design idea #4: Graphics for websites and newsletters
Hate pulling together imagery for your website and newsletters? You’re in luck: Canva can do so much of this heavy lifting for you. Below is an image I pulled together for a Writer Unboxed post about Read More
In a recent email from author Emily Kimelman, she laid out a whole new model for self-publishing that I found especially intriguing, and I thought the Writer Unboxed community would as well.
Emily is the best-selling author of two series—the Sydney Rye mysteries and the Starstruck thrillers—as well as the Kiss Chronicles urban fantasy series under the name Emily Reed. Spending her early years in the Soviet Union (her father was a foreign correspondent for the Philadelphia Enquirer), she caught the wanderlust bug at a young age and has traveled the world from Mongolia to Costa Rica to Spain and beyond, and she often bases her books on her experiences abroad.
(Personal note: Emily is also my wife’s best friend, and they’ve been “sisters from different misters” since they met at age twelve while attending The Baldwin School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.)
I recently invited Emily to share her publishing experiences and her unique new venture with our readers.
Why did you originally decide to self-publish?
In 2005, I was in my twenties and coming up with my life plan.
I wanted to write mystery novels because I enjoyed reading them, and writing them seemed like the most fun way to make a living.
I researched how to support myself as an author and decided I’d write a stunningly good book, get an agent, then a publisher. Then they’d take it from there while I wrote in cafes around the world with my dog sleeping peacefully at my feet and my fingers clacking away on my keyboard.
I did write a stunningly good book (it took 5 years), and I did get an agent …but the rest didn’t fall into place until I became my own publisher.
I’m entrepreneurial by nature and watched the self-publishing market emerge from a shameful little corner of the internet into a powerful force traditional publishers were ignoring. So in 2011, when my agent still hadn’t sold my book, I figured I had nothing to lose by going indie.
How have you monetized your books – in particular, share with our readers “how it works” with Amazon.
Retailers like Amazon pay between 30-70% royalties depending on the cover price.
While self-publishing gives authors more control and higher royalties than traditional publishing, retailers don’t share any data—like who bought your books. You’re basically a wholesaler who is allowed to set the retail price.
Also, Amazon runs ads for other products—and books—on your titles’ pages which makes sending your readers there kind of a gamble—they can easily be distracted before clicking the buy button.
How did this part of your career go?
It went great! And I still sell my books on all major retailers.
The better I became at advertising and promoting myself, the more money I made. But I also started to understand how disadvantaged I was compared to others’ selling digital products online.
When you’re spending multi-five figures on ads, and not getting any data from your traffic, you’re paying to give Amazon a lot of customers.
The first month I grossed six figures and retailers kept 35%, I knew it was time to move toward direct sales.
BookFunnel, a delivery service for ebooks that indie authors use to send out ARC copies and reader magnets, integrated with Shopify and other sales platforms a few years ago. But until […]
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In talking with other writers, especially those early in their journey, I’ve often said that talent isn’t the most important thing. Talent, for the most part, is not actually what gets you published. Talent is great, don’t get me wrong, and your journey toward holding your published book in your hands will be easier if you have some. But plenty of talented writers write a great book and then, poof, it goes nowhere. They don’t succeed, and they quit.
I’m sure you see where this is going. The quitting is the problem. Far more important than talent is persistence.
So persistence is the most important thing. Nobody can stop you from being published but you. You keep trying, and you keep going, and you work hard, and maybe it takes three months or maybe it takes twenty-three years, but if you can stay with it despite rejections, setbacks, and maybe even some outright failures, you can make it happen.
But would it surprise you that talent isn’t even the second most important thing?
I was thinking about this as I dove back into the draft of the third novel in my epic fantasy series The Five Queendoms. Writing fantasy wasn’t in my original plan. Actually, writing four historical novels under the name Greer Macallister wasn’t in my original plan either — those of you who know me know there was actually a name before that and a novel before that, one that had little in common with my best-known and most successful work. It was published and I was thrilled, but sales were poor, and it became clear I wasn’t going to sell a book under that name again.
So the plan changed. Greer Macallister happened, and I’ve had nothing but success under that name, having a fabulous time writing historical fiction centered on extraordinary women. But then I got this “feminist Game of Thrones” idea I couldn’t shake, and the plan changed again: not leaving behind my historical fiction career, but branching out from it, adding on. Greer Macallister writes historical fiction and G.R. Macallister writes epic fantasy. It was an idea and now it’s a reality.
Persistence is the most important thing. But right behind it? Is flexibility.
When you’re pregnant, they highly recommend you come up with a birth plan, covering everything from when and whether you want to be offered an epidural to what music you want playing in the delivery room. But anyone who’s been through it knows that when push comes to shove (as it were), that birth plan goes out the window. There are just too many variables. You can’t control all the things you would need to control in order to follow that plan to the letter.
Your writing career is like that. You can and should plan for it: what do you want to write? How do you want to publish? But persistence doesn’t mean sticking to that plan come hell or high water. You need the persistence to see things through, but you also need the flexibility to figure out that if things aren’t working the way you want, you’ve got to find another path forward.
Q: Has your writing career required flexibility? Do you agree it’s almost, but not quite, as important as persistence?
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Whether you’re an indie, trad, or unpublished writer, you can benefit from turning your manuscript into an ebook. Here are several reasons you might want to:
So, let’s talk about how to create your very own EPUB 3 file in Scrivener 3. First, make sure you’ve set up your section types under Project>Project Settings>Section Types, and assigned them as needed (see this post for a review).
Unless you’re trying to get fancy, creating a good looking ebook can be super quick and simple. Follow along below to create your own.
Choosing Your Format
The first thing you need to do is tell Scrivener what kind of file you’re creating. Here’s how:
NOTE: There are very few settings that you need to “hard code” into an ebook. For example, the font is mostly irrelevant since the viewer can change the font on their e-reader. E-readers will retain relative size (e.g. between headers and main text), but the person reading can also enlarge or reduce overall text size, so the base font size also doesn’t matter. Italic and bold fonts are retained, just like with other output types. Most modern e-readers support highlighting, bullets, images, text color, and hyperlinks, but they may appear different than in Scrivener.
Choosing Your Content
In the right-hand column, make sure you’re viewing the Contents pane. If not, click the Contents button at the top (looks like a bulleted list).
Select the checkboxes for the files in your manuscript that you want to include in the output.
Assigning Section Types
Be sure that the section type for each file is correct. If you have a file that’s an exception to the defaults you set in Project Settings, you can change it by clicking the dropdown menu under the Section Type column heading.
Section Types appearing in gray italics have been automatically assigned based on your rules in the Project Settings. Those you’ve changed manually are listed in black, regular text.
Adjusting the Look
Click the Assign Section Layouts button in the center column to ensure that each of your section types has the desired layout applied to it.
To assign a section type to a section layout, do the following.
Modifying MetaData
Click the MetaData button at the top (looks like a luggage tag) and make sure your name and book title are correct.
If desired, fill in the Subjects (e.g. retailer keywords) […]
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Urban Fantasy Author, Mel Todd
Despite Mel Todd’s warning that we shouldn’t use her as a role model for our own self-publishing journeys, I think indie and traditionally published authors can learn a lot from this sci-fi and urban fantasy author who pivoted from writing in a genre she didn’t love, to writing stories on her own terms. Below, the author and creator of Bad Ash Publishing—the publishing company that houses her twenty-plus titles—shares insights into her career, her missteps, and how she went from writing fanfiction to making over $150K in one year.
GW: Thanks for agreeing to share your writing and publishing experiences with the Writer Unboxed community. The first thing I’d like to ask is what genre(s) do you write in, and why and when did you start writing with the goal of publication?
MT: I probably first thought about it seriously in 2011. I published my first novel in 2013. Originally I started in romance (mistake, I’m not that good at romance), then I had my world shatter in 2016, and I realized I’ve always read sci-fi, fantasy, and urban fantasy, so why wasn’t I writing that? I dove back in, and in 2017 published my first work of Urban Science Fiction. I haven’t looked back.
GW: Why did you choose the self-publishing route?
MT: There are a few reasons. One – I had a friend that I knew (and still know) from my fanfiction days (which I still write) who had gone into self-publishing and was picked up by 47 North. His second year he paid more in taxes than double what I earned that year, and I was making a good salary at the day job at the time. He encouraged me to do it, but I made that romance mistake, and I paid for that with a few years of lost opportunities. Two – I am not good at writing mainstream stories. Agents and publishers need stories that resonate with the mainstream. My stuff is weird, and I consciously make the choice to write stories without a romance subplot now.
GW: Tell us a bit about your self-publishing journey.
MT: Laughs – I don’t mind sharing, but it would not be wise to use me as your role model for your journey. I’ve been writing fanfiction since about 2004. And in my heyday, I was getting 10k hits in the first 24 hours of posting a chapter. So, when I started to self-pub, I leveraged that existing audience. Well, the two romance novels I wrote went nowhere. Partially, it was my lack of marketing know-how (remember this was back in 2013 and 2015 that I published these) and that the fanfic I wrote wasn’t romance. Yes, I was a bit dense, but it’s complicated.
In 2017 I wrote the first book in my Kaylid Chronicles, then started publishing that series in 2018. That year I earned $6K. I kept writing and trying. In 2019 I earned under $4k. I’m sitting there going, well this series isn’t working. Let’s try a new one. I started my Twisted Luck series—a zero sex/romance Urban Fantasy—and published book one of that series in 2020. Something about it, and the following novels, caught fire, and I earned a bit […]
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Please join us in welcoming Victoria Strauss to Writer Unboxed as a new regular contributor. Victoria is not only a multi-published novelist and author of short stories, she is the voice of Writer Beware–a group dedicated to empowering writers by unmasking writing scams and schemes. We’ve been fans of Writer Beware and Victoria Strauss for as long as we’ve existed here as a site, and we could not be happier to have her as a member of the WU team. Welcome, Victoria!
When I do presentations and Q&As, I’m often asked to name the most common scheme or scam writers need to watch out for.
Usually, I have to think a moment before I answer—not just because the universe of writer-focused predation is constantly evolving (for instance, there are far fewer fee-charging literary agents now than there were when Writer Beware was founded), but because the ways in which writers can be tricked and exploited are so many and various that it’s hard to choose.
These days, though, I can respond without hesitation. By far the most prevalent writer-focused scams are solicitation scams.
Solicitation scammers contact writers out of the blue with publishing-related offers that seem too good to be true. A literary agency is interested in your work! A prestigious publisher wants to acquire your book! A film producer wants to turn your novel into a movie! A marketing company can expose you to millions of potential fans!
You know the old adage, though: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. In reality, these offers are not about boosting your career or raising your profile. Whatever enticing carrot a solicitation scammer may dangle before you, the real aim is to get your money.
Solicitation scams and schemes are not new. Back in the days of snail mail, costly print vanity publisher Dorrance Publishing was notorious for soliciting submissions from copyright registration and magazine subscription lists. (Dorrance has re-tooled itself for the digital age, so its solicitations now come via email.)
Profiteering contest and awards programs have also long been prolific solicitors (for instance, J.M. Northern Media, which runs multiple high-entry-fee “festivals”), as have bogus Who’s Who registries. Predatory author mill Omniscriptum regularly solicits submissions to its many imprints, and if you write nonfiction, you may have been contacted by Close-up TV News, a pay-to-play “news” program that has been chasing customers for nearly two decades.
Over the past three years, though, the volume of solicitations has exploded, driven by a huge rise in publishing-related scams from overseas, and also by the pandemic, as in-person networking and marketing opportunities for writers have dwindled and online activity has increased. Self-published and small press authors are the solicitors’ favorite marks. But any writer can be a target.
WHAT YOU MAY ENCOUNTER
Fake Literary Agents and Agencies
Real, reputable literary agents—whose inboxes are overflowing with submissions and who have no need to solicit clients–rarely reach out directly to writers they don’t already represent. For scammers, on the other hand, cold-call solicitation is their main recruitment method. And large numbers of them are posing as literary agents and agencies.
Fake agency solicitations typically involve strategically […]
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Please join us in welcoming Tessa Barbosa as our newest WU contributor! Tessa will see her debut novel published next year, and we’re thrilled to share the journey with her. Welcome, Tessa!
When your first book is about to come out, there’s this odd transition you need to make to thinking of yourself as a public figure. If you are self-publishing, then you’re the one responsible for marketing everything yourself and you have to put yourself out there. But even if you have a traditional book publisher, you’ll still have to do promotion on social media, interviews, and work on your online platform. Even if you don’t feel different, the way other people perceive you might be.
I’ve always been a private person, so the transition doesn’t feel natural, but here are some things I’ve found help make it a little easier:
Stick to the social media that you enjoy
Pick one or two platforms that you enjoy. If you try to do more than that, you probably won’t have time to devote to all of them in a meaningful way. And if you aren’t having fun, or engaging often, people can tell.
Decide how much you’re comfortable sharing
Some people are pretty open about their lives, while others are strict about not posting personal information. This is something you should decide straight away, because all an author ‘brand’ really is, is YOU. Not all of you, but the pieces you want to present to the world. You should be the one in control of it.
Set access boundaries
Think about how much direct access you want to give to strangers on the Internet. You don’t have to keep your DMs open to everyone. You don’t have to follow back unless you want to. Blocking or muting to preserve your mental health is perfectly fine. You may want to consider removing a contact form from your website, and either setting up a dedicated email address for book inquiries, or directing people to an agent or publicist. In general, it’s probably a good idea to keep your personal accounts separate.
Treat your words like they mean something
Consider how your words might affect the people you tag or reply to. Even if you don’t have a lot of followers, as an author you have authority in some spaces that others do not. It’s smart to be conscious of situational power dynamics. For example, it’s probably best to avoid bringing harassment to small accounts for things that don’t matter. This isn’t advice to avoid talking about inequality, racism, or discrimination, only that you should be careful not to escalate a situation when it’s not warranted. Do you really need to dunk on a tweet that 50 other people have already commented on? When is your input most useful?
Be happy for other people’s successes
This is the best way to build community online. Boost when you can! Give compliments! Gush about books you enjoyed! So many things in this industry are out of your control. A little jealousy is natural, but it’s also a waste of energy, because their successes take nothing away from yours. Lift people up behind you and offer help when you can. Writing is a tough, unpredictable industry, with so many ups and downs. Other writers are […]
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