While you are worrying about whether beta readers will steal your ideas, there is a more genuine threat on the horizon.
When offered a publishing contract, please do all your research before you sign. There are a number of fakes and scammers out there, as well as good-intentioned amateurs that don’t know how to get your work to a wide audience. I won’t tell the heartbreaking stories here – there are too many.
Being published badly is worse than being never published.
It can destroy your career and your dreams.
The quick check is to google the publishing house name + scam or warning.
But, to be sure, check with these places first. They aren’t infallible (nothing is) but they can help you protect yourself. They are written and maintained by expereinced writers, editors, publishers and legal folks.
This is really important, so if you are a writer or have writer friends, or you are a writing blog, please reblog it.
Just to let you know, PublishAmerica changed their name to America Star Books.
HEAD’S UP, WRITER TYPES: THIS IS AN IMPORTANT PSA!
Also applies to many so-called freelance sites that are just content mills, and may not pay unless your work is used, even if the contract seems designed otherwise.
Listen, reading these is like legit reading horror stories. When it comes to publishing your writing, always, always, ALWAYS do your research. Not only will it help you avoid scams, but it will also be likely to help you land a much better fit for an agent/publisher/whatever. Knowing more is never going to hurt.
Omg!!! Thanks for the warning! Writers— reblog!
I’ve heard stories like this that are scarier than horror stories. This is an all time worst nightmare for a writer. Everyone reblog and make sure you keep your work safe!
Reblogging again for the links. Also check pred-ed.com and the Absolute Write forum. Then google Publisher’s name + scam and see what comes up. Do NOT use the BBB ratings, they are wholly unsuitable for rating publishers and regularly give A ratings to well-known publishing scams. You can also read my own post on publishing scams, have a link on the left of my blog ( can’t link here, I’m on mobile, sorry).
Equally important to know is that you can SELF-PUBLISH through a number of platforms these days. @ean-amhran and I used Amazon’s CreateSpace and Kindle Direct Publishing to publish both of our books. No editors, no contracts, no finagling with publishers who want to change your materials. Just direct-to-market material.
(Granted, it means you’ve got to do a LOT more work yourself with editing and formatting and cover art, but it’s worth it to miss the headache of trying to bargain with publishing houses or avoid scams.)
Be vigilant, fellow writers!
If you choose to self publish then HAVE A PLAN and think things through.
And hire an editor. Please, for the love of all that is holy, hire an editor. It’s expensive, but you will get a better book out, a better reputation…
If you’re going to publish electronically, make sure you also get someone who can LAY AN EBOOK OUT PROPERLY.
I have spent money on Kindle books, many of them reprints of older works, whose formatting is so messed up as to render them unreadable.
I actually recommend using the Smashwords Style Guide even if you don’t use Smashwords.
It lays out how to neatly format an e-book in a wonderful step by step format, and you can get it free from Smashwords. Just leave off the couple of things that are (very obviously) Smashwords specific.
If you can’t stand dealing with the meticulous detail, then by all means hire somebody, but most people can learn to format an ebook correctly and once you’ve done it a couple of times it takes about an hour tops.
Because the redirects aren’t working for me, I’m going to assume others might have trouble with these links, so for those who need it the URL for the website to Writer Beware is:
These are not publishers’ guilds, notice; you sometimes see scammers trying to defend themselves against Writer Beware exposes by claiming that they’re “small press” or “indie” and Big Publishing is somehow out to get them – but all of those guilds are run by and for writers, to help support them and represent them in the field. It is the closest writers have to having unions, and there’s no direct competition between them (you could literally be an in any of those guilds are the same time as each other, in addition to others, and I believe a number of authors are).
Writer Beware is a wonderful resource, and I highly recommend it. It’s both a good general guide to the scams people run/red flags to watch out for (such as giving up your copyright entirely as opposed to specific rights, or being charged to publish something or have it edited, when they’re trying to act like they’re a “normal” publisher), and a frequently-updated list of the latest specific known scammers, both in “fake agents” and fake/scammy publishers categories. (The company formerly known as Publish America is one of the most famous and egregious cases, but by far not the only one)
Additionally, for SF and fantasy writers, the SFWA’s own list of qualifying markets that one can be published in as a prerequisite to be able to get into their guild (remember, it IS a profession-based guild), is a great guide to normal markets for those genres that have standard contracts that aren’t abusive or scammy, and their guidelines include some of the industry-standard minimums for “per word” etc rates, so even if some new magazine market isn’t on their list, you can tell if it’s suspiciously far outside the usual per-word or whatnot standards. (It’s likely the guidelines for Mystery Writers of America etc also would be useful in that vein)
Even if you’re unpublished or don’t want to join their guild, they’re a wonderful group and resource, and I highly recommend their site and Writer Beware in particular!
The other sites mentioned above, such as “Preditors and Editors” should be still valid if you Google them, and are often rec’d by Writer Beware, but Writer Beware is the one I’m most familiar with. 🙂
Also, you should never have to pay an agent or anyone a “reading fee”! DO NOT PAY PEOPLE TO READ YOUR WORK!!! Run away from so-called agents that charge a reading fee! They are considered unethical in their own industry!
Also related to agents: Should you go this route and seek one, DO NOT PAY ONE DIME TO THEM upfront! A real agent only gets paid when he sells your book to a publisher! The average cut is about 10-15% of the first sale profits, if I remember right, with cuts of film and other rights maybe being more, when sold. At most, writers should only be responsible for the costs of phone calls and postage.
Making your angst hurt:the power of lighthearted scenes.
I’m incredibly disappointed with the trend in stories (especially ‘edgy’ YA novels) to bombard the reader with traumatic situations, angry characters, and relationship drama without ever first giving them a reason to root for a better future. As a reader…
I might care that the main siblings are fighting if they had first been shown to have at least one happy, healthy conversation.
I might cry and rage with the protagonist if I knew they actually had the capacity to laugh and smile and be happy.
I might be hit by heavy and dark situations if there was some notion that it was possible for this world to have light and hope and joy to begin with.
Writers seem to forget that their reader’s eyes adjust to the dark. If you want to give your reader a truly bleak situation in a continually dim setting, you have to put them in pitch blackness. But if you just shine a light first, the sudden change makes the contrast appear substantial.
Show your readers what light means to your character before taking it away. Let the reader bond with the characters in their happy moments before (and in between) tearing them apart. Give readers a future to root for by putting sparks of that future into the past and the present. Make your character’s tears and anger mean something.
Not only will this give your dark and emotional scenes more impact, but it says something that we as humans desperately, desperately need to hear.
Books with light amidst the darkness tell us that while things are hard and hurt, that we’re still allowed to breathe and hope and live and even laugh within the darkness.
We as humans need to hear this more often, because acting it out is the only way we stop from suffocating long enough to make a difference.
So write angst, and darkness, and gritty, painful stories, full of treacherous morally grey characters if you want to. But don’t forget to turn the light on occasionally.
when people defend the “Cis white guy is default” thing like “He’s meant to be an everyman we can all relate to and project on!” kindly remind them the largest ethnic group in the WORLD is Han Chinese and the highest gender percentage fluctuates so if you want an ACTUAL “default” you want a 40 year old chinese person whose gender changes from year to year.
Nobody is arguing that the character is supposed to represent the majority, or the statistical average. They’re saying that if you’re making an ‘everyman’ character, you cannot allow who/what they start their journey as to be the focus of the audience. And if writers made the protagonist black, or chinese, or gay, or trans, or even just female then people would act as if that was the sum total of the character and nothing else mattered.
Nathan Drake and Laura Croft do the exact same thing in the exact same circumstances, but in a conversation about Uncharted gender never comes up at all while in a conversation about Tomb Raider the first topic, for good or ill, is always going to be the fact that Laura is female. Guybrush Threepwood is allowed to be a moron who lucks his way through the hero business, but if he was anything other than a cis white man you’d be up in arms about how racist/misogynistic/transphobic the Monkey Island games are. Arthur Dent, Bilbo Baggins, Doctor Watson… none of them could ever be ‘just some guy’ in the mind of the reader if they started out with a single character trait outside of what is expected.
Don’t get me wrong, diverse characters and especially diverse protagonists and POV characters are super important and a good idea under most circumstances, but to put somebody under the “default” heading you actually have to meet incredibly strict requirements to avoid standing out at all.
The largest ethnic group in the world is Han Chinese, but that doesn’t mean much because the nonsense I write in english is not actually aimed at a GLOBAL audience.
Seriously? That argument has always been the WORST one I’ve ever fucking heard, because if ‘Oh you might as well make them an everyman on any global scale’ then guess what fucko, the ‘everyman/woman’ will NEVER be gay.
EVER.
But if I’m fucking well writing for a queer corner of tumblr nobody’s gonna fucking question my bi female protagonist because I’m writing for THAT SELECT AREA.
I am really goddamn tired of people going ‘well this wasn’t made for ME so I should have a right to complain!’ Because jesus fuck Rocky Horror said it best.
As a fanfic reader, you are not owed a single thing from writers. You have no right to demand updates, to harass writers who don’t post as often as you’d like, or who don’t fill your prompts, or to call out writers for not writing fast enough.
Here’s the thing: fanfiction authors are not professionals. We don’t get paid for what we do. We don’t get to wake up in the morning and sit at our computers and write fics for you to access for free. Fanfic writers know that we will never make a career out of writing fanfiction. We write because it’s a hobby, a passion, a stress reliever. We write because we love the characters, because we love the story, because we have more stories to tell. Most importantly, we write for fun.
We go to school. We work jobs. We have kids. We have homes and apartments and rooms to clean and meals to make and chores to do. We have business meetings to attend and essays to write. Our worlds don’t revolve around fanfiction. Fanfiction is something we do when we have the time, late at night when we can’t sleep, on the weekends, between classes, on our lunch breaks.
If you don’t write, you can’t even imagine the amount of work and time that goes into fanfic. You can’t begin to understand how much planning writers do, and how many hours get spent setting up the plot and developing the characters in the ways that make sense.
You can leave comments on our work. We love it when you leave comments on our work. But when we’ve just spent 10 hours putting together a new chapter, the last thing we want to see in our notifications is “I have waited FOREVER for this! What took so long!” “omg! don’t wait so long between updates next time!” “Am I gonna have to wait this long for the next chapter, too?”
There’s a difference between being supportive and letting the author know that you’re still there after months of silence and shaming them for those months of silence. Every single one of us has a life outside of fanfiction. Things happen. Plans change. Accidents come up out of the blue. When I’m sick, when I’m stressed, when I’m flooded with assignments, I don’t have time to update fics, and I don’t need to tell you that. I don’t need to justify why it takes so long for me to update. You don’t need a reason explaining my absence.
Fanfiction is a gift, and just like any gift, when you receive it, you say “thank you”, because no one was obligated to give it to you. It’s rude say “cool, but I want more, too.”
hold on can i just-
Fanfiction is a gift, and just like any gift, when you receive it, you say “thank you”, because no one was obligated to give it to you. It’s rude say “cool, but I want more, too.”
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