How To Identify A Publishing Scam 101

[marycrawford]

If you've been reading the hilarious LJ comments on the, ahem, book Night Travels of the Elven Vampire and wondering why any publisher would actually publish this kind of thing (i.e. the sort of barely disguised fanfic you'll be really, really embarrassed about having written later), check out Teresa Nielsen Hayden's latest post to Making Light, which highlights a few phrases that are typical of spam publishers' promotion material: "Helping new writers", "Professionally edited manuscript", etc, and explains why these phrases would never be used by a real publisher.

A quote:

“Traditional publishing.”
This term came in with PublishAmerica. It’s their little way of suggesting that they’re a conventional publishing house, which they aren’t. Publishing houses refer to what they do as “publishing.”

Here's another excellent post in which she explains the peculiar business model of the next generation of vanity publishers. (PublishAmerica, which published the vampire book, is probably the most succesful of these.) In short: they don't require you to pay for their publishing your manuscript, they require your family and friends to pay for it instead.

(Teresa Nielsen Hayden, btw, is a senior editor at Tor, one of the largest SF/Fantasy publishers in America, and she knows her stuff like Dr. Johnson knew words.)

Comments

[toliver.livejournal.com]

Oh, thank you! Thank you so much. This is my favorite line:

He closed the book and replaced it, no one thought him strange, not anymore. Because he was a writer, and all knew that writers were strange.

I think that I need, I really, truly, need, (notice all the commas?) to have that as under my signature.:)

[marycrawford.livejournal.com]

You're welcome. Fun, isn't it? :-)