Penguin Lulu and others shake down the
desperate author
Guest post from David Gaughran
Posted
on May 4, 2013 by davidgaughran
Writing is a glamorous occupation – at
least from the outside. Popular depictions of our profession tend to leave out
all the other stuff that comes with the territory: carpal tunnel syndrome,
liver failure, penury, and madness.
Okay, okay, I jest. I love being a
writer. Sharing stories with the world and getting paid for it is bloody
brilliant. It’s a dream job, and like any profession with a horde of neophytes
seeking to break in, there are plenty of sharks waiting to chew them to bits.
Publishing is a screwed up business.
The often labyrinthine path to success makes it much easier for those with
nefarious intentions to scam the unsuspecting. But it doesn’t help that so many
organizations who claim to help writers, to respect them, to assist them along
the path to publication are actually screwing them over.
Before
the digital revolution made self-publishing viable on a wide scale, the
dividing lines were easier to spot. Traditional publishers paid you if they
wanted to buy the rights to your novel. Self-publishers were people who filled
their garages with books and tried to hawk them at events. And vanity presses
were the scammers, luring the unsuspecting with false promises and roundly
condemned by self-publishers and traditional publishers alike.
Today
it’s very different. The scammy vanity presses are owned by traditional
publishers who are marketing them as the “easy” way to self-publish – when it’s
nothing more than a horrifically expensive and terribly ineffective way to publish
your work, guaranteed to kill your book’s chance of success stone dead, while
emptying your bank account in the process.
Some
of you might think: hey, it’s just business. Caveat emptor and
all that. And don’t these people know how to use Google?
That’s
easy to say from our position of experience. Do you remember how naive you were
at the start? Do you remember just how badly you
wanted to get published? Do you remember the crushing grind of the
query-go-round?
I’m
not surprised people get scammed. When you want something so badly, and you
can’t seem to make progress towards that goal – no matter how hard you work –
you start to go crazy. You get desperate.
And
it’s much harder to tell the scammers from the legitimate organizations when they are owned by the same people.
Take
Penguin-owned Author Solutions, one of the worst vanity presses out there.
Here’s how they hoodwink inexperienced writers into using their horribly
expensive service.
If
you Google a term like “find a publisher” the results are littered with sites
like FindYourPublisher.com (which I’m not going to link to because that will
help their SEO, but you can cut-and-paste that address).
The
website purports to be an independent resource, helping to pair you with the
most suitable publishing company. Or as they put it:
dedicated
to helping both first-time and experienced authors identify the most suitable
indie book publishing company for their book. With the information you provide
about your book and goals, FYP makes a recommendation as to which indie book
publisher has the best publishing package to help you reach your publishing
objectives.
Below
this message is an online questionnaire asking you about your book. When you
have completed that and handed over your phone number, the site makes a
recommendation based on your answers.
Except
the only companies recommended are Trafford, AuthorHouse, Xlibris, and
iUniverse – all of which are scammy vanity presses, all owned by Author
Solutions. And, fitting with the rest of the pattern, FindYourPublisher.com is
just one of many (many!) such sites owned and operated by Author Solutions,
purporting to make independent recommendations, but only recommending Author
Solutions companies.
I
have sympathy for those hoodwinked by awful companies like Author Solutions.
The dividing lines aren’t as obvious as they were. And inexperienced writers
naively assume that a company like Penguin has their best interests at heart.
Maybe it’s the cuddly logo.
Newsflash:
Penguin doesn’t care about writers
When
Penguin bought the world’s biggest vanity
press for $116m last July, many people in the publishing business
gave them a pass. They claimed that Penguin would clean up the cesspool. But
instead Author Solutions CEO Kevin Weiss was given a seat on the Penguin board.
A seat on the board!
Emily
Suess wrote an excellent guest post here back in February, detailing how the slick Author
Solutions scam hadn’t changed one bit since the Penguin takeover.
It’s
now almost a year since Penguin bought the company (instead of buying, say,
Goodreads, but I digress). It should be clear to everyone now that Penguin has
no intention of changing Author Solutions’ scammy approach. In fact, Penguin just announced plans to
take the scam global.
Penguin
has been looking under the Author Solutions hood for 10 months now. Its
conclusion was this: we can make this bigger. We can take this scam on the road
and start exploiting writers all over the planet.
And
Penguin is still getting a pass for this
crap.
The
Penguin Omerta
The Publishers Weekly piece on
Penguin’s aggressive expansion plans for Author Solutionsmakes no
mention of the company being a universally reviled vanity press that has
cheated 150,000 writers out of their savings.
This
is something I’ve been noticing for a while, and Publishers Weekly isn’t alone.
The pieces in The Bookseller, GalleyCat, and Digital Book World also
make no mention of the widespread criticism that Author Solutions has
attracted, nor do they mention that the company is currently the subject of a class action suit for their
deceptive practices.
More
disturbingly, my comment pointing this out appears to have been scrubbed from
The Bookseller, is stuck in the moderation queue on Digital Book World’s piece
(despiteexplicitly stating that they
had posted it).
The
reaction at the London Book Fair was similar. No-one from traditional
publishing wanted to talk about Penguin’s ownership of Author Solutions. No-one
wants to talk about how a supposedly legitimate publisher now owns the most
successful author scamming organization on the planet.
These
guys are probably taking their cue from the New York Times, who won’t mention
anything remotely critical about Author Solutions, but are happy to spend lots
of time showing them in a positive light (like here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).
Writer
Beware
The
Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) has done sterling work
over the years warning writers away from people like Author Solutions both on their own site,
and through their industry watchdog Writer Beware.
However,
I would love to see them go one step further.
Remember
those awful Random House
digital-first imprints? Public pressure forced Random House to
change the horribly one-sided terms it was offering writers. That result was
achieved after Writer Beware blogged about it, SFWA president John Scalzi
followed up, and SFWA itself threatened to de-list Random House as a qualifying
market.
What
Author Solutions is doing to writers is far, far worse.
Isn’t
it time to do something about this? Isn’t it time to threaten to de-list
Penguin as a qualifying market if they don’t clean up Author Solutions?
Hands
Up If You Don’t Own A Vanity Press
There’s
only problem with this approach. Where do you stop? Because you would have to
threaten to do the same with all these guys too:
1.
Simon & Schuster hired Author Solutions to run their own scammy vanity press –
Archway Publishing. If that wasn’t enough, they then offered a bounty to
bloggers to lie about the company.
2.
Harper Collins-owned Thomas Nelson have their own crappy vanity
operation called West Bow Press – also “powered” by Author
Solutions.
3.
Harlequin, never afraid to turn down a penny, jumped in the game a few years
ago. Author Solutions provided the white-label vanity operation for
them.
4.
Showing that it’s not just the larger publishers, Hay House contracted Author
Solutions to set up Balboa Press – another scammy, crappy,
overpriced vanity press.
If
it was down to me, I would threaten to de-list all these guys until they
cleaned house, but Penguin would be a good start, given they (a) it all comes
back to Author Solutions, (b) Penguin owns Author Solutions, (c) Penguin has
shown no interest in addressing concerns, and (d) Penguin is planning a massive
expansion of the Author Solutions scam.
Writers
Digest & Lulu
I’m
sure Digital Book World’s reluctance to mention the problems with Author
Solutions has nothing to do with the fact that they are owned by F+W Media,
which also owns yet another crappy vanity press – Abbot
Press (which has some of the worst prices out there).
In
a refreshing change of pace, this crappy vanity press is not actually powered
by Author Solutions. Abbot Press is a division of Writers Digest. Yes, that Writers
Digest.
If
that catches you by surprise, I’m sorry to say that Writers Digest went over to
the dark side a few years back, and now spam their subscribers with crap like this.
I’m
sure Author Solutions was disappointed to miss out on that deal but at least
they can console themselves with the new partnership they struck with
Lulu last month to provide premium (i.e. overpriced and ineffective)
marketing services to Lulu customers.
That’s
right. Lulu made a deal with the devil.
How
Can We Fight Back?
Penguin
think they can continue to ride out the storm, ignoring the criticism and
collecting their ill-gotten gains, but if we make enough noise, they will have
to respond. That starts with sharing this post, or, even better, blogging about
it yourself.
But
it also means reaching out to inexperienced writers and trying to steer them
away from these crooks. We need to get the message out that self-publishing is
not the impossible task it’s painted as. Sarah Woodbury has a helpful post on the basics
here, and I have another here. Feel free to point newbies to them, or
write your own.
Each
time you see an article talking about Author Solutions and not mentioning all
the issues, comment underneath and call them on it. Even if the media don’t
change their one-eyed approach, readers will see the comments.
If
you’re a member of a writers organization like SFWA, RWA, or MWA, ask what they
are doing about Penguin. Ask them why they haven’t threatened to de-list
Penguin. And keep pressing them! The SFWA (and the RWA) were really strong in
response to Random House. We need the same from them again.
150,000
writers have been screwed over already. I think that’s enough. Don’t you?
Thanks
David and here is the ironclad promise of Author Solutions
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