Publishing scams

Here’s a (long) interesting post by Anne R Allen: The #1 Mistake New Self-Publishers Make That Leaves Them Vulnerable to Publishing Scams

This week I realized that almost all the victims of publishing scams have one thing in common: they don’t understand the most important part of the digital self-publishing revolution that started in 2009.

This is the thing you MUST understand in order to be a successful indie author:

Successful self-publishers make most of their money selling ebooks.

This interested me because I wasn’t aware anyone thought otherwise. Evidently Anne Allen routinely encounters people who want to pursue self-publishing but think the important thing is distribution to physical bookstores. This seems startling.

Anyway, Allen then goes on to note various types of publishing scams: Author Solutions and so on, the scams that try to sell you marketing packages involving signings and book fairs and things like that.

This one was certainly new to me:

A number of authors approached by ReadersMagnet say they’ve been offered something quite different: the chance to be interviewed on what is apparently a fairly high profile radio show.  I’d never heard of it, but I mostly listen to NPR. Apparently this show is real. … the fee for this service is $699.

Wow.

Anyway, interesting post, with incidentally many potentially useful links.

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