Scams

Don’t Expect the “Truth” about Self-Publishing from Someone Who Runs a Vanity Press

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Earlier this month, I told you about a scam called "Beneaththecover.com," which purports to offer authors inside news and expert advice about the publishing industry when, in fact, it’s just a front for a bunch of vanity press and book promotion hucksters selling their wares.  This point was driven home the other day when one of their so-called "experts," vanity press publisher Yvonne DiVita, offered this outrageous lie in a post she had the chutzpah to title "POD Myths Dispelled – Get The Scoop Here":

In today’s
emerging digital world, if you truly want to attract that big name
publisher, use a professional POD firm to self-publish because the big
name publishers are watching.

The best way to attract a publisher is to write a good book, not blow thousands of dollars having it printed in POD form by a vanity press. If anything, printing your book in POD is more likely to prevent a publisher from taking you or the book seriously.

DiVita is one of a pack of POD vanity press hucksters who prey on the gullibility, desperation, and ignorance of aspiring authors. She argues that vanity presses aren’t merely printers but real publishers because they pay more attention to their authors than real publishers do.  What she neglects to mention is that vanity presses like hers make the vast majority of their money off their authors, not from booksales, and that all that attention they slather on their clients (not authors, ladies and gentlemen, clients)  is to convince them to spend even more on their worthless services.  She writes:

IF authors don’t sell enough books with their publisher, POD
or otherwise, the author isn’t trying hard enough. I’ve worked with
traditional publishers, and they require an extensive marketing plan
from authors before they will consider publication. And research shows
that books published by traditional publishers sell around 150-300, on
average.

That’s right, blame the author for the fact that their POD vanity press books aren’t sold in stores and are unlikely to sell to anyone but the client… and then back it up with pointless "facts."

I’ve had over two dozen books published by real publishers. No editor has ever asked me for an "extensive marketing plan" before considering my books.I’ve also asked a few published friends…and they have never been asked for marketing plans, either. But they are novelists, and perhaps they would be asked for one if they wrote non-fiction. So let’s give DiVita the benefit of the doubt and say publishers want marketing plans along with non-fiction book proposals. To which I say… So what?  How is that a persuasive argument for going to vanity-press instead of a real publisher? You’ll need a marketing plan either way. The key difference is that a real publisher will pay you and a vanity press will ask for your credit card number.

I’ve scoured the web and I can’t find any "research" that backs up her outrageous claim that most books published by genuine publishers sell only 150-300 copies.

The closet statistic I could find to her numbers was a 2004 Bookscan study that tracked sales of 1.2 million books sold that year. According to their figures, the average book of any kind published in 2004 sold 500 copies. The study noted that only 25,000 titles sold more than 5,000 copies each,
500 sold more than 100,000 copies and only ten sold more than a million
copies. But the figures are controversial, because the sales were not broken down by genre, like fiction or non-fiction, nor did they differentiate between titles from large
publishers or small ones, traditional publishers or vanity presses.

But lets pretend her figures are right. How is that an argument for going to a vanity press? Authors published by real publishers whose books only sold 500 copies in 2004 were still paid to be published.  They earned money, though not as much as they’d hoped.

By comparison, most vanity press authors will lose money because they paid to be published. But don’t take my word for it, let’s look at the 2004 sales figures from iUniverse, the biggest name in self-publishing:

18,108: Total number of titles
published

792,814: Number of copies
printed

14: Number of titles
sold through B&N’s bricks-and-mortar stores (nationally)

83: Number of titles that sold at least 500
copies

Out of 18,000 titles and nearly 800,000 copies printed, only 83 authors sold more than 500 copies. Good God. Think of all the money that authors lost …and how much iUniverse made. That’s the business that DiVita is in…and it’s a profitable one. For the printer, not the author. 

So what is the truth about POD self-publishing companies? It’s obvious. Vanity presses are in the "author services business", not the publishing business which, in a rare bit of candor, even DiVita concedes on her vanity press website:

Windsor Media Enterprises specializes in author services. We  offer idea development, manuscript critiquing, editing, proofreading, formatting and cover design, for new and existing authors.

And for that, they charge you a price and that’s how they make their money. That is their business. And if your book,  by some miracle, manages to sell a few copies, they make a little more. 

A vanity press will tell you any lie they can to convince you that they are real publishers (when they are merely selling editing and printing services), that self-publishing is the route most successful authors take (it’s not), and that you have as much of a chance to sell books with them as you do going with a traditional publisher (you don’t).

Is Yvonne DiVita really someone qualified to give writers sound advice? Or is she someone with a clear conflict-of-interest hoping to coerce naive authors into buying her product? The answer is obvious, and it came right from the founders of Beneaththecover.com  when they tried to solicit my brother Tod into being one of their experts:

Beneath the Cover is a cooperative venture for building marketing platforms of everyone involved.

That’s what should be written on the masthead of their home page, not "Where book industry professionals who know almost everything go to discuss news, insights, and evolving industry issues." And it should be stated in big print on each and every piece of "advice" that they give.

Dumb and Dumber

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Back in 2006, I wrote about a TV bootlegger who bought advertising on Google to promote his various websites.  Now it turns out that the moron has been using the address of a Winnipeg newspaper as one of his many false return addresses:

If you want to keep it secret that you’re selling pirated DVDs, it’s
probably not a good idea to use a major Canadian newspaper as your
return address.

Over the last few days, several packages of pirated DVDs have been shipped to the Winnipeg Free Press from disgruntled customers around the world.
The packages originated from entities called DVD Avenue.TV, DVD Store, AllMyFavoriteShows.com and Expediteur,

Gary Osmond, the Canadian Motion Picture Distribution Association’s
director of investigations — anti-piracy operations, said the DVDs
received by the Free Press are connected to the massive seizure of thousands of counterfeit DVDs by the RCMP in Montreal just before Christmas.

More than 200 DVD burners were also seized by police and eight people
were arrested who are facing fraud charges under the Criminal Code and
Copyright Act.

But Osmond was surprised to hear the DVD pirates had used the Free Press’ address.

"They’re not too smart," Osmond said.

"In Montreal, they used post office box numbers for Canada Post or
private companies. There was one legitimate address in Montreal, but it
was a hole in the ground with a building being constructed.

"Yours is the only legitimate address and the first in Winnipeg."

I Knew This Was Coming

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Victoria Strauss reports that BookWise has gone — surprise! surprise! — into the vanity press business, a natural extension of their multi-level marketing scheme. They are charging gullible aspiring writers $6000 to "publish" their books and for "intensive training" at their WriteWise (aka PublishStupid) seminars taught by "Industry Experts" who, outside of BookWise founders author Richard Paul Evans and get-rich-quick huckster Robert G. Allen, have no actual industry experience.

Their "expert" faculty consists of the teacher of the Info-Preneuring Teleclass for the Enlightened Wealth Institute, a self-published cookbook author, and three authors who write fiction exclusively for the "LDS market"  ("work consistent with the standards and principles of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ").  I guess Lori Prokop, Michael Drew, and Brien Jones were unavailable.

You will also get such amazing benefits as "an official BookWise review" and your photograph taken  with BookWise founders Evans and Allen. Wow! Where do I sign up?

BookWise thinks that "anyone who is a serious writer" would gladly pay $20-30,000 for all of this,   so six grand is a bargain. But "serious" writers know better than to take seminars from vanity press publishers and industry know-nothings who have a clear profit motive and glaring conflict-of-interest behind their "teaching."

This is no ordinary vanity press scheme. To lure in as many suckers as possible, BookWise is offering a $1000 bounty for every paying sucker their multilevel marketing associates can bring in. Prepare to be spammed. But wait, there’s more, as Victoria reports:

There’s another twist to the story. For writers accepted into
WriteWise, Richard Paul Evans and Robert G. Allen will become their
literary agents, receiving, according to the WriteWise brochure, "the
standard agency fee [of] 15% of the royalties that an author receives
from the publisher." The brochure makes it clear, however, that not
every book will be shopped: "…depending upon circumstances, BookWise
Publishing may also present your book to other major publishers." In
this arrangement, most of the benefit is on the agents’ side: they
don’t actually have to do anything for you (unlike in a normal
author-agent relationship), but if they do, they get paid twice.

These guys are taking the vanity press scam to a whole new, and truly sleazy, level.

Behind the Cover of Beneaththecover.com

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Book marketer/publicist Michael R. Drew has put together a site called beneaththecover.com under the guise of helping aspiring writers with expert advice…except all the "advice" is coming from publicists and self-publishers looking to sell their services to the unwary.

In an apparent bid to legitimize their effort, they have been reaching out to "hundreds" of authors, hoping to convince them to provide free content to the site. I’m one of the authors they contacted. Lehi Drew wrote, in part:

Just wanted to let you know about our trend-setting website. And I’m
hoping you’ll like it enough to accept our invitation to become a
contributor. You see, I’ve seen your blog site,A Writer’s Life, and I
think you’re a great writer..

Our website is dedicated to professionals of the book industry, and it’s called Beneath the Cover (www.beneaththecover.com).  It also has an associated blog site, Push the Key (www.pushthekey.com).

What’s in it for you? As a contributor, your name and blog site will be
constantly seen by hundreds and even thousands of book industry
visitors every day. At our site, we draw people from every level of the
book industry, including authors, writers, marketers, publishers,
editors, and agents.

Your Articles. As visitors see your articles on a regular basis and
enjoy your style and the substance of your expertise, they’ll become
familiar with your writing, your expert reputation, and your marketing
platform.

Wouldn’t it be great if you sent a manuscript to a publisher or an
agent and they responded with, “I’m familiar with your work on Beneath
the Cover, so I took the time to go over your manuscript. Let’s talk.”
Wow!

Wouldn’t be great if a publisher got my manuscript and said "Lee is so damn witty and good looking, we’ll give him a $1 million contract without reading a word!"  That’s about as likely to happen as the ridiculous fantasy Beneath the Cover is trying to entice me with. I ignored Lehi’s email. So, a week later, she tried again.

First, let me reassure you that this is not part
of a mass mailing from a list of names/sites that I bought or got from
someone else. I AM mailing to hundreds of writers like yourself, but I’ve been to each site personally.

So, it’s not a mass mailing, but they ARE contacting hundreds of writers. Hmmm. She went on to say:

You,
obviously, have had a lot of experience writing. I can see that, not
only by the fact that you’ve done screenwriting, but by the number of
books you have listed on your blog. I am confident that this shows that
you have great insight into how the book industry works. 

I would very much like for you to become a weekly contributor to Beneath the Cover. I
think that because you’re an experienced author, that you would have
advice for other authors trying to get published and writing.  I really
think that, plus your knowledge of the industry, would make you a good
fit with us and our other contributors.

I responded that if she really read my blog, she’d know that I wouldn’t be the least bit interested in lending my time, effort, or good name to help them sell promotional and self-publishing services to writers under the guise of offering "advice."  In fact, if anything, my advice would be to avoid their site. I also said:

Your site is an outgrowth of Michael Drew’s book promotion business and, not surprisingly, the majority of your contributors come from the self-publishing industry or are selling book promotion & marketing services…
which creates a real conflict-of-interest when it comes to the "advice"
they are giving.

Your contributors have something to sell, and so does
Drew. The only thing that I or any other published author would be
doing by contributing to your site would be lending our credibility to your underlying effort to advance the promotional and
self-publishing services your experts are selling.

I don’t see any published authors among their experts, so it  looks like their "not a mass mailing" to hundreds of authors hasn’t worked. I guess real authors are a lot smarter than the hucksters think we are.

UPDATE:  They also contacted my brother Tod, asking him to contribute to their site. He asked them what they pay…and they said not a dime because "Beneath the Cover is a cooperative venture for building marketing platforms of everyone involved." At least they were honest with him about their real motives (though it’s pretty obvious to anyone who visits their site). I’m surprised they haven’t brought in Lori Prokop  or the experts over at Airleaf  as contributors yet…

The Mail I Get

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I received this email today from a complete stranger. It’s a good example of how NOT to sell a book. 

Please order my book XYZ at http://www.publishamerica.com
and tell all your friends about it to. I have attached a release letter for you
so you can read what it is about. Please order it and then tell all your reader
friends so they can order it too. Maybe then I can become on my way to wealth.
Thank you for your time.

By "release letter," she means a press release from PublishAmerica that  contains an incoherent, one-paragraph summary of the book’s plot and some lies about the company being a "traditional publisher." I’m trying to imagine how anyone could think that this pitch would sell any books.

Another Get-Rich-Quick Scammer

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You  know how much I love Lori Prokop and her laughable array of get-rich-quick schemes. Well, my brother Tod has found Lori’s dastardly male counterpart in Nick Daws, another self-proclaimed
"bestselling author"  of books you never heard of and can’t find in any bookstore. Daws’ "Quick Cash Writing Course" is the funniest author scam since Lori’s "Book Millionaire" debacle. But, as Tod writes:

There’s nothing funny about the desperation writers feel — spend even
a few hours in a workshop and you’ll see it in Technicolor — and as a
professor part of what I preach is that this isn’t easy. There’s no
back door. The only way to succeed is by doing, by handling rejection,
by improving. If you’re looking for Quick Cash, maybe make up a course
like the "bestselling" Nick Daws has, because desperate, foolish
writers will pay you for your precious secrets.

The Mail I Get

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I received a lengthy email today from a woman in her 50s. It read, in part:

Who are the publishers that PAY “unknowns”
for their work?  How do I contact them? I’m an unknown author, writing a book about tragedy, near death experiences, and years of living with pain and how I learned to cope with
it all; and how God miraculously healed me of a debilitating, incurable disease.
My book is ready to be published. I worked with a literary agent (author coach)
for about three years. He got me a contract with Axiom Press, a subsidiary of
Evergreen Press.  But their cost to publish and market my book was between
$3,800 & $6,500 (depending on what services I chose).  I’m not
rich, do not have a big savings account and can not afford this!

[…]isn’t the biggest part of the money paid to the
publisher for marketing purposes?   That’s the way it seems to
me.[…]if I use a
POD and have to pay for all the marketing, etc.  Isn’t that going to
cost me in the long run, much more time and money that going through someone
like Tate? And who will set up my book signings?

Here’s what I told her: Every publisher buys books from unknown authors every day. You contact them through an agent. If they like your book, they offer you an advance against royalties. Your agent gets 10-15% of that advance, you get the rest. And if you earn your advance back in sales, you will get a royalty from every book that’s sold. You don’t advance the agent, or the publisher, a dime. That’s how publishing works.

An agent, or "author coach," who sets you up with someone who wants to charge you to publish your book is either a fool or a fraud. Either way, it’s a mistake to be in business with him, he doesn’t know what he is doing. 

The money you pay a vanity press isn’t going into marketing. It’s going into their car lease, their house payment, and their kid’s braces. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Tate or Jones Harvest or anybody else. They are all taking advantage of your desperation, gullibility and ignorance. 

But if you are hell-bent on paying to be published, save your money and go with iUniverse or Lulu. You’ll get the same "services" for a lot less.

The fact is that no vanity press is going to do any useful marketing for you — they will just empty your savings account (and that includes iUniverse). No newspapers or magazines are interested in reviewing any books from vanity press publishers. Nobody at a vanity press is going to set up any meaningful booksignings for you, either, because bookstores don’t want to host events for vanity press authors. Why? Because the vast majority of vanity press books are ugly, horrendous crap.

It’s cheaper, and more productive, to approach the bookstores on your own…something even professional authors do (and no one does it better than my friend author Joe Konrath).  Most of the successful authors I know have worked hard to establish strong, PERSONAL relationships with booksellers.

So, fire your useless fraud of an agent/coach and if you are going to self-publish,  go with iUniverse or Lulu and avoid any of their marketing packages.

UPDATE 12/29/07:  I heard back from the woman.

No, I do not want to PAY for publishing my
book.  I’ve always been under the impression that a reputable place
pays YOU for your work…but I was given a bunch of mis-information that
they don’t do that these days.  (That’s just the way it is,
and if you get it published you’ll have to pay a publisher because you
are an “unknown”. ) I’m so glad I came upon your web
site before I sent it to someone like Tate! Thanks again – for saving me from a
horrible mistake!

A Victory Against Vanity Press Scammers

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Writers Beware reports the very good news that vanity press scammer Airleaf Publishing, aka Bookman Marketing, was shut down on Dec. 19th, thanks to the aggressive efforts of a group of 275 defrauded authors. Their fight isn’t over — the authors are seeking criminal prosecution against Airleaf founder Carl Lau. 

But what about Airleaf execs/defenders Brien Jones and Krystal Hatfield? How culpable were they in the alleged fraud?

I don’t know what happened to Hatfield but Jones, who worked at Bookman for four years,  is still out there, only now he’s operating as Jones Harvest Publishing.

Jhlogo2
For the outrageous sum of $1750, he will produce your book in POD format…and maybe even feature you among his "Author Celebrity Associates." The first thing you’ll notice about the those Author Celebrity Associates is that 99% of them are elderly, which makes me wonder if Jones is trolling old folks homes for suckers these days instead of the iUniverse book catalog.

He’s also making the same pitch that  he did at Airleaf:

Not only do we publish every kind of book, more
importantly we sell those new books to bookstores. In addition, we
promote our authors books by contacting newspapers, radio and
television stations.
Most exciting of all, we pitch our client’s books in Hollywood, CA to
producers and directors.

At Airleaf, those claims turned out to be false. The closest Airleaf got to Hollywood was reportedly a trip to the Universal Studios Tour. 

Jones’ idea of "pitching" his clients to Hollywood is to attend The Great American Pitchfest with some of his suckers.  It’s not like Jones is opening any doors with his stellar Bookman reputation… Pitchfest is open to the public. Anyone can attend and pitch their ideas without having to pay Jones a penny.

If Jones keeps following the Airleaf/Bookman playbook, I”m sure we will be hearing more about him very soon.

(FYI: Jones is also doing business as authorcelebrity.com  , starredreview.com, greatconceptbooks.com, bookwheat.com      and authorprofile.com.)

UPDATE:  Poor, misunderstood Airleaf scammer Carl Lau blames his woes on Bonnie Kaye, who is the founder of Airleafvictims.com, and his former exec Brien Jones in a newspaper article published earlier this month.

Run Away Screaming from Hilliard & Harris

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I got this email today:

I am thinking about submitting my mystery/romance/thriller to Hilliard & Harris. What can you tell me about them?

In my opinion, Hilliard & Harris are essentially a Print-On-Demand vanity press that gets you to pay on the backend rather than upfront (if you don’t include what you pay to buy copies of your own books). Here’s how they do it:  they load their contract with an enormous number of egregious charges against royalties so that in the highly unlikely event that your book does make money, you won’t see much of it.

For example, they deduct from your sales the cost of returns, cost of printing, cost of shipping, sales transaction costs, cost of insurance, commissions, discounts, cost of promotion, collection costs, taxes, as well as "other reasonable costs,"  just in case they left anything out, like maybe their electric bill and the pizzas they had for lunch.

None of their listed costs, with the exception of returns, are "reasonable" charges against royalties. But since they are primarily a POD publisher, the cost of returns is a moot point anyway. No reputable, legitimate publisher charges authors for printing, shipping, insurance, collections, promotion, commissions, taxes and "sales transaction costs" (whatever the hell those are)…but vanity presses do.

That’s only one example of the many objectionable terms in their loathsome contract, which an author would have to be insane to sign. Run away screaming.

Going After Airleaf

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Over seventy authors who were screwed out of thousands of dollars by the Airleaf Publishing scam are banding together in the hopes of exposing "a company founded on fraud" and putting the owners in jail. The effort is spearheaded by Bonnie Kaye, a relationship counselor who paid Airleaf $1800 to publish her book on "straight/gay" marraiges.

My book came out the same week that former Governor James McGreevey’s book “The Confession” was released. I launched my own media campaign, and I was interviewed Paula Zahn on CNN and the national FOX news. Sales were booming. Airleaf kept telling me that I was their most successful author.

I was feeling so good about Airleaf at that point of time that I volunteered to talk to prospective authors who were on the fence. I now live with the guilt of convincing them to follow me down the road of doom.

But Airleaf didn’t cough up her royalties and she’s since learned of authors who have lost as much as $20,000 on the scam.

Author Frederick Martin-Del-Campo – Chronicles Of War And A Wanderer. Airleaf royally diddled me: I invested over $10,000.00 to have my one book turned into a best seller, and another taken to Hollywood and turned into a movie. They utterly made a fool of me, let alone the countless other authors they defrauded. The Airleaf agents gave me a runaround of answers when I tried to inquire about my investments and publication of books. Now, no one has deigned to reply. They have totally screwed me!"

Her many quotes from her fellow Airleaf suckers is doubly infuriating:  you’re pissed at the Airleaf conmen for preying on the desperation and ignorance of these wanna-be authors…but, at the same time,  these people were so stupid and painfully gullible that it’s hard to feel any sympathy for them.