Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®Ah, 2021. The year that was supposed to deliver us from the pandemic, and instead delivered...well. You know. At least one expectation didn't change: scammers gonna scam. Writer Beware was ready. Below are h...

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®In 2014, I wrote a post about Copyright Registration Online, one of many faux and exploitative copyright registration "services" that cater to writers' anxiety about theft and plagiarism, particularly of unp...

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®I've recently gotten several reports of phone solicitations from a New Jersey-based bookstore called The Reading Glass Books.Why would a bookstore be calling authors out of the blue? Well in this case, to se...

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®HURN PUBLICATIONSI first heard of Hurn Publications (that's a link to an archived version; the Hurn website is no longer online) not because of author complaints, but because of a contact from the compa...

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®I first heard about editor and author coach Christina Kaye (aka Christina Broaddus) last year, via a writer who later posted this public complaint on Facebook. The allegations: misrepresentation of...

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®How cute is NovelCat's kitty logo? If only its contract were so adorable.NovelCat is yet another of the reading/writing platforms, mostly based in Singapore and Hong Kong, that have sprung up relatively rece...

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®This week I became aware that Scribd is engaging in a major push to acquire audiobook and ebook rights for already-published books, thanks to this post from Isobel Starling. Starling's email exchange wi...

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®This post has been updated to reflect changes to the contest rules made by Bardsy. Scroll down to see an addendum.Yes, folks, it's another of my posts about problematic writing contest rules. I do a lot of t...

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®One of the identifying markers for the scores of publishing/marketing/fake literary agency scams that are super-aggressively soliciting self-published and small press writers these days is an offer to re-pub...

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®This past April, I wrote about writers' struggles to get Disney and Disney-owned publishers to provide unpaid royalties and missing royalty statements--in some cases, going back years--and the formation of t...