Agents & Editors Black list

I hate to admit it but I fell for the internet jargon and submitted my manuscripts to WL Litery Agency. I should have followed the advise I have given many others. The lure that reeled me in was the offer to push the sale of books already published by POD, Vanity etc. I sent my manuscripts in for review so I haven't dove in to deep yet. Listed are a few tips regarding bad agencies.


All have two or more of the following abusive practices:

1. Fee-charging--including reading fees, marketing or administrative fees, retainers, processing fees, and other forms of upfront or flat-rate charges that are made as a condition of representation.

2. Paid editing or publishing referrals--including placing clients with vanity publishers, promoting their own paid editing services to clients (a conflict of interest), sending clients/potential clients to an outside editing service that pays kickbacks for referrals. Several of these agencies are no more than fronts for editing services.

3. Conflicts of interest--several agencies are under common ownership with editing services or vanity publishers, which are recommended to clients without disclosing the connection.

4. No or minimal track records--many of these agencies have never made a single sale to a commercial publisher. None has a significant recent track record.

5. Nonstandard author-agent contract terms--including perpetual agency clauses, claiming commissions on clients’ future works even if the agency had no hand in selling them, billing clients for normal business overhead such as travel and entertainment.

6. Unprofessional practices--such as sending form letters or postcards with boxes for editors to check off and return to indicate interest, "bundled" queries (several queries in the same envelope), "blitz" or shotgun submissions (submissions to a dozen or more publishers simultaneously, often without careful targeting), “packaging” a submission with unnecessary extras such as author photos, cover mockups, or sample illustrations.

7. Misrepresentation of skill or experience--including representing themselves as competent to sell manuscripts despite poor or nonexistent track records, lying about sales, and claming placements with vanity publishers as legitimate commercial sales.

If you have questions regarding a publisher, editor or agent search the internet. There is a lot of useful information regarding a lot of topics. Be careful because some of this information can be nothing more than someones vendetta against certain places or people.

My word! It would seem there are more bad ones than good. I hope everyone sifts through the lists before submitting to any of these. It pays to know who others have gone through and had at least a modicum of success. That is a part of why this board is so important (to me at least.)

A. W, Instead of pasting in information from another website, please could you paste the first paragraph and then a link to the site. This forum does not have the resources to fight any lawsuits if any of the agencies you posted decided to sue.

The Thumbs Down Agency List reproduced above has been taken in full from . It's clearly stated there that the list is not to be reproduced without permission.

We would appreciate the immediate removal of the list. Instead, you're welcome to post a paragraph or two from the preamble, plus a link to the list.

Thanks for your prompt attention to this request.

Victoria Strauss
Vice-Chair, SFWA Committee on Writing Scams
Co-Founder, Writer Beware

Shelagh wrote:

A. W, Instead of pasting in information from another website, please could you paste the first paragraph and then a link to the site. This forum does not have the resources to fight any lawsuits if any of the agencies you posted decided to sue.

I understand and I changed the post, sorry I wasn't thinking.

The link you posted leads to an outdated version of the list (one reason why we no longer re-post it or allow others to do so). The current version is online at the Writer Beware website: sfwa.org/beware/twentyworst.html

- Victoria Strauss
Vice-Chair, SFWA Committee on Writing Scams
Co-Founder, Writer Beware

Victoria wrote:

The link you posted leads to an outdated version of the list (one reason why we no longer re-post it or allow others to do so). The current version is online at the Writer Beware website: sfwa.org/beware/twentyworst.html

- Victoria Strauss
Vice-Chair, SFWA Committee on Writing Scams
Co-Founder, Writer Beware

Due to objections and concerns my original post has been edited to try and make everyone happy. I appreciate the fact that Victoria Strauss posted the correct site for others to visit. I do have concerns regarding the validity of the list if it is not to be communicated to vulnerable authors.

Hi Victoria,

Speaking of outdated pages, we were just discussing in another thread that the SFWA warning page on "POD" is woefully innacutate. It's not really the same as "Vanity press' and that confusion of technology with business model does little to help young writers.
Who are going to figure that out and might decide there's no differnece between POD presses like Lulu.com or Whiskey Creek and somebody like iUniverse or Publish America.

Any chance of you striaighening that out?

Way cool to see you stop by here.

"I do have concerns regarding the validity of the list if it is not to be communicated to vulnerable authors."

It's not that we don't want the list communicated to authors. We welcome it when people post a teaser paragraph plus a link to the list on the Writer Beware website. But the list has to be updated at least a couple of times a year, as the agencies on it change their names or establish new divisions. Having outdated versions floating around on the Internet isn't helpful to authors looking for up-to-date information. That's why we no longer allow the list to be re-posted in full (there's a disclaimer at the bottom of the list that states this), and request that people instead provide a link to the original list on the Writer Beware website.

As to Writer Beware's Print on Demand page...it does make a distinction between POD self-publishing services like Lulu.com and iUniverse, reputable indie publishers like Prime Books that utilize digital printing technology, and the many disreputable or amateur or stealth vanity publishers that owe their existence to the cheapness of print on demand. And while I completely agree that strictly speaking, "print on demand" is just a technology, the term has come to be so closely associated with a particular set of business practices that "POD publisher" has taken on specific meaning, and is understood by many people to describe a business model.

I'm in the process of reworking the current Print on Demand page. I'm re-titling it "Print on Demand Self-Publishing Services" and spinning off the section on POD-based independent publishers into a "Small Presses" page, which will discuss small publishers in general, both POD-based and not.

Thank you for the explanation, Victoria. I wish I had been knowledgeable enoughto seek out you site before I ever began. But lessons learned the hard way stay with us. Now I know a lot more, and am learning more all the time thanks to services like yours.

Quote :

the term has come to be so closely associated with a particular set of business practices that "POD publisher" has taken on specific meaning, and is understood by many people to describe a business model.

Actually, that's not so. And the use of "specific meaning" to refer to a glossing between actual meaning and incorrect one is pretty peculiar.
Many people are less ignorant that whoever wrote that page.

And it's odd to see somebody defending HELPING to carry on a confusion of terms that makes it harder for people to understand the situation.

I would think it obvious that using terms correctly is of interest to all concerns and for something as high profile as that page to conflate the owrds it's talking about is harmful to exactly the people they are most trying to warn.

Wouldn't it be easy to just rewrite the thing to it's accurate and more helpful to readers?

Instead of everybody else having to run around and straighten out confusion and disinformation it creates?

I hope the rewrite makes all this stuff clear. You might consider the use of "toner-based" vs "ink-based" printing technogy to be helpful.

And make sure people know you are talking about people selling publishing services, not people who use POD printers instead of presses, which is increasingly just about everybody.

Otherwise you end up casting BeWrite or Whiskey Creek or LuLu in the same bin with publishing scams, and when people figure out it's not true they lose the discrimination between real and fraudulent business practices you are trying (or should be trying) to promote.

I agree with Lin. I think clarity is essential. Using a term incorrectly on a help website is not helpful.

"Actually, that's not so. And the use of 'specific meaning' to refer to a glossing between actual meaning and incorrect one is pretty peculiar."

Google "POD publisher." You'll find all kinds of people and websites using this term to describe a business model. Are they correct in doing so? In the literal meaning of "print on demand," no. Do they do it anyway? Yes. Refusing to acknowledge this only perpetuates the confusion.

Anyway, my concern isn't to take people to task for not using "print on demand" in its strictly correct meaning. I'm trying to give writers information about what they may encounter out there in the big bad world of publishing--and one of the things they're going to encounter a lot, if they explore small presses or self-publishing services, is the term "POD publisher."

I do wonder, given your comments, how carefully you read the page in question.

- Victoria

Quote :

Are they correct in doing so?

No, they are sloppy, mistaken and ignorant. As is yours. It's just that yours should know better.

Oh, I read it quite carefully, as a matter of fact. So have a lot of people on self-publishing sites. It's become pretty legendary for high-level disinformation.

And the best way to help people who run into the term "POD publishing" is NOT to define it in an incorrect and invidious manner, then say it's okay because other sites do so. Don't you think?

Wouldn't it be easier to just correct the page than to quibble about what is obviously misleading and potentially harmful to the very people who would turn to it for clarification?

Don't get me wrong. I think what you do for these warnings is very cool, and pretty courageous in our litigation-happy society.
But that makes it all the more harmful to have errors.

You are over-using that term and over-generalizing...and, ironically, over-specifying at the same time.

What is to beware of is not POD, it's "publishing services". You are clumping people like Bewrite and Whiskey Creek and Samhain in with scamsters, while not getting across that there are plenty of scamsters using press technology. Which can be worse because you end up paying Vantage or Darrance or whatever for a garageful of copies.

I think you're slicing the cake the wrong way: perpetuating the confusion and prejudice surrounding the POD term but not spelling out significantly what the problem is: which is not short runs, but screwjobs.

By the way, your idea that not paying advances is the mark of shoddy or shady publishers is far off the point. Most small presses don't. In fact, some of the Big Six conventional publishers are eliminating the royalty advance.

Again, it's a good cause, but that just makes it all the more incumbent to get it right.

Wow, Lin. That's amazing info.

lin wrote:

Again, it's a good cause, but that just makes it all the more incumbent to get it right.

I could not agree more.

I was contacted by iUniverse, it seemed odd to me even with my limited knowledge of the publishing world...

Should I avoid these types of places?

What is the outlook for traditional publishing houses in this era of self publishing, and publish on demand?



Sorry I'm a newbie...

You make a choice to self-publish, vanity publish, small press publish or traditional publish.

If you want books published at no cost to you, IUniverse, and other vanity publishing houses can do it for you. They are the same as self-publishing, but they include distribution channels and some benefits. They are still looked at by the industry as self-publishing/vanity publishing. They sometimes offer extra services for a fee. Their printed books are usually pricey.

I have a friend who sell-publishes with Booksurge at Amazon.com to get some help. Amazon also has Createspace for the more technically inclined. The Kindle ebook is the rest of the family (other than Amazon's own publishing company).

He's selling his books pretty well.

I prefer a small press to get some other perspective on my book's marketing prospects and additional edit assistance. Small presses do screen for books they think will sell. Some reviewers and organizations accept small presses as "traditional" publishers, so that helps also.