Beware: Author Scam

Money always flows to the writer

I’ve posted/noted a couple of times about how blown away I am by the level of quality of much of the work I read here and have spoken with several people about their publishing histories outside of SubStack. I’ve also seen several things that are cause for concern, and since so many of us are really just getting our writing careers going, I wanted to talk about them.

First off: Why the hell would you listen to me? I am not a successful or well-known author. I have, however, been writing and submitting short stories since 2015, and have had a number of stories published in anthologies, online zines, and magazines, and I’ve been screwed over several times. I’ve also learned a lot from talking with more established writers. There’s not a lot of advice that I can offer an aspiring writer, but there is a little. I hope that this will help writers who are posting great work here but are not that experienced when it comes to dealing with publishers or editors. There are a couple of red flags. So if you think you might care about what I have to say please keep going and share this with other writers so they can be better aware when (and I say ‘when’ instead of ‘if,’ because if you keep at it long enough this will happen. Over and over.) this occurs.

If you are ever approached by an editor or publisher (sometimes with indies, they’re the same) and invited to submit or join an upcoming project, but you have to pay to take part... This is a scam. The editor might have the best intentions, might believe this is how it works, and they might not see their business model as a scam, but the end result is the same as if they were cackling and twirling their mustaches while typing out their email to you. They’ll say (1) the payment is to cover formatting, promotion, your book cover, and for (2) giving you exposure and allowing you (3) the opportunity to join a bestselling series, or publishing house or work with this award-winning writer or editor.

This is how it works: The publisher pays for the formatting, cover, publishing, and they pay the author for their story, and they (hopefully) make their money back on the back end, through book sales. This is true regardless of the size or prestige of the publishing house or editor. Now, especially in the indie world, that payment may not be much; maybe five bucks and an eBook copy. Some publishers don’t pay anything but also don’t charge anything. Usually these are to be avoided, too, but there are exceptions and that is a topic for another day. But even these for-the-love publications aren’t taking money from you.

Someone who wants you to pay to be in their anthology has it backwards. They know they aren’t going to sell any books. The book is still the product, but the writer instead of the reader is now the customer.

No one who promises exposure as an author’s payment will sell enough books to increase your readership. Check the publisher, editor, book series on Amazon; check Goodreads. See how many reviews they have, how many times someone starred one of their publications. It’s almost never more than twenty. Now Amazon isn’t the only game in town, but it is the largest, so even if you charitably applied a similar number of reviews (and extrapolated to a larger number of sales) to other sites, you still aren’t selling the number of copies to blow up your career. Anyone who can offer enough exposure to help your career can also offer to pay you for your efforts, and they pretty much always do.

You’ll bestselling this, international bestselling that, and technically they’re not lying, even with only twenty reviews. Here’s how to be a bestselling author. When you upload a book to Amazon, you choose your subgenres, and you can get very detailed to the point that your book is in a category with very few other books. Now, Amazon, when you click on a book category, shows you the top 10 best-selling books in that category. These lists are updated hourly. So you slot your book into a narrow niche, it sells two books in an hour, and you’re now listed in the number one spot. You are, by selling two copies of your book, a best-seller. You do this on a couple regional Amazon pages and now you’re an international best-selling author. Congrats. “Best Selling” means nothing. Do not get pulled into paying money to these people. You likely have a wider readership here on SubStack than these best-sellers do.

A couple quick notes/exceptions: Most contests require a fee to submit; some are great, some are scams, do your due diligence (but also who cares about contests. You’ll get more readers online anyway). A few of the larger pubs like The New Yorker or Granta or somewhere like that requires small token fees for submission; these tend to be much smaller than what I’m talking about, so you decide for yourself. If you and a handful of other writers decide to go in on a project together and everyone agrees to buy-in to cover the costs that’s between you and them, and it’s just fine.

So, in conclusion, long story really long, you deserve to be paid something for you work, even if that payment is just more readers here on SubStack, but never pay for your work to be published somewhere where no one will read it. Hopefully this helps someone. Please share it if you think it will. Just remember, if you were a baker, it would be ridiculous if your customers expected you to pay them to eat your donuts. Don’t. Ever.