by the SFWA Publications Crew and Victoria Strauss
Editor’s note: This article is part of the SFWA Presents: Get to Know… series, which includes informational pieces about SFWA programs, committees, and initiatives, and also interviews with the SFWA volunteers who work to support their fellow writers in the industry.
Sponsored by SFWA, Writer Beware® investigates and exposes fraud and bad practices in the publishing industry. Its continuing mission is to educate writers and authors at all stages of their careers about hidden dangers in the industry and ways to protect themselves. To learn more about this important service, we talked to Victoria Strauss, co-founder of Writer Beware. She received the 2009 Kevin O’Donnell, Jr. Service to SFWA Award for her work with Writer Beware and was honored with an Independent Book Blogger Award in 2012. The Writer Beware team also includes Michael Capobianco and Richard White.
Writer Beware has been essential in protecting authors from fraud. What inspired you to start Writer Beware, and how has its mission evolved since its founding in 1998?
I’m often asked if Writer Beware reflects my own experience of being scammed, but the answer is no: I was never cheated or ripped off (though I easily could have been, given how little I knew about publishing when I first started querying).
I began joining online writers’ groups in the late 1990s (yikes, hard to believe it was so far back). I was struck by the number of stories about crooked literary agents, predatory vanity publishers, and dishonest editing services—and by the fact that the same publisher or agent or editor names appeared over and over, and that there seemed to be so many connections between the different scams (for example, crooked editing service Edit Ink not only paid kickbacks to agents who referred writers for services, but ran its own fake agencies as referral mills).
Here was a whole ugly underbelly to the publishing industry that I’d had no idea existed. Like so many writers, I’m intrigued by new or strange things. I became fascinated by the scam stories and began to follow them and search them out.
I joined SFWA in (I think) 1998. SFWA has always been concerned with advocacy and education; just by coincidence, the then-webmistress of the SFWA website was looking for someone to create a page of writing scam warnings. It seemed a perfect match for my own interests and my desire to get more involved as a new member, so I volunteered. (Courtesy of the Wayback Machine, you can see how the Writer Beware webpage looked in August 2000, the year after it was launched.)
Around the same time, unbeknownst to me, the late Ann Crispin, who was then SFWA’s Vice President, was seeking to set up a writing scams committee. A kind soul introduced us, and we hit it off and decided to join forces. Ann was the public face of WB, for which she was a fierce and tireless advocate, and I, being more of an introvert, worked behind the scenes, maintaining the website and building what was to become Writer Beware’s database.
Ann and I became fast friends, and her death in 2013 was a huge blow, both personally and professionally. Her energy and drive are really, really missed.
Today, WB consists of me, Michael Capobianco (who fills many other important roles in SFWA!), Richard White, and another member who prefers not to be publicly named. Though the range and prevalence of writing scams has expanded since we started (has it ever), WB’s mission remains the same: to track and expose schemes, scams, pitfalls, and other bad practice in and around the publishing industry, with the aim of giving writers the tools and knowledge they need to avoid being exploited or ripped off.
What are some of the most common scams targeting writers today, and how do they differ from those in the past? How has technology impacted the prevalence and sophistication of literary scams?
Writer Beware was founded in the pre-digital era, when really the only viable path to a writing career was the agent-to-commercial-publisher route. Accordingly, most scams purported to facilitate that, from fee-charging agents, to vanity publishers, to outside editors who falsely claimed that “professional editing” was necessary to get past agencies’ and publishers’ gatekeepers.
However, the digital revolution has opened additional career paths for authors, primarily self-publishing, but also an enormous expansion of the small-press sector. An agent is no longer the be-all and end-all of a writing career, which has made it much less lucrative to be a scam agent. They’re still around but relatively scarce these days.
Vanity publishers, by contrast, are more numerous than ever (often attempting to disguise their true nature by claiming to be “hybrid”). Profiteering contests and awards (which exist to enrich their owners, rather than to honor writers) are also more common than in the past. But the most common fraud right now is a whole new scam sector focusing almost exclusively on authors who self-publish or publish with small presses. Both of these are extremely crowded and competitive markets where it’s increasingly hard to stand out. So marketing is a big opportunity for scammers. Self-publishers also need services—cover design, formatting, etc., either à la carte or as soup-to-nuts publishing packages—and that’s another big open door for fraudsters.
More recently, the scam industry has shifted heavily overseas. Is there a reason why international scams are booming now?
These days, most self-publishing and marketing scams operate from the Philippines, Pakistan, and India. In part, this is due to outsourcing. Sometime in the mid-2000s, big publishing service providers like Author Solutions and vanity publishers like Tate Publishing began trying to cut their costs by transferring much of their marketing and production work overseas.
In the Philippines, for example, there’s a large, educated, English-speaking workforce that’s also less costly than equivalent workers in the US. Inevitably, some of the more entrepreneurial-minded of these workers, seeing how lucrative it was to convince writers to spend large amounts of money to publish and market their books, decided to set up their own copycat enterprises to compete with Author Solutions and other American companies.
But where the American companies’ business practices were often deceptive, with high-pressure sales tactics and poor customer service (Author Solutions especially has long been the subject of consumer complaints), the overseas operations crossed the line into fraud, taking money for services they didn’t deliver, selling fictional products like “book insurance,” impersonating publishers and film companies with bogus offers requiring huge upfront fees, and more.
Don’t get me wrong: There are still plenty of US-based publishing scams, and many in the UK and Australia as well. But the vast bulk of questions and complaints WB receives are about these unscrupulous foreign operations, which often do business under multiple names and rely on their overseas locations to shield them from consequences.
I maintain a resource on Philippine publishing scams on the WB blog. It includes a (depressingly large) list of scam company names.
How much research and outreach to sources goes into a Writer Beware feature? Can you delve into the specific investigative processes you use to uncover scams and questionable practices?
I mainly find out about scams, problem publishers, bad contest guidelines, and similar, from people who contact me to report them. Mostly, I hear from writers, but there’s also outreach from agents and publishers, especially these days with impersonation scams so common. Occasionally, rarely, I’ll be contacted by law enforcement or private investigators.
Social media is also a source—often when someone posts about a scam or other publishing-related problem, people who are familiar with WB will ping me so that I see the post. I also follow industry experts and news sources, which helps me keep track of what’s happening in publishing—for example, the UK’s proposed changes to copyright in order to accommodate AI training. But the vast majority of discovery comes from direct contact with the people affected.
Often, those contacts will include a full description of the problem or experience; if not, I ask for more detail. I also request documentation to support whatever is being reported: contracts, emails, marketing materials, other relevant items. If further research is needed (which is always the case for blog posts), I use a variety of mostly online resources: web searches, Whois lookups, Publishers Marketplace, Companies House and other business registries, court dockets, to name a few. Depending on the type of complaint, I may contact the subject of the complaint to ask questions or request comment (when I write about problem publishers, for example).
I am careful to document anything I write about on the blog or warn about on social media, and my posts are based on multiple complaints (not rumor or hearsay or one random writer’s sour grapes, contrary to what some WB haters allege). This is important for accurate reporting, of course, but we also need to protect ourselves against legal liability.
In keeping with that, WB doesn’t accept anonymous complaints. Anything shared with us is confidential—we never publish names or unique identifying details without express permission—but we do need to know that we’re dealing with real people. We also need to hear from the affected person themself—if you contact me because your friend has been scammed, I’ll ask you to ask the friend to get in touch directly.
How do you approach creating alliances with industry professionals to maintain the credibility and reach of Writer Beware?
We’ve been around long enough that many industry people know about us just from word of mouth. We provide solid research and balanced viewpoints; I think we’re well-known for that. And while we don’t have the huge following that some of the more in-your-face publishing pundits do, I think we have a record of credibility that writers and publishing industry people trust.
WB staff attend conferences and conventions, participate in panel discussions, and give presentations and workshops to writers’ groups. We liaise with professional organizations like the Authors Guild (Michael Capobianco has way more connections in this area than I do). I’m active on Bluesky and on WB’s Facebook page, and I’ve been doing quite a lot of interviews and podcasts lately—just getting the word out about Writer Beware and the need for scam awareness.
In less pleasant outreach, I’m increasingly having to contact agents and publishers to inform them they’re being targeted by impersonation scams. These are everywhere now—again, part of the scam tsunami from the Philippines. I maintain a list of frequently impersonated people and companies on the WB blog.
Writer Beware maintains an extensive database of bad actors in the industry. Your work includes introducing new authors to these dangers, but it has its challenges. Would you please describe your ongoing mission of warning authors?
We’ve been building our database since the late 1990s, and it is HUGE. In my basement, I have a five-drawer standing file cabinet and a bunch of banker’s boxes from pre-digital days, when I printed everything out and stashed it in manila folders. But since 2005 or so, my data collection has been exclusively digital. I don’t miss the paperwork!
I’m often asked why we don’t make the database public. There are a couple of reasons. For one, WB is a tiny volunteer operation, and we just don’t have the resources for the constant maintenance and updating that would be needed to keep such an enormous public resource current.
For another, it would be a magnet for lawsuit threats and other attempts to intimidate us (as happened with the old Preditors and Editors, which hosted an extensive list of public warnings). Honestly, we’d prefer to spare ourselves and SFWA the aggravation. (Not that we don’t get threatened—see below.)
We do freely share the information in the database, though, via these aspects of our mission:
- The Writer Beware website is a regularly updated, general-purpose resource that identifies where writers might encounter scams and bad business practices, how to recognize these, and suggestions for avoiding them. The website includes sections on literary agents, vanity publishers, small presses, freelance editors, self-publishing, and more. Included are scam warnings, discussions of good and bad business practices (the more you know about how things should work, the easier it is to identify malfeasance when you encounter it), and links to trustworthy resources to learn more and help with research (for example, if a writer is looking for a literary agent).
- The Writer Beware blog hosts my detailed posts about specific schemes and scams, coverage of important publishing-related issues (for example, the controversies over generative AI and copyright), general reporting on what’s happening in and around publishing (such as two recent publisher bankruptcies), and general information helpful to writers (such as discussions of contract clauses). I also love featuring the weird stuff that lurks around the edges of the publishing industry, such as the long, sad history of attempts to create an author reality show, or the romance fraudster who faked a literary competition.
- Writer Beware’s social media includes a Facebook page and my presence on Bluesky (I’m @victoriastrauss.com). I post articles of interest, Writer Beware updates, and alerts and warnings that don’t require a detailed blog post.
- Writer Beware’s email service (beware@sfwa.org) is where writers can lodge complaints, alert us to bad or strange or confusing things they’ve encountered, and—most of all, because this is the most frequent type of email we get—ask questions about…pretty much anything writing- or publishing-related. If there’s any information in our files, I will pass it on, and if I don’t know anything, I’ll say that too. This is where the WB database really comes into play—both adding to it based on complaints and reports, and digging into it to find information I can share in response to questions.
The above should make it clear that WB is much more than just scam warnings. While scams and bad practice are the core of our mission, we also try to follow and report on a much wider range of issues of concern to writers and people in publishing.
One more thing: Scams and frauds are a danger to writers. But so is incompetence. “Literary agent”, for example, is not an entry-level job; it requires specialized skill and knowledge that are best acquired by working in publishing or for a reputable agency. People who come to agenting without that background may not be able to provide competent representation. They may not drain their clients’ bank accounts the way a scammer would–but otherwise, the end result is little different: wasted time, no publishing deal, and possible career damage.
In Part 2, coming August 14: Writer Beware’s reach and reputation have grown over the years, but the challenges facing writers are evolving just as fast. From the rise of impersonation scams to the emotional demands of advocacy, the second half of our conversation with Victoria Strauss explores deeper vulnerabilities in the publishing industry and the ongoing commitment it takes to support fellow writers.
For more information, please visit Writer Beware. For questions, comments, and concerns, please contact Writer Beware at beware@sfwa.org. Especially if you have documentation that can help with an investigation. Thank you!
Explore more articles from SFWA Presents: Get to Know…
Victoria Strauss, co-founder of Writer Beware®, is the author of nine novels for adults and young adults, including the Way of Arata epic fantasy duology (The Burning Land and The Awakened City), and a pair of historical novels for teens, Passion Blue and Color Song. She has written hundreds of book reviews for publications such as SF Site, and her articles on writing have appeared in Writer’s Digest and elsewhere.
She received the 2009 SFWA® Service Award for her work with Writer Beware, and in 2012 was honored with an Independent Book Blogger Award for the Writer Beware blog. She’s webmistress of the Writer Beware website, which she also created, and maintains the Writer Beware database, blog, and Facebook page.