Author name: Victoria Strauss

I’ve seen a slew of bad publishing contracts lately, which makes this guest blog post by author Kfir Luzatto especially resonant for me. Turning down a publishing offer when you have one in hand is one of the toughest decisions you will ever have to make…but sometimes, if the publisher has a poor reputation or the contract terms are bad, it’s the wise thing to do.

The following statement was sent by the Authors Guild to its members on Sunday. The Guild labels the proposed merger between Penguin and Random House (which would create the world’s largest publisher) “unsettling,” and urges “close scrutiny from antitrust officials at the Justice Department or the FTC.”

It’s right there in the logo of the Screenplay Replay Contest: the come-on.”Where Your Winning Script Gets a Publishing Deal.”

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware

On Thursday, I blogged about high entry fee awards schemes. Today, I’m going to discuss another potential awards trap: non-optimal entry rules.

It’s Awards Week at Writer Beware! No, I’m not handing out prizes–I’m dispensing cautions. I’ve got two posts this week, both focusing on literary awards you may want to think twice about before entering.

Query letters. Except for the synopsis, there’s no more dreaded task a writer has to undertake.

How to boil an entire book down to a short pitch that not only provides an accurate snapshot of the work, but makes a literary agent (or a publisher) want to see more?

On the heels of several publishers’ secret settlement deal with Google in the long-running Google Books lawsuit, a judge has made a major ruling in another lawsuit over book scanning.

Seven years ago, the Authors Guild and several major publishers (including McGraw Hill, Penguin, and John Wiley) filed suit against Google for its unauthorized scanning of in-copyright books.

On June 11 of this year, a class action lawsuit was filed against PublishAmerica by a Baltimore, MD law firm, in association with high-profile litigators Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro.

Among other things, the complaint alleged that PA makes money off its authors while billing itself as a traditional publisher, requires authors to pay for “usual and customary marketing that any reputable publisher would do as a matter of course,” offers “services that are not reasonably designed to promote book sales,” and “duped” the three plaintiffs in the lawsuit with, among other things, “bogus services” and books “riddled with errors.”