Today, Smashwords founder Mark Coker guest blogs about “private label rights” services, which make it possible for anyone to “author” their own ebooks or to populate blogs by putting together chunks of content from the service’s database. The result: scads of badly-formatted, poor-quality ebooks and blogs, which are often used by SEO scammers to confuse Google Search results.
Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware Today, by unanimous decision, the US Supreme Court overturned a lower court ruling
Is it irony or coincidence that, only a few days after blogging about vanity awards, I should be spammed by one?
Perhaps you have, too. It’s an outfit calling itself the 2010 Creative Spirit Awards.
Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware Here’s a story that, for sheer weight of irony, I wish like anything
Writer Beware breaks down an email solicitatioin from Aspire Magazine to the nitty gritty.
Earlier this week, I received an email from a company called MyFreeRead.com, enticingly titled, “Authors: We Want Your e-Books & Articles!”
Last September, the US Justice Department urged the courts to reject the Google Book Settlement, citing concerns about class action, copyright, and anti-trust laws. The DOJ’s brief put the Settlement’s approval process on hold, and forced the parties back to the negotiating table–resulting, in November, in the filing of an Amended Settlement. New deadlines were set for authors and for the filing of objections, and the Fairness Hearing (to determine if the Settlement will stand) was postponed to February 18, 2010.
Victoria Strauss takes a satirical view of the latest fad in attempts to separate authors from their money.
For some time, publishers and others have been concerned about Amazon’s policy of pricing ebooks at $9.99, regardless of the price tag publishers put on them. Many feel that Amazon’s discounted ebook pricing is an attempt to control and monopolize the ebook market by forcing a pricing standard. Some in the publishing industry have even called the practice predatory.
Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware Once upon a time, there was a self-styled literary agent named Cris Robins
