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.”

Actually, I’m on staycation, but I’ll be cutting way back on the Web stuff for the next two weeks. I’ll be back the week of September 24.

Today: another guest blog post of relevance to freelance writers. This one covers content aggregators, and the pitfalls that may be lurking in their Terms of Use.

If you’re a freelance writer, you’re probably under constant pressure to get the next paying gig and to keep the money flowing. This can override your caution and leave you vulnerable to scammers. I know, because I’ve been there myself.

In my recent blog post on Pearson’s acquisition of self-publishing giant Author Solutions Inc., I posed several questions that I hope Pearson will consider as it integrates ASI with Penguin Group. One of these was whether ASI will start being more transparent in its advertising and PR. I’d like to go a little bit more into detail on what I mean.

A prominent literary agent recently told me that unless an author receives a hefty advance of $100,000 or more most publishers will do virtually no promotion, leaving it to authors to create and exploit their own platforms via social media and networking connections, workshops and webcasts.

If you’ve been living under a social media rock and haven’t heard of the LendInk incident, here’s a brief rundown.

LendInk was a website that facilitated Kindle ebook lending, matching would-be ebook borrowers with ebook owners. All of this was perfectly legal, involving legitimately purchased ebooks, lending options provided by Amazon, and lending terms set by publishers (whether the book was self- or traditionally published).

FundsforWriters.com has listed contests for thirteen years, and we’ve reached a point where many sponsors send us contests. If the entry fee is over five percent of the first prize, I scrutinize the contest harder. If it’s over ten percent, I decline the request.

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware

Widely-discussed book news this week: Amazon UK’s report that ebook sales have outstripped the sales of all print formats combined.

According to unaudited figures released by [Amazon UK] on Monday, sin…

The other day, on one of the online writers’ discussion groups I frequent, someone asked a couple of questions about the list that I thought it would be instructive to answer here: why do we include agencies on the list if they’re not currently active?