You may have heard that Vantage Press, one of the USA’s oldest vanity publishers, closed its doors at the end of 2012.

As we begin the new year (Writer Beware’s fifteenth–good heavens!), here’s a look back at some of Writer Beware’s most notable posts and warnings from 2012.

Well, it’s happened again. Another traditional publisher has added a pay-to-play “division.”

Yesterday, venerable trade publisher (and one of the Big 5) Simon & Schuster announced the launch of Archway Publishing, a self-publishing services provider.

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

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.

Following on my last post about how authors can waste money on promotional strategies, here are some more cash-sucking “opportunities.”

I’ve gotten a lot of questions about Raider Publishing International over the years. Founded by a former (and disgruntled) PublishAmerica author, it’s basically a self-publishing service with some added bells and whistles.

How threatened do publishers feel by agencies’ aggressive moves into publishing? Well, according to a report today in The Bookseller, Random House UK has done an end run around prestigious literary agency Sheil Land, directly approaching author Tom Sharpe to secure digital rights to his backlist.

Last October, I blogged about David Boyer, a self-styled author and publisher who was discovered to be committing extensive plagiarism, publishing stories and books both under his own name and his many aliases.

A judge has dismissed the case of an author who launched a criminal libel suit against a journal editor who published a bad review of her book, and the author has been ordered to pay punitive damages to the defendant.