If a display site is free, you lose nothing by signing up (as long as you’re careful about any contacts you receive). But if you have to pay a fee, you might want to think twice before pulling out your wallet.

A little while back, I stumbled on a news story about Mitchell Gross, a Georgia man who was recently indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of wire fraud and money laundering for allegedly luring a woman into investing millions of dollars in a phony company.

One of the effects of the phenomenal growth of ebooks over the past few years has been to bring new value to the backlist–both for publishers who hold the contracts for backlist books, and authors who want the freedom to exploit a new range of rights.

As we begin the new year (Writer Beware’s fourteenth!), here’s a look back at some of Writer Beware’s most notable posts and warnings from 2011.

A couple of weeks ago, I began hearing from self-published and small press authors who’d been approached over the summer by a Turkish publisher called Arvo Basim Yayin.

Writer Beware has learned that Pearson Education, a major education services company (and the parent company of trade publisher Penguin), is currently requesting vastly extended licenses for copyrighted text and images that it has received permission from rightsholders to include in its print textbooks and other publications.

It’s unfortunately very easy for writers to buy into these faux numbers–whether out of fear, or inexperience, or simply because they vindicate writers’ own frustration with rejection.

My interest in ebooks is a tiny percentage of my interest in books. I didn’t dream of being a writer so I could spend my time discussing file formats and what Author X (even if X= me) did to sell a whole bunch of copies. Maybe it’s stupid and romantic, but I got into this because I loved books.

So let’s get back to that whole laughing at work-for-hire authors or trashing popular books or not understanding what a saleable novel is.

Publishers aren’t eager to allow Amazon to undermine the economics of the e-book market, representing the lone bright spot for the industry, by permitting an estimated two to five million Amazon Prime customers to start downloading e-books for free.