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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 week, prestigious UK agency Ed Victor Ltd. announced that it was going into publishing, with an ebook/print-on-demand division called Bedford Square Books.

I often hear from writers who are convinced that they’re being cheated by their self-publishing services because they’ve been vigorously promoting their books, and yet their royalty checks are tiny.

Ask anyone – in these days of a less-than-thriving economy, and reduced budgets for book promotion, publishers increasingly count on authors to do much of the promotion for their own books.

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware

The publishing news of the week–maybe of the year–is the collapse of Borders, the USA’s second largest bookstore chain.

New language in the termination provision of the Harper’s boilerplate gives them the right to cancel a contract if “Author’s conduct evidences a lack of due regard for public conventions and morals, or if Author commits a crime or any other act that will tend to bring Author into serious contempt, and such behavior would materially damage the Work’s reputation or sales.”

I don’t often write posts like this, because it’s really like shooting fish in a barrel. And there are so many red flags here that savvy writers may wonder why I bother. But there are a lot of new writers searching for agents, many of whom are probably new to Writer Beware, and may not yet be clear on what to watch out for.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t self-publish if you want to (though I would urge you to do so on the basis of knowledge rather than hype), or that self-publishers can’t become successful (clearly, they can–something that has always been true, for every possible value of success). I’m just saying that it’s risky to assume that others’ success stories will apply to you.