The rise of self-publishing has introduced many different service businesses to the industry. These include freelance editors, book formatters, cover designers, marketing experts, and more. It has also greatly increased the number of startup publishers and individual writers creating their own tiny publishing companies.
Unfortunately, it is also made it possible for scammers, liars, thieves to prey upon the hopeful much more easily than ever before.
Avoid These Writing Dangers
- Vanity publishers
- Unprofessional service providers
- Free-book scammers with sob stories
The general rules of hiring someone to provide a service or doing business with a company or individual hold true in the fiction writing industry. Do your research before signing a contract or giving money to anyone. Keep your eyes open for red flags. When in doubt, stay away.
These companies charge you money to publish your book.
This is not how the publishing industry works.
You came up with the idea and put a lot of hard work into writing the book. You deserve to be paid for your efforts. In business speak, you created the product.
A real publisher has a vested interest in making sure your book is excellent so that it sells a lot of copies and they make money from the percentage of the sale price specified in the contract.
A vanity publisher has no reason to perfect or promote your product because they already got a lot of money from you. Why should they care if your book sells or not if they earned hundreds or thousands of dollars from you the moment you submitted to them?
Red Flags for Vanity Press
No vanity press calls themselves a vanity press. They do everything they can to convince you that their way is the right way to do things. Instead, the may call themselves hybrid publishers, partnerships, or offer contributory contracts.
Dive into the language they use on their website. If they talk about revolutionizing the publishing industry, turning traditional ways on their head, or introducing something brand-new to the writing world, consider these red flags. The foundation of publishing – that writers get paid and the publisher earns a percentage of the sale price and nothing more – has nothing wrong with it. This is not to be revolutionized.
Some vanity presses do not ask for money up front.
Instead, they bill you for services associated with self-publishing: editing, formatting, cover design, etc. These are usually things you need to pay for. However, a vanity publisher overcharges and does not let you choose the person you work with. You must use their people even if they do not do the type of work you approve of.
Another common vanity press scam involves forcing you to buy a certain number of your published books. The contract may state that you need to buy 100 or more books with clever suggestions to sell them in person at book signings or other events. This is just another way that they get your money because all the proceeds of those sales go directly to them.
All those editors, formatters, book cover designers, and marketing experts mentioned earlier on this page do valuable work for self-published authors. There are many excellent options to choose from out there. However, there are just as many frauds who deliver poor quality results.
Caveat Emptor – Let the Buyer Beware
How do you know who to hire? Do the same thing for an editor or book cover designer they would do for a plumber, attorney, or landscaper.
- Get recommendations and online reviews
- Check out their past work for professionalism and quality
- Talk with them and make sure they understand their job
- Look for common red flags
Common Issues with Bad Service Providers
Editors and Proofreaders
Some use automated programs like Grammarly or ProWritingAid to provide editing or proofreading services. While these can help writers improve their craft, they are no substitute for trained, skilled, and meticulous people.
Ask to see examples of books they edited in the past and make sure they have no errors. Read reviews to see if people complain about poor editing or a lot of mistakes. Get a simple edit of the first few pages or a chapter to make sure their methods align with your style.
Book Formatters
Get to know the conventions of proper formatting such as indents, skip blinds, drop caps at the beginning of the chapter, etc. Look at books they formatted in the past and make sure they look good. These are probably the least troublesome service providers because there are great programs that make formatting simpler.
Book Cover Designers
The biggest problems with hiring unprofessional cover or marketing graphic designers is the chance of them using stolen images. Every photo, vector, icon, and font used on a book cover must have a clear and undeniable license for its use.
Also, there are a lot of people calling themselves designers out there who do not know anything about design or book covers specifically. Things like genre conventions, layout styles, and effective color schemes all come into play. Look at the top sellers in your genre and make sure the book cover designer examples suit buyer expectations.
There are multiple book pirating sites online that copy people's entire books and put them up for sale or for free access. While you can send a DMCA notice to protest stolen copyright, it is difficult to avoid all these problems. Some people do not bother because people who use scammer sites to get free books are not your target customers anyway.
There are a few things to look for to avoid giving your book away for free to someone who intends to do bad things with it.
Take care when choosing beta readers to go over your final draft manuscript before publication. While it is impossible to get to know every single one personally and establish trust, be wary of those who offer beta reading too frequently or who do not seem involved in the fiction world or your genre specifically. Do not simply send your file out to everyone who offers to help.
Do not fall for sob stories of people who insist they have no money or online access to buying or borrowing books through the publisher or major sales platforms like Amazon. Although this may be true for people from certain countries, it could also indicate they are collecting books that they can publish themselves elsewhere.