Five Signs Your Publisher Is Scamming You
Avoiding Predation in Publishing
Welcome to Shelf Life where we are building an ark because it’s been raining for forty days and forty nights. The ark contains two dogs and one parrot with which to repopulate the earth. Both dogs are female.
It’s hard out there for an author. You think you’ve finished the hard part—actually, you know, writing the manuscript—but when it comes time to publish you learn there’s a whole new world of obstacles and disappointments awaiting you. Publishing comes with a generous amount of rejection. This is not universal—somewhere out there, someone must have sold their manuscript on the first try with a single query—but rejection is universal enough that we must all count on shouldering our share.
Agents will not respond to your queries. Publishers will not respond to your pitches and proposals. Beta readers will ghost you. Magazines will reject your stories. This is normal. There’s just way more writing out there than there are venues to publish it. Agents and editors are fickle. Almost every author gets more nos than yeses.
Publishing predators thrive in this environment of authorial disappointment, unmet expectations, dashed hopes, and obstacles to publishing. These predators actively seek authors who have been beaten down and kicked around a bit by the publishing industry. That’s their preferred prey. They’re counting on new and developing authors to be naive, unfamiliar with the ins and outs of the publishing industry, and desperate for a book deal.
Once they have prey in their sightline, their business is to separate you (the author) from your money and your intellectual property rights. This is the last thing you want. But it’s hard to be vigilant when someone comes around offering the legitimate-sounding deal you’ve been trying so hard to score for yourself.
So: How can you quickly tell whether an agent or publisher is the real deal, or whether they’re out to scam you? Today I’ve got five bright red flags that should set off alarm bells when you see them in the book industry. Actually, strike that. These shouldn’t just raise an alarm—any of the below should be a dealbreaker if you spot them amid a potential book deal. If you see one of these, I have bad news: You’re getting scammed.
1. They Approached You
Unless you have a track record of selling books and winning literary or genre awards for your writing, then agents and editors will not approach you with a book deal.
Let me say that again in no uncertain terms: Legitimate agents and publishers will not approach you first for a book deal.
There are always more manuscripts on an agent’s or editor’s desk than they can ever get through. They rely on an army of assistants and interns to triage the steady flow of manuscripts coming their way every day. They are not actively going out on the internet, looking for potential new authors to solicit, and asking those authors to sign a deal with them. The folks who are doing this are vanity publishers and scammers drumming up business. Their business is not publishing books. Their business is taking money from authors.
Here’s how this happens: You’ve been making the rounds of the beta reader and new author Facebook groups. You’ve been active on Booktok and Bookstagram. Your online presence as an author with a manuscript in work or ready to shop is growing. Suddenly, someone’s in your email or your DMs claiming to be an agent or a publisher who’s been following your online posts and thinks you have a really hot commodity. They’d like you to submit your manuscript so they can review it and maybe offer you a book deal.
This feels so gratifying when it happens. Someone has seen the genius of your work in the rare glimpses of it that you’ve offered online! They’ve identified you as a diamond in the rough! They’re ready to invest in you!
They’re not. It’s a scam.
2. They Want Your Money
Money flows from the publisher to the author like water runs downhill. The publisher asking the author for money is like water flowing uphill: Something is very wrong in this scenario.
In the traditional publishing model, the publishing company gets their money from book buyers—the readers. They are the content middle-person. They license the right to publish the book from the author in exchange for money in the form of an advance and/or royalties.
If the publisher wants money from the author, then they are not a traditional publisher because they are not following this model. Their model is based on receiving money from the author instead of from book buyers.
Most authors know all this. However: Scam operators are slick and they know authors have been warned about publishers asking for their money. While some scam publishers will come right out and ask for a fee to publish your book, others might use setups like these:
They suggest your book isn’t ready for prime time yet, and refer you to an editor—who you will pay out of pocket—to get your book closer to publishable shape. This editor works with the scammer. They split your money.
They require a reading fee to consider your manuscript for publication.
They ask you to sign a contract guaranteeing sales of your book. If they don’t sell the agreed-upon volume of copies, then you must buy units to make up the difference. They will not sell any copies. You are on the hook to buy the contracted number of units.
The publisher expects you to pay production costs up front to subsidize the cost of publishing. This is basically self-publishing with extra steps and someone else taking a cut.
There are plenty more scams where these came from. To avoid losing your shirt, don’t pay—or agree in your contract to pay—anything to a publisher for the publication of your book. Likewise, agents get their fee from the money the author is paid by the publisher. Legitimate agents do not take the author’s money up front. They work on commission.
3. Their Website Woos Authors, Not Readers
This is really simple: If the publisher’s website sells books, it’s because their business model is selling books. As an author, you want the publisher’s money to come from selling books. If the publisher’s website sells authors on publishing with this company, then their business model is fleecing authors.
All publishers’ websites will have an indication somewhere of how to submit to that publisher (even if it’s just an admonition not to submit except through an agent). It’s not a red flag if you find submission instructions on a publisher’s website.
If the main purpose of the website is to attract authors to buy services instead of attracting readers to buy books, this is not a legitimate publisher. It’s a vanity or subsidy press.
4. Their Promises Are Impossible to Guarantee
No one can read a new author’s manuscript and rightly predict whether it will be a bestseller. No one can guarantee that a book will sell at least a certain number of units, or make at least a certain amount of money, or will definitely earn out its advance.
If editors or agents could identify a bestseller with unerring accuracy, then publishers would publish nothing but bestsellers. The trad pub model relies on the earnings of bestsellers to finance everything else. That’s how the model works: Sign everything you can that you think is likely to be a bestseller, and the few of those that actually go on to become bestsellers finance the whole pile. If anyone had the winning formula to publish only bestsellers, then the trad pub model would not work the way it does.
Scam publishing operations will attempt to dazzle you with the possibilities so you’re less likely to notice what they’re sneaking into your contract. I mean why would you worry about meeting a measly 500-copy sales minimum when the publisher is assuring you that your book will sell 10,000 copies in year one?
5. They’re Fearmongering
By fearmongering, I mean using fear as a tactic to pressure you to work with them.
No one else will take a chance on this project, but we will.
We sign new, unpublished authors—other publishers won’t consider you without a backlist.
Other publishers will completely rewrite this book to make it salable, but we’ll support your original vision.
There’s a fine line between pitching your company and using fear to browbeat authors. If a company truly wants to publish your manuscript, they should make the case about what they can do for you and your book. If, instead, they lead with the consequences of what will happen if you don’t publish with them—then they’re using scare tactics. If they’re using scare tactics, it’s because they have nothing to offer you.
I have this theory: No one who comes to my door to sell me something has a good deal for me. Why? Because if the product they’re selling could stand up to any level of scrutiny, then they’d put that product out on the marketplace with all the other products and let me choose it based on its merits. If someone has to come to my door and give me a personal sales pitch while I’m unable to comparison shop, it’s because they know they have a crap product that can’t succeed without the hard sell.
Publishing is like this too. Nobody who comes knocking at your door with a publishing agreement has a valid deal for you.
Here’s how you can tell: “I’m going to have my agent look over this and once I get the thumbs up from them, I’ll get back to you.” (You don’t have to have an agent to say this.) They will have about 50,000 reasons why you shouldn’t show it to your agent—“There’s no time to waste! The agent will want a cut! We only work with authors directly, we never work with agented authors!”
They know that what they’re offering will never stand up to scrutiny.
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