What a tangled web they weave … In the past two months, I’ve worked with several private clients and fielded numerous phone calls/emails from authors who have issues with their “publishers.” In all cases, they’ve been duped. They’ve been lured, hooked and now are sinking. The cause: a publishing predator is in their midst.

Their publishers are really not “publishers,” at least in the sense that they have the infrastructure to create and support a quality book and its author or that they have their internal team—from editing to some semblance of book design and publishing marketing and publicity and that they are accountable in the critical accountability departments of actual book sales and responsibility.

I attended a national conference a few months ago where the attendees were professional speakers. Many were well established, but a majority—new to the industry—gobbled up information that would hopefully turn them into a star on the platform. Having a book helps. Within the Exhibit Hall, several booths proclaimed that they were publishers … they would publish your book for a small fee. What they were, vanity presses “(or as some people call them, subsidy publishers)—nothing more, nothing less. The predators of the print world … and they were signing up people … their next victims, left and right.

…to continue reading this post, visit The Book Designer website for Author Alert: Is Your Book Held Hostage by a Subsidy Publisher?

Shady publishers taking advantage of writers is the reason I wrote Four Types of Book Publishers to inform unsuspecting victims of what’s out there.