Tag Archives: scams

Problems inherent in trying to be a professional writer in a self-publishing world

Book Reviews, Business, Self-Publishing, Writing, , , , , , , , , , ,

Let’s face it. There are a lot of writers out there. And with Amazon and the Nook making it that much easier for anyone to hang out a shingle and say he or she is a writer, that means we’re going to see more and more of them out there, even if they’re still struggling to string two sentences together. But that’s not the focus of this post. The focus of this post is that because there are so many of us out there, there are also a lot of people out there who are quite willing to rip us off and separate us from our hard earned dollars.

Of course, it’s always been this way, except in the past it was a lot easier to spot the ones trying to take advantage of us. In the old days, a writer mainly had to worry about a couple of different entities, such as:

1. Vanity Publishers. These guys would tell you your book was great and that they wanted to publish it. Then they’d send you a bill for their trouble. They took advantage of the fact that young writers (meaning ones who haven’t been writing in the business for long…age is irrelevant) didn’t know that legitimate writers got paid by the publisher, not the other way around.

2. Charging Agents. When a writer was ready to get a “real” agent, he or she would query a whole bunch of them and hope something interested someone. Every now and then a lucky hit was made, except you’d then hear from some mid-level agent who you really didn’t know but figured they had to be legit to be in the Writer’s Digest Agent Book. And then they’d say that they’d either have to charge you to read your book (before becoming your agent) or charge you for their services (after becoming your agent). In the end, they’d never sell anything because they made their money fleecing young writers who didn’t know better.

3. Editors. Someone would invest in an ad in the back of Writer’s Digest, claiming to be an editor. They wouldn’t cheat you by not editing your work, but quite often you’d end up with an editor who knew less about grammar and spelling than you did.

So, fast forward a few years and now we’re in an era where writers are self-publishing their stuff, as the legacy publishers have practically imploded on themselves, trying to hold onto a business model that resembles the big music producers trying to hold onto the music industry. This has provided a whole bunch of new entrepreneurs to latch themselves onto the writing community. Here are some ones to keep in mind:

1. Book formatters. Formatting a book for an ebook venture is pretty easy. You just have to fail at it a few times first. These guys promise to do that work for you, and some of them are cheap enough to be worth it. But others charge hundreds of dollars and make it seem like your book will fail if you don’t use their services. Like I said, if you have done it a few times, you’re generally okay. For the lower charging ones, they might be completely worth it as it would save a writer a lot of time not having to worry about the packaging part of the paradigm.

2. Agents Who Pursue You. When you start to make it as a self-published writer, you start to experience these agents who claim they can do wonders for your sales. Yet, they know as much about sales as you do, or even less. Basically, they’re banking on you remembering that agents used to be important and hope you’ll buy into the fantasy that having an agent makes you somehow better off. An agent sells your work to a publisher. If you’ve already published it, chances are pretty good that they don’t have much to offer you. A marketing specialist might be worthwhile, but if that’s what you’re seeking and he calls himself an agent, chances are you’re wasting your time…and money.

3. Bad Cover Artists. I’m being very careful about how I address this one because there are some brilliant cover artists out there, and I have used a few of them because they’re just awesome. The ones to watch out for (and not use) are the ones who have just unwrapped their copy of Photoshop Professional (or Elements) and now thinks he or she can create great covers. A great cover artist works from concept, not from stock photos, which is how a lot of them operate. I use one cover creator who actually asks me a bunch of questions about the novel AND THEN starts to design concepts. She’s great at what she does. That’s what you seek, but they’re rare and hard to find.

4. People Who Claim to Know More Than They Know. This has been one of my pet peeves. There are some authors out there who attempt to gain sales by pretending to know information that they really don’t. A good example is the extremely best selling author Rob Eagar who wrote a book everyone kept recommending to me as “the book that will help you sell more books”. The book is titled, Sell Your Book Like Wildfire, and it is a great book if you write nonfiction. However, because of the realization that the larger market out there is the group of naïve people like me who are writers of fiction, he spends a great deal of time trying to give the impression that this book is JUST AS good for fiction writers. His premise is simple. You have to sell books that are worthwhile to people. In other words, that have value to them, so you have to find what makes your book valuable to them and sell that idea as your premise for your book. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work with fiction. As a matter of fact, the more I read of his book, the more I realized he hasn’t a clue about anything that deals with fiction. He’s a marketer who knows nonfiction, and that’s it. Unfortunately, he’s convinced a lot of writers of fiction out there that his book is worthy, and in MANY conversations I’ve had with other fiction writers, we’ve all pretty much come to the same conclusion. Fiction books are about stories and storytelling, not about finding something useful for a reader. Sure, you can spin that in some way that might pretend to work, but in reality, you aren’t going to interest readers of fiction unless you have a really good story to tell, and you have an engaging way to do it. You’d get a lot more value from someone teaching you how to create a flashy cover for your book than you would from this book. Again, I was fooled by the desire to find an easy way to success.

That’s a general idea of some of the things to watch for in today’s writing environment. Drop me a line (or add a comment) if you come up with any yourself.

“Rich Dad/Poor Dad” Media Sensation Robert Kiyosaki author files for bankruptcy–Another Oprah-inspired trend of fake experts

Business, , , , , ,

The article

Basically, Robert Kiyosaki, an author I’ve read in the past because I fell for his Oprah-inspired, get rich rhetoric until realizing he wasn’t really saying anything that actually seemed usable, owed $24 Million to the Learning Annex and didn’t pay it, so he lost a trial over the issue, and even though Forbes claims he’s worth $80 Million, he went the bankruptcy route to avoid actually paying his bills. I’m thinking of doing the same thing to keep AT&T from collecting on that cell phone bill they send me every month, but I haven’t pulled the trigger on that one yet.

This reminds me of a story I’ve mentioned before in the past concerning my adventures in South Korea, when I came up against the businessman known as “he graduated from Harvard”. I was working for a for-profit school at the time, and I kept hearing about this infamous Korean businessman who everyone talked about with great respect because “he graduated from Harvard”. Then the school I was working at fell into financial hell, and it was astonishingly bought by none other than the man known as “he graduated from Harvard.”

The whole curriculum was changed because “he graduated from Harvard” had great ideas for what was going to make this school as great as he was. A few months later, a new change was implemented, which consisted of paychecks forgetting to be filled out and management forgetting to answer any of their phones. One of the co-workers at the school (who was new), mentioned that she knew the man known as “he graduated from Harvard” and she wasn’t sure she would be talking about him because she was still trying to get her backpay from a previous place she worked at which he had owned as well. Hearing from other people, I started to discover that the guy known as “he graduated from Harvard” had stiffed quite a few people in the past, and this was most obviously his next attempt at grabbing a bunch of cash and running away before anyone figured it out.

I remember talking to him one day, when he was being heralded around like Caesar after returning from Gaul. He actually introduced himself as “Mr. Kim. I graduated from Harvard.” I said, “Great, I worked on my Phd at Western Michigan University and went to West Point.” He smiled, pretended he didn’t understand me (even though I spoke to him IN KOREAN) and then wandered off to introduce himself to someone else as the great Korean man who graduated from Harvard.

Soon after that, after not receiving my next month’s paycheck (two in a row), I left Korea and came home. Not even sure what happened to that school and the infamous “he graduated from Harvard”. What I found fascinating is that he had an entire life schtick of ripping people off by informing everyone that he graduated from Harvard.

This is the same sort of feeling I get from Robert Kiyosaki after having read his book. I’m sure the Learning Annex has its own version to tell as well. Hey, maybe everything was on the up and up with him, but he’s going to have a difficult time attracting people to his cause in the future. Although if “he went to Harvard” is an example, there are suckers born every minute, meaning that the money flow just never ends.

Young, Pretty Texas Girl Reminds Us All That Sometimes People are Greedy Sh**heads

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When I heard about this story, I was both shocked and awed, even though I keep telling myself over and over that nothing really can shock and awe me anymore. Well, I was wrong.

Young teen, Angie Ramirez, galvanized support for her battle with leukemia that she’s been struggling with most of her life. With only six months to live, she put out a call for help from all of the rest of us, and respond we did (with about $17,000 of supported donations). Well, as it turns out, a funny thing happened on the way to leukemia. You see, little Angie Ramirez, who is 18 years old now, doesn’t actually have leukemia. Her charity she created, The Dream Foundation, really only had one dream being fulfilled, and it appears that dream was to help a young, attractive girl make a shitload of money off of gullible people.

Now, having said all that, maybe she has leukemia, but detectives in Texas certainly don’t think so. And neither does the hospital where she claims she lived most of her sick childhood (turns out, they never heard of her). Maybe it’s all a paperwork mix-up. I don’t know. But it doesn’t sound very good from what I’ve read and heard so far.

But look at her picture. She’s cute. And I’m sure a whole lot of people saw a cute little girl who was suffering and really felt she was worth trying to help. But because of her, how many people who might have helped other people are probably going to think it’s not worth it because if they were fooled once, they figure they’re probably being lied to again.

In this country, we have Ponzi schemers who completely get away with their crimes, go to prison for a few years, and then come out richer than God. When you’ve got guys like Bernie Madoff, whose family then argues that it “deserves” some of the money that he bilked people out of because they have mouths to feed, you just shake your head and realize that there has to be a reason people feel they can, and should, get away with this kind of crap. Whether it’s bad rearing or a society that believes that winning is more important than anything else, including morals and laws, this kind of stuff is happening way too often. It’s getting to the point where whenever I hear a sob story about how someone is suffering for some reason, my spidey senses start tingling, and I figure that they’re probably full of crap.

The other day, I was reading a forum posting on a community site I have been part of for over a decade now, and a known person talked about some horrific things that have happened in her life recently, and she was asking for the community’s support. Now, I’ve known of this person for a very long time, and instead of immediately think “wow, let’s try to help her”, I started thinking of people like Madoff and this scum teen who cheated people out of their charity, and I immediately don’t want to help her. And there’s probably no reason to suspect a scam, yet the incidents of this nature make it so that I don’t trust anyone any longer.

That’s what this kind of stuff leads to, and it bothers me a lot because I’m still naive enough to believe that people should help people whenever they can. But when charity is treated as another income source, what future is there for people who hold out hope for humanity?

(Picture attributed to Ruben Ramirez/AP)