On Scams and Predatory Behavior in the Writing World with Victoria Strauss
"[There] was a whole dark underbelly of publishing that I hadn’t known existed. I became fascinated."
Welcome to our interview series, On Something with Somebody! Today we’re sharing our chat with Victoria Strauss, co-founder of Writer Beware. If you like these interviews and want to tag along with this newsletter for more, you can sign up here.
Are we living in the golden age of scams? Considering the egregious number of “Potential Spam” calls I get—and also, of course, the random WhatsApp messages, the texts promising jobs with good pay, flyers bursting with misspellings, and every piece of mail I get that says, “Oops, once again your information has been compromised, our bad”—I’d say: Yes.
But it’s not like the scam game just started yesterday. Scammers, con artists, and the like have been around basically forever. And yes, that means in the literary and publishing world too.
This week we’re sharing our chat with Victoria Strauss, co-founder of Writer Beware, a resource that provides comprehensive information and warnings about scams and other bad publishing practices, overall making publishing less… well, sketchy.
Below, Victoria and Ben chat about scams versus bad actors, the most shady corners of the literary world, how scams have evolved since the start of the internet, and what hope Victoria has for the future.
Have you experienced something sketchy in the lit mag world? A contest gone unpaid? Serial plagiarist got your nose? We’re trying to prevent this sort of thing, and we’ll be cataloging and investigating these kinds of behaviors alongside Writers Beware.
» Learn more here «
The line between scam and bad actor can be very thin, and different people define those terms differently.
Benjamin Davis: Could you start by giving a little background on yourself and Writer Beware for folks who might not be as familiar?
Victoria Strauss: I’m a novelist; I write historical fiction but also fantasy. In the late 1990s (yikes, can’t believe it’s been that long), I began joining writers’ groups online and started seeing all these awful stories about writers’ experiences with fee-charging literary agents and predatory vanity publishers. I was fairly lucky in my own publication journey: I was never scammed (though I was ignorant enough when I started out that I easily might have been). Here was a whole dark underbelly of publishing that I hadn’t known existed. I became fascinated.
Around the same time, I joined the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) and saw that they were calling for a volunteer to create a page on the SFWA website warning about writing scams. I volunteered. A little later on, I was introduced to Ann Crispin, who was SFWA’s VP at that point and was working on creating a Committee on Writing Scams. We joined forces, and the rest is history! Sadly, Ann passed away in 2013. She wasn’t just a colleague but a dear friend, and I miss her every day.
That single page of warnings is now Writer Beware: an extensive website with sections on literary agents, vanity publishers, small presses, self-publishing, and more; a very active blog that discusses specific schemes and scams and the publishing industry in general; a Facebook page for community engagement and discussion (https://www.facebook.com/WriterBeware); and my own social media feeds (primarily on Bluesky these days.
We also accept questions and complaints via email: beware@sfwa.org.
BD: Where does the line fall between a scam and a bad actor? For example, I’d consider Narrative a bad actor with exorbitant fees to submit versus something like taking fees for a contest without ever paying the winners.
VS: The line between scam and bad actor can be very thin, and different people define those terms differently. For me, I agree with the distinction you’re making: a scam is deliberately designed to defraud (taking contest fees and never paying winners, stealing personal information, lying about the nature of paid services, impersonating agents or publishers in order to trick writers into buying goods or services) while a predator stays just this side of outright criminality but still takes serious advantage of writers–such as those inflated Narrative contest fees, or overpriced vanity publishers, or publishers with rights grabs in their contracts.
BD: Writer Beware looks not just for scams but “schemes” and “pitfalls.” What are some examples of these, and how would you differentiate them?
VS: It’s a common misconception that Writer Beware only deals with outright scams, but we are just as aggressive in covering predatory behavior that lands just this side of fraud. That’s what I’d define as a “scheme” while a “pitfall” is something that might happen that’s not necessarily fraudulent but not very good for you.
So an example of a “scheme” would be one of the many profitmaking writing awards, where the aim is not to honor writers, but for whoever is running the award to make a buttload of money. Such schemes typically charge exorbitant entry fees, offer scores of entry categories to maximize entries, usually don’t disclose their judges (if there even are any), feature cheap-to-provide prizes (such as digital certificates), and add to their profit margin by hawking extra merchandise or even requiring authors to buy their trophies.
An example of a pitfall would be an author settling for a marginal or questionable literary agent because they believe that any agent is better than no agent (not true). Or ignoring their misgivings about iffy clauses in a publisher’s contract (such as royalties paid on net profit) because they’re so eager to have their book published. Or hiring someone to perform a service—editing, cover design, PR—they aren’t qualified to deliver (incompetence can do as much damage as scammery).
BD: Where do you discover the most shady behavior within the lit world?
VS: The worst scams right now target self-publishing authors. Re-publishing scams, marketing/PR scams, book-to-screen scams, publisher/literary agent/production company impersonations…the list goes on. I’ve written a lot of words on my blog about these scams, most of which come from overseas and target English-language writers.
BD: Are there specific things that make your hair stand on end while evaluating a publisher that’s been reported to you?
VS: To be honest, not so much these days. I’ve been doing this so long that pretty much everything I see is something I’ve already seen. Not paying royalties, publishing books with formatting errors, acquiring books and sitting on rights without ever publishing, bullying and retaliation by the publisher, horrid contract clauses, hidden fees…the list goes on.
That said, something especially obnoxious I’ve seen recently: publishers that reduce royalty payments in ways that aren’t mentioned in their contracts. For example, the contract states that royalty payments are calculated on the publisher’s actual cash receipts (aka net income) with no additional deductions. But when authors get their royalty statements, they discover that the publisher is making additional deductions in the form of print costs (this is a real example).
As much as the internet is a great research tool, there’s just so much bad advice and deceptive content.
BD: What is your process when a scam is reported to Writer Beware?
VS: Anything I write about on the WB blog or mention on social media is supported by multiple similar reports/complaints and/or documentation in my possession. I check my records to see if I’ve gotten other reports or complaints. I ask for documentation: contracts, emails, royalty reports, and the like. I don’t report on hearsay or rumor; writers like to talk about whisper networks, but whispers are as likely to be false or out of context as they are to be true.
I can only add a complaint to my database if it comes from the person directly affected. I can’t accept your complaint on behalf of your friend, for example; I need to hear from your friend themself. Also, I don’t reach out to authors directly unless invited; I’ve learned from experience that such contacts are rarely welcomed.
I encourage anyone who contacts me to pass my email address on to any other writers they’re in touch with who’ve had similar issues and ask them to get in touch with me. The more complaints I have, the more likely it is that I’ll be able to write about them; having a lot of complaints also helps me to anonymize the information I provide.
Writer Beware promises confidentiality: names and unique identifying information (such as book titles) will not be publicly posted or shared unless you give us permission. We’ve been doing our thing for 25 years and have never given up a name, not even under threat of lawsuits or subpoena.
BD: Writer Beware started in 1998, woah. It seems (as with all dark things) that the evolution of the internet has made scams and schemes so much more common. How have they evolved since you started?
VS: When we started, the main scams were dishonest literary agents (charging upfront fees, acting as fronts for paid editing, getting kickbacks from referrals to editing services or vanity publishers) and predatory vanity publishers. The predatory vanities are still a problem—boy, are they ever—but literary agent fraud has become relatively rare, thanks to the growth of small presses and self-publishing. Being a scam agent is way less lucrative now that agents aren’t the be-all and end-all of a writing career (as they were in 1998, when traditional publishing was essentially the only reputable option), so there’s less incentive to set yourself up as one.
Other scams and schemes and time-wasters that were there when we started and are still around: dodgy and/or profiteering contests and awards, fake copyright registration services, predatory editing services, spam submission services, vanity anthologies, and probably several more that I’m not calling to mind right now.
What’s new, or relatively so: the tsunami of scams focused on self-publishers, which have become legion for a couple reasons.
Successful self-publishing involves at least some financial outlay for editing, cover design, marketing, etc., and scammers are eager to tap into that need and divert writers into their clutches. Also, while all writers have to struggle to a greater or lesser degree for readership and exposure, self-publishers must go it alone, without the backup of a publisher that has a vested interest in maximizing sales (any reputable publisher will offer at least some sales and marketing support). Especially if they’ve used one of the less savory paid self-publishing services, such as the Author Solutions imprints, their books are likely to languish in obscurity, which is very much not the way such services present what they can do for writers. Disappointment and frustration can make writers into easy prey for scammers who purport to offer a better publishing experience, or better marketing, or who claim they can transition writers to lucrative traditional publishing contracts or bring their books to Hollywood.
BD: What kind of impact do you think the internet has had on the writing world overall?
VS: Good, obviously. It’s a great research facilitator for those of us who do research for our books. Writers can find each other and form communities. Social media and agent/publisher websites have helped to (somewhat) demystify traditional publishing and streamline the submission process. Most important, I think, is that the digital revolution has created alternate career paths for writers, with the growth of self-publishing and the flourishing world of small independent presses.
But also, plenty of bad. Scams, obviously, which have proliferated online and exploit digital technology and social media to defraud authors. Social media is so great for making connections, so toxic at other times. The sheer volume of information and the difficulty in figuring out what’s worthwhile: as much as the internet is a great research tool, there’s just so much bad advice and deceptive content. And if you’re an inexperienced writer, how do you filter it? For example, if you Google “publish my book”, the first results are sponsored links for overpriced self-publishing services and ghostwriting scams.
BD: Lastly, if writers come across a scam, how can they report it to Writer Beware?
VS: Email me: beware@sfwa.org. Or message me on Bluesky: @victoriastrauss.bsky.social.
