While you are worrying about whether beta readers will steal your ideas, there is a more genuine threat on the horizon.
When offered a publishing contract, please do all your research before you sign. There are a number of fakes and scammers out there, as well as good-intentioned amateurs that don’t know how to get your work to a wide audience. I won’t tell the heartbreaking stories here – there are too many.
Being published badly is worse than being never published.
It can destroy your career and your dreams.
The quick check is to google the publishing house name + scam or warning.
But, to be sure, check with these places first. They aren’t infallible (nothing is) but they can help you protect yourself. They are written and maintained by expereinced writers, editors, publishers and legal folks.
This is really important, so if you are a writer or have writer friends, or you are a writing blog, please reblog it.
Just to let you know, PublishAmerica changed their name to America Star Books.
HEAD’S UP, WRITER TYPES: THIS IS AN IMPORTANT PSA!
Also applies to many so-called freelance sites that are just content mills, and may not pay unless your work is used, even if the contract seems designed otherwise.
Listen, reading these is like legit reading horror stories. When it comes to publishing your writing, always, always, ALWAYS do your research. Not only will it help you avoid scams, but it will also be likely to help you land a much better fit for an agent/publisher/whatever. Knowing more is never going to hurt.
Omg!!! Thanks for the warning! Writers— reblog!
I’ve heard stories like this that are scarier than horror stories. This is an all time worst nightmare for a writer. Everyone reblog and make sure you keep your work safe!
Reblogging again for the links. Also check pred-ed.com and the Absolute Write forum. Then google Publisher’s name + scam and see what comes up. Do NOT use the BBB ratings, they are wholly unsuitable for rating publishers and regularly give A ratings to well-known publishing scams. You can also read my own post on publishing scams, have a link on the left of my blog ( can’t link here, I’m on mobile, sorry).
Equally important to know is that you can SELF-PUBLISH through a number of platforms these days. @ean-amhran and I used Amazon’s CreateSpace and Kindle Direct Publishing to publish both of our books. No editors, no contracts, no finagling with publishers who want to change your materials. Just direct-to-market material.
(Granted, it means you’ve got to do a LOT more work yourself with editing and formatting and cover art, but it’s worth it to miss the headache of trying to bargain with publishing houses or avoid scams.)
Be vigilant, fellow writers!
If you choose to self publish then HAVE A PLAN and think things through.
And hire an editor. Please, for the love of all that is holy, hire an editor. It’s expensive, but you will get a better book out, a better reputation…
If you’re going to publish electronically, make sure you also get someone who can LAY AN EBOOK OUT PROPERLY.
I have spent money on Kindle books, many of them reprints of older works, whose formatting is so messed up as to render them unreadable.
I actually recommend using the Smashwords Style Guide even if you don’t use Smashwords.
It lays out how to neatly format an e-book in a wonderful step by step format, and you can get it free from Smashwords. Just leave off the couple of things that are (very obviously) Smashwords specific.
If you can’t stand dealing with the meticulous detail, then by all means hire somebody, but most people can learn to format an ebook correctly and once you’ve done it a couple of times it takes about an hour tops.
Because the redirects aren’t working for me, I’m going to assume others might have trouble with these links, so for those who need it the URL for the website to Writer Beware is:
These are not publishers’ guilds, notice; you sometimes see scammers trying to defend themselves against Writer Beware exposes by claiming that they’re “small press” or “indie” and Big Publishing is somehow out to get them – but all of those guilds are run by and for writers, to help support them and represent them in the field. It is the closest writers have to having unions, and there’s no direct competition between them (you could literally be an in any of those guilds are the same time as each other, in addition to others, and I believe a number of authors are).
Writer Beware is a wonderful resource, and I highly recommend it. It’s both a good general guide to the scams people run/red flags to watch out for (such as giving up your copyright entirely as opposed to specific rights, or being charged to publish something or have it edited, when they’re trying to act like they’re a “normal” publisher), and a frequently-updated list of the latest specific known scammers, both in “fake agents” and fake/scammy publishers categories. (The company formerly known as Publish America is one of the most famous and egregious cases, but by far not the only one)
Additionally, for SF and fantasy writers, the SFWA’s own list of qualifying markets that one can be published in as a prerequisite to be able to get into their guild (remember, it IS a profession-based guild), is a great guide to normal markets for those genres that have standard contracts that aren’t abusive or scammy, and their guidelines include some of the industry-standard minimums for “per word” etc rates, so even if some new magazine market isn’t on their list, you can tell if it’s suspiciously far outside the usual per-word or whatnot standards. (It’s likely the guidelines for Mystery Writers of America etc also would be useful in that vein)
Even if you’re unpublished or don’t want to join their guild, they’re a wonderful group and resource, and I highly recommend their site and Writer Beware in particular!
The other sites mentioned above, such as “Preditors and Editors” should be still valid if you Google them, and are often rec’d by Writer Beware, but Writer Beware is the one I’m most familiar with. 🙂
Also, you should never have to pay an agent or anyone a “reading fee”! DO NOT PAY PEOPLE TO READ YOUR WORK!!! Run away from so-called agents that charge a reading fee! They are considered unethical in their own industry!
Also related to agents: Should you go this route and seek one, DO NOT PAY ONE DIME TO THEM upfront! A real agent only gets paid when he sells your book to a publisher! The average cut is about 10-15% of the first sale profits, if I remember right, with cuts of film and other rights maybe being more, when sold. At most, writers should only be responsible for the costs of phone calls and postage.
The average rating for Peter Capaldi’s last season was 5.8 million viewers. No episode that season rated above 6.68 million – and that rating was for the season premiere. That season featured the only two episodes to rate below 5 million viewers EVER since Doctor Who was revived in 2005.
The season before that the average rating was 6.20 million. That was the first season since 2005 not to have a single episode rate over 7 million viewers. Every season before that had an average rating in the 7 millions, except for season 4 in 2008 which averaged 8.42 million. Incidentally, that was David Tennant’s last full season, and the final full season before the Moffatt years.
Whilst the ratings have only been announced for 4 episodes so far, not a single episode of Jodie Whittaker’s first sesason has fallen below 8 million viewers. The average rating so far has been 9.15 million. Its true that it is unlikely the average will stay that high – ratings have technically been dropping week by week. Exactly as happened every season in the past – it is perfectly normal for ratings to fall towards the middle of a season, and rise again for the finale.
A lot of the media will just do anything to discredit this season because they can’t handle the fact the Doctor is female now.
It’s often been remarked that Spider-Man’s schtick wouldn’t work nearly so well if he didn’t live in a town with so many tall buildings, but consider: how well would Batman’s “I am the night” routine work if he was operating out of a normal city where people actually live, rather than a perpetually twilit urban hellscape that looks like the Art Deco movement had a one-night stand with Soviet Brutalism in a wrought-iron-and-gargoyle factory?
That is my favorite description of the Batman aesthetic ever.
OMDFG that’s a perfect description.
Imagine Spiderman ballooning in wide open areas. No, sorry, can’t get to that crime, its against the prevailing wind.
Also, Batman brooding on top of a Wafflehouse.
Batman: God, this stupid city with its sufficient lighting and lack of crumbling infrastructure to shoot grappling hooks into
Superman: Everyone for miles has lead poisoning, I’ve spent the entire night stopping crossword puzzle museum robberies and heists at the Second National Bank of Gotham on the corner of second street and second avenue, and earlier the wall of…clouds? smog?…cleared up for a minute and I’m pretty sure the sky was literally blood red
Musical prodigy Alma Deutscher aged 11 (seen here with younger sister Helen), is staging her first full-length opera, Cinderella.
Composer, pianist, violinist… Alma learned to read music before she could read words. She began playing the piano aged two and at four years old she was composing her own music.
I grew up on the lower east side. My father sold fruit. My mother sold shirt-waists for a factory. Let me tell you, you don’t get to climb the American ladder without picking up some bad habits on the way. There’s a ceiling for certain types of people, based on how much money your parents have, your social class, your religion, your sex.
This scene in Agent Carter took my fairly placid interest in MCU Howard Stark and it was like pouring petrol on a flame. I don’t know if it was intentional, but we have just been given practically canonical Jewish Howard Stark. I’ve been doing some reading up on the history of the Jewish population of New York, and I’m pretty much sure these choices were deliberate.
First off, the lower east side – this was a hugely popular migrant area. In the early 1900s, it was predominantly Irish Catholics, but with the influx of Jewish people from Eastern Europe, fleeing the pogroms and persecution, by the time Howard was a kid, it would have been a predominantly Jewish area, with a Jewish population of up to 400,000 people. It was also one of the most densely inhabited parts of the city, with families crammed in tight into tenement blocks.
Then we have the jobs his parents have – because of restrictions placed on Jewish people, whether by their own religion or by anti-semitic rules of society, the majority of Jewish people were limited to working in trade, ie. selling produce. Both of Howard’s parents work in trade. Of course, any ethnicity and/or class of people could work, but given their location and the jobs they have, it seems pretty clean-cut.
And then he says “the American Ladder”. These three little words distance him from his identity as a card-carrying white American. He’s talking about what he’s had to do to climb ‘their’ ladder. Not ‘our’ ladder. This confirms that not only is he of migrant descent (see his place of residence), but is of an ethnicity not entirely welcomed in the country and that he may only be a first- or second- generation migrant.
I find this especially interesting given some of the comments in earlier episodes. He called Peggy and Jarvis “my two favourite foreigners”, which is intriguing given that he’s now pretty much raised a flag saying “I am not entirely as American as people think”.
And he saved Anna. So he’d known Jarvis? So they always got along. Yes. And? It’s one man. Howard knows lots of people. What possible reason could Howard Stark have for saving a Jewish woman and the man who tried to save her? It’s not just because he knew Jarvis. Oh no. Yes, that helped. Yes, he liked Jarvis. But Howard grew up surrounded by Eastern European Jewish families. He knew how bad it could get for them, and I would almost bet money on him knowing first-hand as well. And this man he knew risked his life to save a Jewish woman. That’s why Howard stepped in.
Now, I hear comments that the name Stark isn’t Jewish. I beg to differ, my friends! There are still Jewish Starks in New York to this day. And even if Stark didn’t originally start out as a Jewish name, unfortunately for a lot of Jewish families, it was easier to assimilate into the culture by hiding their Jewish origins, and the easiest way to do this was by changing their names. Often, it was done by changing it to something that sounded similar or something that sounded especially not-Jewish. And given that Stark is a German name that means Strong, hmm, I wonder why that might have been picked.
And as a gracenote, the final bit of Howard’s speech, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he talks first about money, religion, and social class. He came from the dumping ground for migrants. He lived where they were pretty much forced, by poverty and the need for cheap accommodation.
In summary: He was not from a wealthy family. He was not from a socially-accepted religion. He was not from a good social class. And every one of those things, he learned to hide, and he did it by lying. “The only way to break through that ceiling is to lie. So that’s my natural instinct: to lie”.
He hid behind his acquired name. He hid behind his hand-built reputation. He hid behind the wealth he garnered. He made himself the embodiment of the American dream, and given that everyone idolises him, they clearly don’t know where he came from, and he makes damn sure they don’t find out, because he doesn’t want to slip back down the American ladder.
You heard “my mother sold shirtwaists for a factory”. You were probably thinking that she was a clerk in a little shop or an early department store, something like Selfridge’s..
But the line was actually “my mother sewed shirtwaists in a factory”. And a factory job like that would be low-pay, long hours, back-breaking work and horrendous conditions, particularly around the turn of the century. Most factories of the time were incredibly dangerous places, often with heavy machinery and no safety procedures or precautions.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire took place in New York City in 1911. The workers, mostly female and mostly Jewish and Italian immigrants, were locked in and unable to escape. It’s still considered one of the worst industrial disasters in US history.
That’s the kind of work Howard’s mother would have been doing. That’s why, despite being a womanizer, Howard never tells Peggy that she isn’t capable of anything she puts her mind to.
In her excellent and morbidly fascinating book Necropolis: London and Its Dead, author Catharine Arnold describes in detail the subterranean presence of corpses found throughout the British capital. To no small extent, she makes clear, dead bodies were basically buried everywhere, to the point that, as Arnold pithily states, “London is one giant grave.“
[…]
As Arnold points out, there is an otherwise inexplicable shift in direction in the Piccadilly line passing east out of South Kensington. “In fact,” she writes, “the tunnel curves between Knightsbridge and South Kensington stations because it was impossible to drill through the mass of skeletal remains buried in Hyde Park.”
Put another way, the ground was so solidly packed with the interlocked skeletons of 17th-century victims of the Great Plague that the Tube’s 19th-century excavation teams couldn’t even hack their way through them all. The Tube thus deviates SW-by-NE to avoid this huge congested knot of skulls, ribs, legs, and arms tangled in the soil—an artificial geology made of people, caught in the throat of greater London.
Thus, like the example of the Aztec skulls unearthed by subway crews in Mexico City, London’s Tube also sits atop, cuts around, and tunnels through a citywide charnel ground of corpses, its very routes and station locations haunted by this earlier presence in the ground below.
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