My loyal readers to start with the vacation I had planned for last week turned into a staycation instead. The weather was frightful in the Pacific Northwest to say the least. Rather than go down to Gooding to visit with my wife and her mother and Tom I had to work on my writing project I informed you of a couple of months back. That is now done and in the first phase of editing. I also went and got traction on this marketing I told you of two weeks ago and that seems to be going well. I have a radio interview that went great and upcoming trailer for A Man’s Passion, plus my book will be presented to the Toronto Book Fair in June.
This past Wednesday our virtual Inland Northwest Writers’ Guild had an interesting topic that almost had me concerned called writer’s scams. In other words, writers who become unwitting victims of various scams that are out there. The most popular is the vanity press, whose sole purpose is to print your book for you, but you pay for everything. That happened with me because I had Author House print This Life: My Life After My Stroke. They were more than Happy to print my book. They were even willing to edit it and market it, so long as I paid for everything. A vanity press business model is based solely on getting as much money from the writer, not on how many books actually sell.
And of course, years later they called me wanting to know if I had any other books they could print up. I realized what they really were and told them , no I don’t have any other books to print. It was a lie of course. I was rooked out of a couple thousand dollars and got little in return.
When I told my group about what I had achieved, Linda the coordinator asked me if was legit. I replied as far as I could tell it was because they had paper trail of contracts that I had to sign so it was all legal and above board.
Linda listed many other scams especially those that offer marketing deals that are too good to be true and you have to fork out a bunch of money that is outrageous, which turns out was all a con after all. I was starting to become concerned until she showed us a list of those companies and vanity presses to avoid at all costs. The company I am working with was not on that list.
So now I am off to edit more of this latest project. I also rename the title from Grave Robbers to Building a Mystery. I liked the way it sounded much better and seemed to fit with the over all plot, which deals with three different sets of conflict, hence building a mystery. I haven’t decided on a new project yet though I do like to fit in a new character, Boomer Rang.
Jerry Schellhammer 