Knowing as much as you can about the process, from agent to sale to publishing to bookstore, and why things happen the way they do, is a way to protect yourself when you’re just starting out as an author. When I was first submitting stories to magazines in late 80s and early 90s, most of the online activity was still on bulletin boards and pay services like GEnie and AOL. I got most of my information on publishing from panels at SF/F conventions and seminars. And I was lucky to live somewhere where there were SF/cons and writing groups, but I occasionally met people who weren’t so lucky, and who got scammed.

After my first couple of books had been published in the mid 90s, I got an email through my web site from an aspiring writer asking for advice. She lived in a rural area where there weren’t any conventions, no local writers or support groups. She had sent her manuscript to an agent (probably finding him from an ad in Writer’s Digest) and he had told her it was a fabulous book, sure to be a bestseller. But it needed to be edited before a publisher saw it. And he would recommend her to an editor he knew, who would help her edit the book, for a fee of a few thousand dollars.

Yeah, now we know that that’s a bad, bad thing.

(The other red flag was that this was a horror novel. At that time the horror genre was in the bust half of a boom and bust cycle. A lot of horror writers had had books canceled, contracts canceled, whole horror lines had been dropped, and horror sections were disappearing from bookstores. The only people who were still doing well in horror were mainstream bestsellers like Stephen King. A reputable agent would have told her that.)

If a real agent thinks a book still needs work before submission, she’s going to make suggestions about what she thinks you need to do, and you’re going to revise it yourself, until you’re both happy with it. When an editor acquires the book for the publisher, she’s going to tell you what she thinks needs done to it, if anything, you’re going to talk about it if there’s anything you don’t agree with, until you have a revision you both like. You don’t pay the editor for this, the publisher pays the editor.

The “agent” who refers the writer to an “editor” who will edit the book for $1000s of dollars before it can be submitted to a publisher has been a scam for a long time. Either it’s two people working together who split the outrageous fee, or it’s one person playing both roles using different names and email addresses. There are probably still writers who are being taken in by it, even though there are a lot of writer sites warning about it now. But back then there just wasn’t a lot of information about scams readily available online or elsewhere.

(Note that there are real freelance editors who sell real editorial services for manuscripts, though they have reasonable set fees based on the amount of work done. But that’s a service a writer is going to contract for themselves.)

The woman who emailed me had paid the money, and the “editor” had been working on the book for months. She had begun to suspect something was wrong, and then the “agent” and “editor” asked for more money (another amount in the $1000s) to finish the monumental editing job they were doing to this poor book. She had realized she was being scammed, but needed someone to tell her just to make certain, because this was a hard dream to give up. I told her, and she thanked me. I never heard from her again but I hope she kept writing. Can you imagine thinking that you had achieved your dream, your book was on the road to publication, and gradually realizing that you were being conned? It’s a pretty horrible thought.

There are tons of these kind of scams, and scammers are constantly evolving new variations. They work because writers who dream of being published but who don’t know how the business of publishing is supposed to work are vulnerable.

Taking advantage of all the different information sources out there, like the Writer Beware blog or Predators and Editors, can help you avoid this kind of trap. I’ve also got a page of links on my web site: Publishing Information Sites for Beginning Authors, with links to resources and articles.

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There’s going to be another book giveaway this week, for Stina Leicht’s new fantasy novel Of Blood and Honey, so come back to the Night Bazaar for more info on how to enter.