Traditional publishing scam

Traditional publishing scam is real in the publishing world today. There are so many vanity publishers online who are ready to rob authors of their hard earned money.

You have to be careful. You have to be watchful. You should not pay any traditional publisher to publish your book.

Related: Top publishing companies in the world

What is traditional publishing scam?

Traditional publishing scam is about the activities of many vanity publishers online today who are not real traditional publishers. The major business activities of these vanity publishers is to swindle authors or coerce authors into a deceptive contract that will only favor them and not the author.

How Vanity publishers operate

Vanity publishers operate by asking authors to pay for publishing services before they can take on the works of the author. They will also ask authors to pay for a certain copies of their published books before their books are taken on

These vanity publishers don’t do any other thing apart from collecting publishing services fees from authors. After authors have paid these fees, their books are left for the dead.

Vanity publishers have taken their pay and the books and the authors can go forget anything positive thing happening to their books.

Why real traditional publishers don’t sign authors again

Traditional Publishing has changed over the years even in Europe and the USA. The following will show why traditional publishers are rejecting submitted manuscripts of most authors today. This situation is the reason why we have many vanity publishers today.

1. The competition is fierce now in the publishing world. It is very tough.
2. Traditional publishers have lots of authors to consider now
3. They don’t want to take risks like they used to do before
4. They will only consider taking you on unless you are a public person who already has huge followers
5. The appearance of self-publishing platforms like Amazon has brought in the needed competition for traditional publishers so that are always careful in taking on projects from unknown authors
6. We have the same scenario in Nigeria too.

Literary agents and traditional publishers

These days to get a contract with traditional publishers you have to go through literary agents. To go through an agent is also a tough task as many of them will not reply your pitch emails.

We also have lots of fake literary agents online today. I know because I have been through it. I tried to get one directly and also through sales agents but all failed.

There was a traditional publisher that was almost taking me on. But I felt short because of my limited following and small database of existing fans.

They told me this after we had exchanged series of emails, proposals, documents etc. I was almost sure they would sign me on but at the last hour, the deal was cancelled.

Real-life experience of an author with traditional publishers and agents

I want you to read the real-life experience of an author while looking for traditional publishers and literary agents for his book, The Mind of a Hero.

Chinonso Aguzie bears his mind

There’s this author site we normally use. Querytracker.com that helps authors to find literary agents who would connect them to publishers.

And I would sleep in that site, sending bunch of proposals to literary agents hoping… It was a very stressful experience… Honestly.

Few of them would reply immediately, while others would take ages to reply and some won’t even reply at all.

But why I love the site was that it made everything easy both for the literary agents and authors.

I don’t think we had literary agents in Nigeria… nothing like that.

I’ve some time got really close but at the end they must find an excuse to back off asking if I have an email list, the number of my Instagram handle.

One once told me that I should build an audience. But at that time, building an audience was nothing I paid attention to.

In the query, while submitting your letter, there would always be and box where you put how many followers you have across social media.