{"id":207046,"date":"2023-05-31T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-05-31T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.draft2digital.com\/blog\/?p=207046"},"modified":"2026-03-26T08:07:53","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T13:07:53","slug":"how-to-spot-indie-author-publishing-scams-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/draft2digital.com\/blog\/how-to-spot-indie-author-publishing-scams-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Spot Indie Author Publishing Scams (Part 1)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Stop me if this sounds familiar: as a child, you submit a poem to a national anthology publication. Lo and behold, your poem is accepted! Celebration ensues. You must be a prodigy! Your supportive parents obligingly pay the $50 to purchase the hefty tome, all for the pleasure of seeing your budding talent in print.<\/p>\n

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When you receive the anthology, you start to realize \u2026 The poems within its pages are terrible. <\/em>(Apart from yours, of course!) Not only that, but there are LOTS of them. What kind of vetting process does the anthology have, anyway? Turns out\u2014virtually none.<\/p>\n

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If this happened to you at any age, you are a fellow victim of the decades-old \u201cpoetry anthology\u201d scam, which has been around since at least the 1920s\u2014and likely far earlier. The age of the internet has brought a fresh spin on old classics like this one, along with a new generation of scams and bogus services designed to prey on any aspiring author\u2019s Achilles heel: the desire to see their work published.<\/p>\n

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These scams can\u2019t all be listed by name, in part because they seem to pop up every week under a new alias. The good news is that they generally share some identifiable traits that make them easy to avoid once you know what you\u2019re looking for. <\/p>\n

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By the way, we\u2019re just scratching the surface in this two-part series. If you have questions about a specific company or resource, we highly recommend checking with <\/em>Writer Beware<\/em><\/a> or <\/em>ALLi<\/em><\/a>, two watchdog groups that keep a close eye on the latest and greatest in indie author scams.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Vanity presses<\/h2>\n

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In general, legitimate publishers pay you<\/em>, not the other way around. That\u2019s because they make money by selling your books to readers, not by selling you services. Publishers who charge you for services rendered are generally scam-like presses that earn their money from you, the author, rather than from readers.<\/p>\n

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Vanity presses, like the ones who run the famous \u201cpoetry anthology,\u201d usually charge an overly expensive rate per book. Author Solutions is one of the more notorious bad actors, but there are many out there, and new ones (or old ones with new names) seem to pop up all the time.<\/p>\n

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That said, some legitimate hybrid publishers in the indie author space will ask you to front some of the cost to produce and market your book. So what\u2019s the difference between a predatory vanity press and a legitimate hybrid publisher? Namely, quality control (or lack thereof). If an imprint accepts virtually every submission, it\u2019s a vanity press. Legitimate hybrid publishers will only accept books that meet their internal requirements. (For more on hybrid publishing, check out Reedsy\u2019s excellent post<\/a> on the subject.)<\/p>\n

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How to spot the scam: <\/em><\/p>\n

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