5 ms·
The latest fake literary agencies
- rawgabbit 2y agoWhat are some real agencies?
- KittenInABox 2y agohttps://querytracker.net/ https://querytracker.net/ is a common search engine for literary agencies.
- bryanrasmussen 2y agopretty much the only things that are really important are the last two points >A real agency is highly unlikely to email or phone you out of the blue with an offer of representation or a claim that a traditional publisher is interested in your work (real agents don’t pre-shop manuscripts for authors they don’t represent). >A real agency will not require you to pay anything or buy anything as a condition of representation or publication. Other than the agent’s commission, there should never be a cost associated with rights acquisition. highly unlikely is politespeak for never going to happen unless your self published work is making tens of thousands of sales already.
- api 2y agoSame goes for angels and VCs emailing you out of the blue with serious offers. It can actually happen but it will only ever happen if you have a product with real traction already. It will never happen for an idea, a half baked MVP, or a just launched thing unless it’s blow off the paint incredible… in which case you will see traction likely before any investment offers.
- KittenInABox 2y agoA real agency is unlikely to, but can definitely email/phone our of the blue to talk about representation. This is in a few cases: have you gone viral for some reason? Did you win an award somewhere for unagented fiction (short stories, a one-off poem, etc)? Do you have a large existing following in the field and have publicly said you're unagented/working on something an agent can represent you in? Do you already have a significantly successful literary career in the indie/self-published space? But generally yes, an agent is not going to contact you randomly.
- bryanrasmussen 2y agoI mean it's true I said tens of thousands of sales, but I supposed people could understand that as hyperbolically meaning "having a significant level of success already, without an agent", which it seems to me all of your examples are just variations of that particular magical 50-shadeish type of thing.
- Finnucane 2y agoAgents don't sit passively in their offices waiting for projects to come in. They network, scout for talent, poach other agents' clients. But they are not randomly emailing unknowns. That doesn't happen. Established agents may have younger, less-established agents working for them who are hungrier to build their own lists, but even they have enough coming to them they don't have to do scammy things like this.
- relistan 2y agoInteresting info. But neither this, nor the previous post linked from it, explain what exactly the money scam is. I guess the main audience is supposed to know already.
- gkoberger 2y agoEach one explains the scam — book trailers, ghostwriting, book seals and access codes, “relicensing”, etc. High level, they’re each trying to sell nonsense to unsuspecting writers who think they’ve found a publisher for their book.
- palmfacehn 2y agoAll variations of advance fee fraud?
- pjc50 2y agoNot quite; it's more selling shovels for a nonexistant gold rush. Lots of people want to "become a Writer" for ego reasons, and it's easy to sell them services that promise to help with that. But even if you're legitimately trying the book market is terrible and most people make nothing.
- mattmanser 2y agoYeah, but it's no different to trying to become a rock star. And you don't have to be in the 16-24 age bracket. Part of what you're paying for is the dream. When I was a naïve young person we did something similar, paying a bit for our track to be on a CD. I've no illusions now, but I still joke I'm a published musician. And there are still plenty of ways to become an author if you want. I have a guilty pleasure of LitRPG books, which are generally terrible and riddled with problem authors, but there's a cadre of writers who are making good money. They write in a serialized format like Dickens used to. Chapter by chapter, release it for free on RoyalRoad, get traction. Then they package a book up for Kindle Unlimited, take the old chapters off RR apart from some taster chapters, and start a Patreon for advanced access to new chapters. There's one series which is absolute trash, Defiance of the Fall, where he's admitted he's dragging the story out as he's making so much money.
- bsenftner 2y agoThis is abut literary agencies, but the fake business scam is growing and can be in any industry.
- magic_smoke_ee 2y agoThis. LLMs provide very low cost fake content generation capabilities. That makes due-diligence ever more comprehensive and thorough in the absence of a meaningful, proven referral.
- mediumsmart 2y agocombine the Llm with a shopifake point of sales referred to by a couple of fakebook ads and you are off to the races.
- anarchonurzox 2y agoI've seen an increase in both warnings about these kinds of scams and cautionary tales by those who've been burned. I'm glad people are raising awareness, but I worry that this is just one more datapoint toward the overall erosion of online trust. It seems like the only way to really combat this is through closed / semi-closed trusted networks, but those tend to become dominated by personalities and difficult for newcomers to break into. The reduced trust in "outside" voices then leads to echo chambers and groupthink. I think we're already starting to see some of this in the kinds of books being put out by the big publishing houses; I don't have hard numbers (and maybe I'm just getting old and cynical) but a lot of recent titles feel extremely generic. There's a subplot in Neil Stephenson's Fall (or Dodge in Hell) where media and other networks are so saturated with false, meaningless, clickbaity, or otherwise negative-value content that they become either less than worthless, or require paid "filters" to extract actual value. I'm getting a sense of being close to that point already and I don't know what the right move is from here to reduce the fracturing of my wider social circles.
- InDubioProRubio 2y agoPeople with stars in their eyes getting taken for a ride by external scam artists instead of whoever is the current Weinstein of that industry thats scandalous. Not really though.
- cindycindy 2y ago[flagged]
- bunderbunder 2y agoTwo wrongs don't make a right.
- cobertos 2y ago> It seems like the only way to really combat this is through closed / semi-closed trusted networks, This is the only way. The cost of spinning up a new identity on the web (with supporting documents, pictures, etc) is near zero now. There's only 3 or 4 things to really vet people, and those can be faked with more effort. The only real way to vet someone nowadays is IRL, and that requires non-trivial effort but provides most guarantees you'd want in new participants in an online community. > I'm getting a sense of being close to that point already and I don't know what the right move is from here to reduce the fracturing of my wider social circles. I have this feeling too. My guess is that social circles will be less fluid and dynamic. Traditional centers of trust will become more important.
- flpm 2y agoThis type of scams prey on the ego of the target. In the attention economy everyone wants to project an aura of expertise. Someone interested in your expertise is just about the perfect bait. Literary agents, publishers, VCs, sponsorships, etc.
- everybodyknows 2y agoPost needs [2024]. Probably not all the latest fakes, not any longer.
- quercusa 2y agoThese people must read a lot of Dan Brown books: I am Damon Green, a leading literary agent...
- daveguy 2y agoI particularly like this part from the final thoughts: "solicitation is one of the first and most common signs of a scam these days" This is true about most scams these days. So much so that I have been advising non-technical friends and family to stop directly responding to any communication you did not initiate. Instead ask yourself, "how would I go about addressing or confirming this with the supposed source if I hadn't received a message about it?" Also helps with avoiding the encouragement of marketers.
- eslaught 2y agoAs someone who was in the query trenches not too long ago, I feel like this website paints an overly rosy picture of what a typical agent website looks like. The fact is that a shocking number of agent websites are awful. These are legitimate agents. Some of them have surprising numbers of best-sellers behind their names. Their websites still suck. Why? Because they're agents, not programmers. They don't have the time or the inclination to do this kind of thing, and frankly the incentives don't require them to get better. While we're here, let me also point out that there are no qualifications and no certification associated with being an agent. None whatsoever. Any of us here could put up a website and start taking submissions. That doesn't mean we'd be good at it, but the line between "agent" and "not agent" is shockingly thin. Don't believe me? Here's an alphabetically sorted list of (probably? mostly?) real agents. You can go check out their websites yourself: https://www.manuscriptwishlist.com/find-agentseditors/agent-list/ https://www.manuscriptwishlist.com/find-agentseditors/agent-... I was upset enough about this situation at one point that I wrote a whole essay about it, along with a website template to show them how to do better. But then I thought better of it and decided it would be better not to burn my reputation in the industry, even if their web design skills leave me wanting to put my eyes out. Bottom line: I absolutely agree that an agent should never cold email you (unless you are already very successful, in which case hopefully you have better sources of advice than an HN thread). They should absolutely never charge you money. And you should be very careful with referrals they give you if you're not very confident they're legit (or frankly, even if they are). But if their websites suck: well, sorry, that's sort of how the industry goes. (Unless you never want to work with a boutique agent, ever.)
- imoreno 2y ago>Because they're agents, not programmers. This really shouldn't be an excuse in 2025. Tools like webflow and wix exist now. If you said "designer" it might have some truth, but you can find plenty of freelance web designers who will do it so cheaply that probably even a single book deal could cover it.
- eslaught 2y agoI should probably clarify. Yes, the websites objectively suck. They suck in usability and also in design. But they also suck in content. When you're an author looking for agents, you're basically looking for three things: 1. What genres/ages/categories are they interested in? (Or just as importantly, not interested in.) 2. What is their experience and track record? 3. What are their submission guidelines? For many agent websites it's shockingly difficult to find this information. Even something as basic as whether an agent is open to submissions can be difficult to find. (Agents often close to online submissions, so whether or not you can submit is an important question!) So we're really talking about a failure to think through, in a step-by-step way, what authors experience when they visit your website, what they want, and how to make that information actionable. It's "design" in the broader sense of that word, not so much the narrow sense. The mechanical aspects of how to get content onto a page probably also interfere, to some extent, with making this all happen, but I think those are likely secondary issues to the issues of basic functionality and content. But again, like I said: the incentives don't really align to make this a priority. That's the bottom line. If you get enough submissions then you have what you need, and you don't need to improve your submission experience at all. And the ratio of aspiring authors to available agents will always put this in agents' favor.
- imoreno 2y agoSo what kind of people creates these scam sites?