Strategic Book Group / Strategic Book Publishing / Eloquent Books / SBM

You'll find them here: http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=202 with the rest of their company names.

Avoid them. Don't even think of doing otherwise.

As everyone has already said, Richard...run. Quickly.

Richard L. Sutton said:

Anyone have any experience with this NYC outfit?

Click to expand...

Just for starters they aren't a NYC outfit. That's the first of their many shameless lies. They're a Boca Raton outfit.

I submitted my book to Strategic Book Publishing a few days ago, and got a long-winded e-mail in reply. Usually, publishers take longer to get back, so this was a red flag. I came here before going further, and I'm glad I did. Thanks for watching out for the snakes in the garden!

P.S. Believe it or not, Strategic Book Publishing is in the 2010 Writer's Market book.

WOOT! Another writer saved I am glad you investigated JB

WELCOME to Absolute Write JB!!

jbhakim said:

P.S. Believe it or not, Strategic Book Publishing is in the 2010 Writer's Market book.

Click to expand...

Actually that's not surprising. IIRC, Writer's Market doesn't vet the publishers and agents they list. Regardless, it's usually easier and a lot more reliable to look things up online, books can get outdated fast.

Glad you dodged the bullet, and welcome to AW

Doesn't anyone do research anymore?

From the PW Twitter feed: the blaring headline says a 6-year-old got a 23-book deal. Scroll down and you find out it's with Strategic Book Publishing.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-st...nds-a-mega-deal-for-23-books-115875-22516916/

ETA: the news story is spreading over the interwebz without any word about the shadiness of the publisher itself. Nope, no one's doing any research.

UGH I know how depressing. Poor boy

I checked with Writers Market, and Strategic has been removed from the current (2011) edition of Writers Market.

-Ann C. Crispin
Chair, Writer Beware
www.writerbeware.com

Bubastes said:

Doesn't anyone do research anymore?

From the PW Twitter feed: the blaring headline says a 6-year-old got a 23-book deal. Scroll down and you find out it's with Strategic Book Publishing.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-st...nds-a-mega-deal-for-23-books-115875-22516916/

ETA: the news story is spreading over the interwebz without any word about the shadiness of the publisher itself. Nope, no one's doing any research.

Click to expand...

what's even sadder is that supposedly his mother, a writer, gave it to her agency who *then* went to these scammers.

I'm not sure you can have that many idiots in one place without some sort of implosion.

Sheryl Nantus said:

what's even sadder is that supposedly his mother, a writer, gave it to her agency who *then* went to these scammers.

Click to expand...

Well, I'd guess her 'agent' is one of the Fletcher ones.

Have emailed the Mirror's investigative team (investigate AT mirror.co.uk), pointing out they've also been duped by a notorious scam artist.

Being a "novelist" is not the same thing as being a "published novelist" or even "a person with any writing talent at all." My guess is, if the poor kid's mom has any publication credits to her name, they're all with vanity presses.

Bubastes said:

Doesn't anyone do research anymore?

From the PW Twitter feed: the blaring headline says a 6-year-old got a 23-book deal. Scroll down and you find out it's with Strategic Book Publishing.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-st...nds-a-mega-deal-for-23-books-115875-22516916/

ETA: the news story is spreading over the interwebz without any word about the shadiness of the publisher itself. Nope, no one's doing any research.

Click to expand...

There's now a comment posted that links to the Florida AG lawsuit and to WB.

~brianm~

I just blogged about this. The story has gotten a lot of pickup from blogs and the media, including reputable sources of info such as PW and the Bookseller.

What gets me is that it's such an improbable story--when was the last time you heard about ANYONE getting a 23-book deal, much less a six year old child?--that surely any news outlets picking it up should have done a bit of fact-checking before running it. If you Google Strategic, Writer Beware's warning is the second listing that shows up.

- Victoria

One thing for certain, you don't drive more attention to yourself when you're under investigation especially when it borders unbelievability.

I also emailed the Mirror this morning, and let them know exactly what what kind of press Strategic is, and who runs the operations.

I got a reply back pretty quickly from an "Andrew Penman" at the Daily Mirror saying that they were going to start looking into the situation and thanking me for writing.

I hope they'll do exactly that.

-Ann C. Crispin
Chair, Writer Beware
www.writerbeware.com

Just for our friends at Google, so this thread'll pop up: Leo Hunter, Me and My Best Friend.

Sheryl Nantus said:

what's even sadder is that supposedly his mother, a writer, gave it to her agency who *then* went to these scammers.

Click to expand...

Mum's book was published by AuthorHouse in 2008.

~brianm~

AC Crispin said:

I also emailed the Mirror this morning, and let them know exactly what what kind of press Strategic is, and who runs the operations.

I got a reply back pretty quickly from an "Andrew Penman" at the Daily Mirror saying that they were going to start looking into the situation and thanking me for writing.

I hope they'll do exactly that.

-Ann C. Crispin
Chair, Writer Beware
www.writerbeware.com

Click to expand...

Considering they're reporters, it begs the question as to why they didn't investigate in the first place. No wonder papers are biting the dust. As for PW, shame on them - there's simply no excuse for their ignorant reporting of this "wonderful" deal.

Yeah, little Leo's supposed book was released over a year ago, in July 2009. I'm thinking that this was all an attempted publicity grab by the mother, who is the actual author. Pretty skeezy, IMO.

- Victoria

priceless1 said:

Considering they're reporters, it begs the question as to why they didn't investigate in the first place.

Click to expand...

Perhaps the reporter can't investigate because the editor won't allow it. A few months ago I quit my job at a bad local daily for various reasons, one being "I am required to write and add my byline to too much pure crap which won't do my career any favors; even worse, my byline sometimes gets slapped on crap my editor wrote." I was the one who had to do a write-up whenever anyone in our local area published a book. That was fine when discussing real books -- books where the publisher pays the author -- but anyone who published with a vanity press got the exact same gushing write-up, and on a slow news day those write-ups even made the front page.

One guy put out a book with XLibris. It was his autobiography, maybe 50 pages long; I read it in a single sitting and it was cataclysmically bad. I don't mean "bad writing" in the sense of "dull, boring, won't catch the reader's interest," but in the sense of "since passing English grammar and composition is required by every school in the nation, how the hell did this man ever get a high school diploma?" The writer was ignorant of even the most basic composition rules: if someone is speaking put it in quotation marks; start a new paragraph whenever a new person speaks; proper nouns like "Buffalo, New York" must be capitalized every time, even when they're not at the beginning of a sentence. And if you overlooked the book's mechanical problems, there was also the issue "This man is batshit insane and his story best summarized as 'Nothing is really my fault because when I did bad things like cheat on my wife it was Satan who made me do it'."

I told my editor all this, and suggested that shining the light of publicity on this man and his booklet really wouldn't do him any favors, but the editor insisted I do a story anyway. So the story I wrote sort of glossed over the book and focused on my interview with the author -- then the editor rewrote the entire damn thing, basically copying the back-cover blurb and making the man sound like Nouveau Shakespeare. And the SOB kept his name off the story and left mine on. That time, at least, I was able to catch it before it went to print, take my byline off and have it published as a "Special to the [Shitty Newspaper]," but I wasn't always able to do that.

Hell, it's possible that somewhere in the archives of this very forum, there's a link to something with my real name on it, and you all typed comments like "Does this twit of a reporter actually think publishing a manuscript with Strategic Book Publishing is a bona fide achievement?" To which I say "No, the non-twit reporter damned well knows better but the twit editor refuses to listen."

Ink-Stained Wretch said:

Perhaps the reporter can't investigate because the editor won't allow it.

Click to expand...

Sort of puts to rest the notion of "why let facts or research get in the way of a story?" doesn't it? Scary.