Instant Book Writing Kit / Writing Help Tools Center (Shaun Fawcett)

thorjansen said:

Or are they all using the same template made by some "entrepreneur" who promised to show them how they could make big money shimmying down the tubes of the internets?

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This wouldn't surprise me.

Queen of Swords said:

Northwest then went belly-up. Deering quickly painted herself as a victim too, and asked bilked clients if they would send her $125 so she could recover the rights to their books. And some of the clients sent even that to her.

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The balls on that woman.

Queen of Swords said:

Jim Fisher's Ten Percent of Nothing, a book about scam agent Dorothy Deering, shows a perfect example of this. Deering hooked her clients up with vanity press Northwest Publishing, which charged them thousands of dollars and paid Deering a kickback (on top of the representation fees her clients were already paying her).

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Thank you for that! I think I will buy a copy. The first chapter is on Google Books here and is well worth a read - a great illustration of the scam.

thorjansen said:

Why do all these jokers have such long, long pages requiring great patience and tremendous scrolling dexterity?

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That's a classic example of what I call the "I'm a scammer" format. You can recognize one of those sites from across the room just by the layout. And every single page I've ever seen that uses that layout is pitching a, let's call a Bad Idea.

By a weird coincidence, another page, same format, different person, popped up here in the discussion at AW just today: http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=664&page=5