I just spotted this in the Google Ads of another writing-related site:
Whitmore Publishing
Quality book publishing since 1961 No publishing fee. We pay you.
whitmorepublishing.com
Let's count up the lies in that ad, shall we? Like the sign in the Dashiel Hammet story*, it threatens to have more lies than words.
We can start the first lie with the name of the firm.
Whitmore Publishing isn't really Whitmore Publishing: it's
Dorrance (the well-known (not to say infamous) vanity press).
Oh, they try to disguise the fact: Whitmore gives its address as 926 Liberty Avenue, Third Floor, Pittsburgh, PA. Dorrance's address is 701 Smithfield Street, Third Floor, Pittsburgh, PA. But a brief glance at Google Maps will show you that those two addresses refer to the same building:
Whitmore;
Dorrance.
There was a publisher called Whitmore, back in the 1960s. And they did (as the current Whitmore boasts) publish Warren Adler's first book. What the current site doesn't mention is that
the Whitmore that published Adler went out of business in the early 1990s. All the books are long-since reverted, all the editorial, production, sales and marketing staff has long-since moved on to other places. So "since 1961" is a shocking lie, as is their claim to quality book publishing. Or book publishing at all -- the current Whitmore arose in 2003, some ten years after the real Whitmore disappeared.
"No publishing fee" is a red flag. When is there ever a publishing fee with a legitimate press? It's also a lie. This current Whitmore follows PublishAmerica's business plan: they print, POD, and their market is their own authors. They sell overpriced books and expect to make their profit on the small number of sales that come from self-purchases. The fee is hidden in the cover price.
"We pay you." Indeed. They pay an advance that's ten times higher than PublishAmerica's. They expect to get many times more back from the author. That's the equivalent of cutting off a dog's tail and handing it back to the dog, saying, "Here you go, Fido! A nice piece of meat!"
"whitmorepublishing.com" -- lists as its technical contact a person with a dorrancepublishing.com email address. Dorrancepublishing.com's IP number is 65.39.195.54. Whitmorepublishing.com's IP number is 65.39.195.56. They're both hosted by Peer 1 Network.
A lot of writing (and other) sites don't realize that they can block URLs from advertising with them. The Google ads you see on writing-related sites (based as they are on keywords) are almost universally for scams: Vanity publishers, fake agents, unneeded services. The rule is this: If you see a publisher or an agent advertising through Google, they're either scammers or worthless.
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*I was reading a sign high on the wall behind the bar:
ONLY GENUINE PRE-WAR AMERICAN AND
BRITISH WHISKEYS SERVED HERE
I was trying to count how many lies could be found in those nine words, and had reached four, with promise of more, when one of my confederates, the Greek, cleared his thoat with the noise a gasoline engine's backfire.
. I am bored with this section (and embarrassed by it). I have re-written it over and over, changed opening scene 3 times, reworked the dialogue, moved around the chronology and I just can't seem to get it to work (yes, the scene is needed). I am so close to the end of the story, I can almost taste it but I find myself "waxing cats" in order to not have to look at this story again.
