Re: Warning: Lee Shore Literary Agency
Is Lee Shore still in business? If so, those guys are bad as they come.
I first heard about Lee Shore a long time back. I'd known for a while that slush readers at publishing houses were puzzled by Lee Shore's submissions. It wasn't that 90% of the manuscripts were obviously unpublishable, though they were; that's no mystery at all. Every newbie who learns to open and log slush swiftly figures out that certain agencies are a never-ending source of bad books. You don't have to train newbies to recognize the scam agents; you have to keep reminding them that it's possible for a good writer to fall into a bad agent's hands.
With Lee Shore, the mystery was why they made it so easy to reject their books. The cover letters practically gave you permission to do it. Sometimes there wouldn't even be a proper cover letter accompanying the manuscript, just an auto-reject form with check-off boxes giving you a choice of reasons to reject it. (My young informant visibly turned up her nose when explaining this. "We throw away the form and send them a real rejection letter," she said.)
A year or two later, I finally found out what was going on with that. The first part of the loop was pretty standard scammer fare: Lee Shore lured in naive authors, bilked them of fees for this and that, and told them that No Publisher Will Look At A Manuscript That Hasn't Been Professionally Edited. Which is completely untrue, by the way; that claim is an infallible genetic marker for scam agents.
The "professional edit" is a popular way for these agents to pry additional money out of their clients. Some agents simply demand that their authors pay them to edit their manuscripts. The owner of Lee Shore is known to have demanded a $9500 editing fee from
one author. Rotten awful scam agent Martha Ivery did the same thing, and she was barely literate. Other agents send the author off for a very expensive "edit" at the hands of a confederate. One must assume that kickbacks are involved in these arrangements, since the money can be substantial and the "edits" almost never produce a saleable manuscript. I can't see professional scammers handing over their pigeons to be plucked by others without making something on the deal.
When the editing stage was finished, Lee Shore would announce that the supposedly buffed and polished manuscript was now ready to be sent out to publishers, ooh gosh how exciting. Then they'd send it out to a bunch of publishers and collect a bunch of quick rejections. This was the explanation for those mysteriously listless cover letters, and auto-reject check-off enclosures: they were collecting rejections, pure and simple.
When you're killing slush, there are going to be a lot of manuscripts that can be rejected out of hand. These first-cut rejections are reasonably quick to process. Lee Shore was trying to get that fast rejection response because the rejections were all they wanted.
Why? Because an author who'd thought their manuscript was polished and publishable, and who then gets hit with a bunch of quick rejections, bam bam bam, is going to be in a very vulnerable state, sort of like a cutlet that's been pounded with one of those tenderizing hammers. Having reduced the author to this condition, Lee Shore then ran their crowning scam. They'd call the author, rejoicing, saying they'd placed the book with a house that absolutely loved it, a small publisher but such a perfect fit for the book, O happy happy day.
You can imagine the author's reaction to this news. Their sufferings would be redeemed! Their book would be published! It would be in bookstores!
People would read it! Cue the sun bursting forth from clouds, witch-kings crumbling to ash, orcs incontinently fleeing in all directions, and free beer for everyone forever. And the name of this kind and perceptive publisher? Why,
Sterling House, of course.
Alas, there were two things Lee Shore would omit to mention. One was that most books sold by Lee Shore were placed with Sterling House. The other was that Sterling House and Lee Shore were
both owned by the same person,
Cynthia Sterling. Needless to say, Sterling House was a rapacious vanity publisher; but when your very own agent is telling you this is a good deal, it's hard to resist.
There's no record of Lee Shore ever selling a book to a real publisher. They did place some of their titles with a small number of
other vanity publishers with whom they had noticeably cozy relationships: Northwest, Commonwealth, Aegina, and especially
PressTIGE (on which, more anon). I'm suspicious of this for the same reasons I'm suspicious of the arrangements whereby scam agents refer their clients to "professional editors" who charge them a mint. There's only so much plucking you get can get out of one pigeon. Why should they be turning their clients over to operations that'll take them for thousands of dollars, if they're not getting a kickback on the deal?
You don't need an agent to sell your book to a vanity publisher, and real agents don't do it. Sometimes you'll see professional authors placing their unsaleable old out-of-print titles with PODs just to keep them available. Wildside's been doing a lot of that kind of publishing, and they're a respectable operation. But if you see agents placing their clients' hitherto unpublished titles with PA, iUniverse, Xlibris, 1stBooks, etc., run the other way.
But back to Lee Shore. They had a particularly cozy relationship with
PressTIGE Publishing, a notoriously
corrupt operation run by Cynthia Sterling's longtime crony
Kelly O'Donnell, a.k.a. Martha Ivery. This gets complicated. Watch carefully:
1. Kelly O'Donnell and Martha Ivery are the same person.
2. Martha Ivery runs the Pacific Literary Agency.
3. Martha Ivery is the Publisher of PressTIGE publishing.
4. Kelly O'Donnell runs Kelly O'Donnell Literary Services.
5. The Pacific Literary Agency and Kelly O'Donnell Literary Services both sell their clients' books to PressTIGE Publishing.
6. Over the years, Cynthia Sterling and Kelly O'Donnell/Martha Ivery have undertaken many joint projects.
7. Among its commercial credentials, Kelly O'Donnell Literary Services lists "sales" to Sterling House.
8. Among its commercial credentials, Lee Shore lists "sales" to PressTIGE Publishing.
Isn't that cute? You could keep the author running in circles forever, batting them this way and that like a cat playing with a mouse, and never once let them come anywhere near real agents and real publishers who'd pay them real money and sell their books to real readers. I once saw a writer indignantly defending Lee Shore on the grounds that they'd placed five of his books with publishers. Turned out he'd been published once each by Northwest, Commonwealth, and PressTIGE, and twice by Sterling House: five placements at notorious vanity houses in a row. He must have had a lucrative day job; otherwise he could never have afforded it.
Bear in mind that a lot of the people who fall among these thieves don't have high-paying jobs and can't afford it. They mortgage their houses, sell their cars, spend their savings, and dip into the grocery money. Bear in mind as well that there's no guarantee that these books that get shunted off and wasted on vanity publication deals would have been unsaleable. Scammers don't care how bad their writers are, but they don't care how good they are, either.
I can't tell whether I've just written a current warning or a case study, because I don't know what Kelly O'Donnell, Cynthia Sterling, or any of their former employees are doing these days. Whatever it is, I hope it's painful, humiliating, and has nothing to do with books. But I trust that it was nevertheless useful for me to write this, because even if that particular batch of nogoodniks are no longer ripping off authors, someone else is sure to be doing it.
