I happened across A.C. Crispin’s and Victoria Strauss’ blog, Writer Beware Blogs!, which details how they find and research writing scams for their Writer Beware pages on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc. site. Crispin and Strauss are both published authors and well known in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy world. While the blog is fairly new, Strauss has been offering information to writers for a long time. In fact, she was one of the few authors online when I first hooked up my computer and started my adventures into the strange new world called cyberspace. While her genre wasn’t what I was interested in, her advice was always well thought out and relevant for most writing genres.

I was excited to find this blog. Not so much because of the scam information but more because blogs about writing in general are hard to find. The posts on this blog are not entirely about scams, though they are all relevant. An example is A.C. Crispin’s newest post, What Does a REAL Agent Do?. The information is basic but new authors really should read it. New authors in particular are susceptible to scammers and their scammy ways, simply because new authors are often desperate to get their masterpieces published. It’s not easy to get published in today’s market and there are many excellent writers that can’t get an agent to look at their work, let along get a publisher interested.

This blog is well worth the read and I’m sure the authors would welcome well thought out comments.

As a side note: These two authors are doing something important in several areas. One, they are informing the writing community of what to look out for when pursuing the publishing industry. Two, they are marketing themselves, though that may not be their intent, it is an added benefit and writers should take note of how these two authors are creating interest in a very creative way, not in just their scam information but in each one as a human being, which in turn creates an interest in their books. How they present the information is as important as the information itself. I have purchased books based on something that intrigued me about the author’s personality or character, usually because of an interview with the author that went beyond talking about his/her book(s) and revealed something unique and/or interesting about the author. Once a masterpiece is published, the author will need to learn how to market themselves as much as their book. While some publishers do hard-core-marketing for selective authors, that’s not the norm in today’s market. Authors must become more involved in the marketing process if they want to succeed.

Here is A.C. Crispin’s and Victoria Strauss’ Web sites. I could do an evaluation of both of these two authors Web sites but that is better left undone for now. I’ll just say that Victoria Strauss really should get her own domain name and Web designer.