Prey of Book Vultures .....

 

The first book I wrote was published with a traditional, Danish publisher, Munksgaard. It was a scholarly treatise turned book about teen  magazines. I'm still proud of it as it was something new: "Ungdomsblade", 1977. Later on I published several other scholarly books with traditional, Danish publishers so I was used to this publishing system which worked fine for me. However, for some time I had been writing fiction in English and as I didn't want to try my luck with traditional publishers in either England or USA I started to look for other possibilities. In a sort of happy-go-lucky moment I decided to publish these books with AutorHouse, UK. Actually, I published four books with them in 2011. At that time I had never seen anything to worry about so I took for granted that this publishing house was a decent and trustworthy company, or put another way: They hadn't been unmasked the way they are now ....

AuthorHouse was fun - and very expensive without doing much for the payment they expected ....

After book four I stumbled upon a platform for free publishing: LULU. Here I published several ebooks, both for children and for grown-ups. This was the "dawn of the ebook" and I enjoyed publishing a lot of books, both with LULU and the Danish publishing firm SAXO like, e.g.:

 

I miss the innocence of that time as one published as one felt like, but alas, it's gone forever. Now a lot of criminal people and devious companies developed within the branch of publishing, and they seem to be waging a sort of war against writers: People posing as agents or publishers trick them into costly and fruitless projects. Recently this new kind of robbers - and that's actually  what they are - have grown a new branch: Criminals lure authors into weird schemes of turning their books into movies. Even though I'm not all that naive I fell for such a ruse because it, presumably, was instituted by a genuine film director:

It appered that The Spotlight Media Productions were considering one of my many children's books, "The Naughty Peteyboy, Sonya and The Magic Word", for a movie. I was surprised as I never had seen this book as movie material, but also I was flattered so I fell for the ruse. Someone wiser than me, Victoria Strauss, was approached too with another scheme, but she didn't fall for it:

https://twitter.com/victoriastrauss/status/1577402465531461632?s=20&t=8PkPopl74Ac4jshbURTl8w 

After reading what she wrote it dawned upon me that I had been duped. Before that I had written to the so-called "Charlie" to tell him off as I found it weird that the company didn't pay for the option of my book or sent me a contract, but it  was Victoria Strauss who made it clear to me what was going on. After some investigation I now see the scam as it is: Someone, maybe in the Phillipines, commits identity theft and poses as Charlie McDowell hoping that sooner og later his victim (me!!!!) would be flattered into sending him money for the movie they are (NOT!!!!) making over one of their books. That I would never have done, but still, I might have given him the rights of my book which is small and old ....

https://justpublishingadvice.com/author-solutions-gets-the-chop-about-time/

https://justpublishingadvice.com/vanity-book-publishing-and-self-publishing-are-not-the-same/ 

https://www.usp.ac.fj/research/research/output-and-awards/identifying-reputable-publishers/

https://www.sfwa.org/other-resources/for-authors/writer-beware/pod/

https://twitter.com/cedar3ec/status/1569547081261682689?s=20&t=2UORxJC5Fk5_qAIie00pFA

Wikipedia