Early this morning I opened my email with no idea I’d have an interesting research project from a shyster publisher.

Their email

Something or other publishing (their actual name) sent me an email. They seemed really interested in me sending them a short story for their anthology. That sounded like a cool proposition so I went digging to find out more.

Their Requirements

Looking into the requirements of acceptance into their anthology and here are the details:

“To qualify for publication and royalties the Author purchase ten (10) copies of the Anthology…”. You also receive a 1% royalty if the book sells more than 500 copies.

My Take

So for all my hard work, I have to buy 10 copies first and then if by some miracle it sells 500 copies, which it probably never will, I’d get a measly 1% royalty. Let’s say they get 20 authors to sign up for this terrible deal, then they get 200 books sold, probably make about 50% from each sale into their pocket and the authors still get nothing until 300 more books are sold.

Please do Your Research

Research and read the fine print and you can easily find the shysters. Although, I fell for this sort of scam when I was in my teens – I published a poem in an anthology and had to buy copies, so there’s that. but I won’t fall for it again. I hope you never get duped by a publisher.