Common Scams in Self-Publishing and How to Avoid Them – Part 1

As a self-publishing author, there are a lot of great services out there that you can use to help you on the road to publication and with marketing. However, while many of the companies offering these are legitimate and will give the service they advertise, there are also a lot of scams out there that target inexperienced, first-time authors. This blog post looks at what these scams are and how to evaluate services to filter these out.

Of course, not all of these are giving you nothing in return for your money – they might just give you a lot less than you should get for the amount you have paid. This is most common if you buy a package – it may include a lot of things you do need, such as editing and formatting, but also have a lot of unnecessary or substandard services. You actually end up paying more than you would for all of the services separately, quite possibly for lower quality. We will now look at some of the services you should be wary of.

Marketing

There is no reason why you shouldn’t pay for marketing – this can be an excellent investment to sell more copies of and turn a higher profit on your self-published book. However, proper marketing is a skilled job that needs to be done well. It should be designed specifically to suit your book and directly target your intended audience, rather than taking a blanket approach and marketing to all readers – this usually just ends up being ignored at best or annoying and off-putting at worst.

The key thing here is to look at what they are actually selling you. If it is simply listed as something like “a complete marketing campaign”, be wary! This gives you what the company calls complete and nothing more. Your definition might be very different. If they can’t tell you exactly what is included in the package and show you the type of campaign they will put together, you will not be getting anything worthwhile. Likewise, if they do show you and it looks like it would be the same for every book they promote, it will not help to sell yours.

Reviews

Reviews are a vital part of selling your book when you are self-publishing. They give it a score that potential readers can see at a glance and make a decision whether to find out more. Likewise, the reviews themselves can help your readers decide, saying what the reviewer liked about the book and who they would recommend it for. This is true even when the reviews are negative if they are detailed enough, as what one reader dislikes may actually persuade another to buy your book.

However, it is difficult to get reviews without actually having reviews to encourage buyers. This might tempt you to buy some reviews from one of the many companies selling them, but you should definitely be wary. Most selling platforms take a dim view of purchased reviews and may act against books or authors with them, including banning you from selling on the site. In this way, buying reviews can actually harm both your sales and your professional reputation.

There are multiple ways you can buy reviews, some which are against Amazon’s terms of service and others which are within it – just. The only legitimate way to get reviews is to give free copies to people in exchange for an honest (not necessarily positive) review. This is often done by a third party matching your book with readers they think it will interest, based on the genre and tags you give them. While this is technically permitted by Amazon’s terms of service, a sudden flurry of reviews can mean that your listing is flagged and will be investigated further. Also, remember that different selling platforms have different rules, so make sure you check this.

Awards

Another common way for unscrupulous people to make money from self-publishing authors is to run contests, asking them to pay a fee to submit their work to it. The problem here is that not all competitions like this are actually scams – some are legitimate contests that can help promote your writing. Doing a bit of research before you enter helps to make sure you are not being taken advantage of.

For example, how high is the entrance fee compared to their overheads? Typically, a scam will have exorbitant fees before you can enter, which may then be followed up with offers to sell you publicity and marketing if you win. Also, consider how many categories there are, all of which will generate winners. Some can have as many as 100 categories, with three winners in each. Writers can enter as many categories as they like, but still have to pay the entrance fee each time, driving profits up for the company holding the awards.

Wrapping Up

I hope that this helps you to avoid some of the scams out there. In my next blog post, we will be looking at some of the other problems you can run into as a self-publishing author, such as plagiarism and unfavourable contracts, so come back in two weeks for that!

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