Cautionary tale from Becca Mills

It popped up in a tweet by David Gaughran and had me clicking the link to a jaw dropping story.

The-active-voice is the website of the author Becca Mills, a writer of speculative fiction, and from the subject matter of a recent blog I don't think her speculative musings could have prepared her for what happened. She recalls the trials of her novel Nolander being withdrawn from Amazon and Smashwords by a malicious DMCA notice citing a breach of copyright, and her endeavours with some degree of success to track down her accuser and make the book available again.

Over quite a lengthy post she unfolds the story of what happened and how she rectified the situation, so that happily now Nolander is back up on Smashwords and Amazon.

Take the time to read through and ponder what she has to say, I believe it will be worth the time and effort. 

Virtually real!

I like surfing the net, not just in an idle sort of way, but following a hunch to see what I can unearth chasing the connections. It is usually someone who offering a service, I want to know whether they are who they say they are.

Self-publishing on a tight budget makes you tread cautiously, and consider carefully anyone promising the deal you can't afford to miss that may be the one to run away from screaming loudly. When the alarm bells start jingling and you've read to the bottom of the page and noted the address; indulge your inner detective!

A couple of weeks ago Green Shore Publishing flashed on to the radar. Reading through the blurb and testimonials left a strange itch, and it needed a good scratch. I scratched away

A new start-up with a prestige sounding address, an office in the centre of a major city. On a street that has been there for centuries (Not difficult when some urban street plans are unchanged since the eighteenth century), and the property may have been in the same hands all that time. Inner City properties come with a price tag, higher rather than lower; so how?

Writer Beware posted a warning detailing the elements of the website that didn't up; the comments attached to the blog make interesting reading. The question cropped up, what is real, how much of what was on the screen was genuine, the whole set up bordered on the unreal, and the scratching revealed an answer to the start up question.

Was any of it real; the virtual office; a working space in a shared address, secretarial cover and mail forwarding; emails go direct. The postal redirect could be as basic as the clerical cover opening the mail, scanning it and emailing the scanned documents (A small publisher using this system would accept only email submissions) and the originals would be stored for a limited time or shredded depending on the individual arrangements.

Fiction is our business, the making it up stuff and no resemblance to the living or dead is grist to the creative mill but what happens when the people you are working with in the real world edge toward fiction. A prestigious address may be money in the bank, your money in their bank. Scratch away, type in the company name followed by "complaint" and look at the results. View it from any angle you can think of and add the results to your list. 

Check everything, work through the links, use all your tools and if you're curious about where they are, street view is a handy piece of kit. The little orange man can drop you on the street where they live and check out the neighbourhood. Unscrupulous, straight up, decent and honest, the hunch could
lead you to any of these. Tread carefully.

Smashing!

The World Cup is well on its and Wimbledon is close to finding this  year's champion and to prove that great things come in threes.  Smashword summer/ winter promotion has just kicked off. From now until the end of July Control Escape is half price with the code SSW50.

Check out the other titles on offer this month at www.smashwords.com