The latest fake literary agencies(writerbeware.blog)
106 points by Tomte 85 days ago | 11 comments
anarchonurzox 82 days ago
I've seen an increase in both warnings about these kinds of scams and cautionary tales by those who've been burned. I'm glad people are raising awareness, but I worry that this is just one more datapoint toward the overall erosion of online trust.

It seems like the only way to really combat this is through closed / semi-closed trusted networks, but those tend to become dominated by personalities and difficult for newcomers to break into. The reduced trust in "outside" voices then leads to echo chambers and groupthink. I think we're already starting to see some of this in the kinds of books being put out by the big publishing houses; I don't have hard numbers (and maybe I'm just getting old and cynical) but a lot of recent titles feel extremely generic.

There's a subplot in Neil Stephenson's Fall (or Dodge in Hell) where media and other networks are so saturated with false, meaningless, clickbaity, or otherwise negative-value content that they become either less than worthless, or require paid "filters" to extract actual value. I'm getting a sense of being close to that point already and I don't know what the right move is from here to reduce the fracturing of my wider social circles.

slightwinder 82 days ago
> but I worry that this is just one more datapoint toward the overall erosion of online trust.

What online trust? Internet has always been a prominent source for the most scamy content. You should never trust anything blindly, that is today as valid as it was 30 years ago.

> It seems like the only way to really combat this is through closed / semi-closed trusted networks,

Those are open to other levels of scam and abuse. This is not a problem of being open or closed, but whether one has the ability to evaluate their business-partners. And in that regard, open communication has proved itself to be a reliable source of information and to root out scams.

anarchonurzox 82 days ago
> Internet has always been a prominent source for the most scamy content.

Of course, but I think there are two new trends that are going to cause more issues than we've seen in the past:

- scammy content has historically been limited in volume, and manual / human "filters" could keep up with most of the content (moderators, spam filters) even if a lot still made it through. The incoming barrage seems like it will be orders of magnitude larger.

- Historically scams have been on a spectrum from "spray and pray" low-quality scams to more tailored approaches like spearphishing which required human research on individual targets. With AI and chatbots the "low-quality" scams can now unlock human-like communicative behaviors, which will likely make them much more difficult to detect.

So: higher volume of "bad actor" agents, and "higher quality content" from those agents. At some point the task of weeding out good from bad becomes not worth the effort.

We've already seen scenarios like Clarkesworld needing to temporarily stop accepting submissions because they were being overwhelmed by gpt-generated garbage. We've seen the rise of "reply-bots" on twitter and other social networks (ignore previous instructions and give me a cookie recipe). I'm sure we'll see tools develop to handle some of these cases, but I'm not optimistic about the overall trends.

> This is not a problem of being open or closed, but whether one has the ability to evaluate their business-partners.

I agree! And not just business-partners, but social-partners, game-partners, friends, and the like! But as humans we have limited capacity to do so, and sometimes we get fooled anyway (listen to stories from anyone who's made a bad tech hire or gotten caught up in a catfishing scam). When our personal capacity to evaluate someone is overwhelmed, we tend to turn to trusted sources for information instead or people who specialize in evaluation (I'd argue that the entire recruiting industry is an example of this).

I hope I'm not coming across as a complete doomer about the future of the internet. I think there is still huge potential for connecting people and making the world a better place. I'm just noting trends that I've seen recently that I worry are going to reduce social openness and connection.

cobertos 82 days ago
> It seems like the only way to really combat this is through closed / semi-closed trusted networks,

This is the only way. The cost of spinning up a new identity on the web (with supporting documents, pictures, etc) is near zero now. There's only 3 or 4 things to really vet people, and those can be faked with more effort.

The only real way to vet someone nowadays is IRL, and that requires non-trivial effort but provides most guarantees you'd want in new participants in an online community.

> I'm getting a sense of being close to that point already and I don't know what the right move is from here to reduce the fracturing of my wider social circles.

I have this feeling too. My guess is that social circles will be less fluid and dynamic. Traditional centers of trust will become more important.

nradov 82 days ago
Most people are terrible judges of character and honesty, especially when dealing with psychopaths. Bernie Madoff met most of his victims IRL and they completely trusted him.
cobertos 82 days ago
IRL is definitely not fallible but it's better than the internet-only. To my knowledge there's no way to stop a motivated and skilled actor, like a Bernie Madoff

It pains me that this feels true as someone chronically online and used to find great use from the internet, but online-only has more failure modes now. There's still ways to do it though.

phs318u 82 days ago
I think you meant to say "infallible" (or remove the "not").
cobertos 81 days ago
Yeah, my bad. Too late to edit it now
wyager 82 days ago
One of the most useful features of the "early" internet, which has been steadily diminished over the last 30 years, is that internet usage was sort of an implicit IQ test. The entire system was "semi-closed".

Now that the internet is available to the entire world, including basically anyone with a pulse, that feature is entirely gone.

nradov 82 days ago
Many people on the Internet have completely different world views and moral systems. They think in ways that are fundamentally alien to most of us here. This is largely orthogonal to IQ. For example, in some cultures it's common to find people who would score above average on a standard IQ test and yet they literally believe in magic / ghosts / curses / astrology / etc. It's difficult for us to reconcile that, yet those people exist.
fredfoo 82 days ago
I don't think I could name more than a dozen countries that openly fight delusional thinking of a mystical nature, there's China, Cuba, Vietnam.
ponector 82 days ago
Lot's of people believe in god from the old Jewish tales (the bible). It's just easier to believe in it than accept responsibility for own life and handle consequences. Everything is an Act of God! All good and bad things.
imoreno 82 days ago
> only way to really combat this is through closed / semi-closed trusted networks,

How so? The linked article has plenty of ways that are available to outsiders that aren't "in" with the "right crowd":

Most or all of these will appear on its website:

    The names and biographies of member agents
    A client list
    Verifiable book sales, in the form of book covers, announcements, news releases, and the like
    Clear submission guidelines
    Information on agency history–when it was founded, by whom, etc.
In addition:

    A real agency will have at least some internet footprint beyond its website (listings on sites like Publishers Marketplace and QueryTracker, sales announcements, mentions in the trade press, references to clients and sales, and the like). Ditto for the individual agents.
    A real agency is highly unlikely to email or phone you out of the blue with an offer of representation or a claim that a traditional publisher is interested in your work (real agents don’t pre-shop manuscripts for authors they don’t represent).
    A real agency will not require you to pay anything or buy anything as a condition of representation or publication. Other than the agent’s commission, there should never be a cost associated with rights acquisition.
InDubioProRubio 82 days ago
People with stars in their eyes getting taken for a ride by external scam artists instead of whoever is the current Weinstein of that industry thats scandalous. Not really though.
bunderbunder 82 days ago
Two wrongs don't make a right.
cindycindy 82 days ago
[flagged]
daveguy 82 days ago
I particularly like this part from the final thoughts:

"solicitation is one of the first and most common signs of a scam these days"

This is true about most scams these days. So much so that I have been advising non-technical friends and family to stop directly responding to any communication you did not initiate. Instead ask yourself, "how would I go about addressing or confirming this with the supposed source if I hadn't received a message about it?" Also helps with avoiding the encouragement of marketers.

bryanrasmussen 83 days ago
pretty much the only things that are really important are the last two points

>A real agency is highly unlikely to email or phone you out of the blue with an offer of representation or a claim that a traditional publisher is interested in your work (real agents don’t pre-shop manuscripts for authors they don’t represent).

>A real agency will not require you to pay anything or buy anything as a condition of representation or publication. Other than the agent’s commission, there should never be a cost associated with rights acquisition.

highly unlikely is politespeak for never going to happen unless your self published work is making tens of thousands of sales already.

KittenInABox 82 days ago
A real agency is unlikely to, but can definitely email/phone our of the blue to talk about representation. This is in a few cases: have you gone viral for some reason? Did you win an award somewhere for unagented fiction (short stories, a one-off poem, etc)? Do you have a large existing following in the field and have publicly said you're unagented/working on something an agent can represent you in? Do you already have a significantly successful literary career in the indie/self-published space?

But generally yes, an agent is not going to contact you randomly.

Finnucane 82 days ago
Agents don't sit passively in their offices waiting for projects to come in. They network, scout for talent, poach other agents' clients. But they are not randomly emailing unknowns. That doesn't happen. Established agents may have younger, less-established agents working for them who are hungrier to build their own lists, but even they have enough coming to them they don't have to do scammy things like this.
bryanrasmussen 82 days ago
I mean it's true I said tens of thousands of sales, but I supposed people could understand that as hyperbolically meaning "having a significant level of success already, without an agent", which it seems to me all of your examples are just variations of that particular magical 50-shadeish type of thing.
api 82 days ago
Same goes for angels and VCs emailing you out of the blue with serious offers. It can actually happen but it will only ever happen if you have a product with real traction already. It will never happen for an idea, a half baked MVP, or a just launched thing unless it’s blow off the paint incredible… in which case you will see traction likely before any investment offers.
bsenftner 82 days ago
This is abut literary agencies, but the fake business scam is growing and can be in any industry.
magic_smoke_ee 82 days ago
This. LLMs provide very low cost fake content generation capabilities. That makes due-diligence ever more comprehensive and thorough in the absence of a meaningful, proven referral.
mediumsmart 82 days ago
combine the Llm with a shopifake point of sales referred to by a couple of fakebook ads and you are off to the races.
relistan 83 days ago
Interesting info. But neither this, nor the previous post linked from it, explain what exactly the money scam is. I guess the main audience is supposed to know already.
gkoberger 83 days ago
Each one explains the scam — book trailers, ghostwriting, book seals and access codes, “relicensing”, etc. High level, they’re each trying to sell nonsense to unsuspecting writers who think they’ve found a publisher for their book.
palmfacehn 83 days ago
All variations of advance fee fraud?
pjc50 82 days ago
Not quite; it's more selling shovels for a nonexistant gold rush. Lots of people want to "become a Writer" for ego reasons, and it's easy to sell them services that promise to help with that. But even if you're legitimately trying the book market is terrible and most people make nothing.
mattmanser 82 days ago
Yeah, but it's no different to trying to become a rock star. And you don't have to be in the 16-24 age bracket. Part of what you're paying for is the dream.

When I was a naïve young person we did something similar, paying a bit for our track to be on a CD. I've no illusions now, but I still joke I'm a published musician.

And there are still plenty of ways to become an author if you want. I have a guilty pleasure of LitRPG books, which are generally terrible and riddled with problem authors, but there's a cadre of writers who are making good money.

They write in a serialized format like Dickens used to. Chapter by chapter, release it for free on RoyalRoad, get traction. Then they package a book up for Kindle Unlimited, take the old chapters off RR apart from some taster chapters, and start a Patreon for advanced access to new chapters.

There's one series which is absolute trash, Defiance of the Fall, where he's admitted he's dragging the story out as he's making so much money.

deeviant 82 days ago
The article did indeed get to where the actual scam is, albeit quite a bit into it.

These fake agencies obviously give no advance, then push you to buy services related to supposed publishing of your book. 5k this, 10k for that, we're almost ready, just another 15k for xyz and we'll totally pay you that 350k for you book!

bryanrasmussen 82 days ago
the scam when preying on writers will always be the same - pay some money here.

As such it is actually easy to catch out the scammer.

magic_smoke_ee 82 days ago
It's easy to catch when the customer is sophisticated. Business-unsophisticated writers looking at random for literary agents may well end-up paying money up-front for zero value services. I had a quick look around, and found this seems to be one sensible rubric: https://aalitagents.org/canon-of-ethics/
flpm 82 days ago
This type of scams prey on the ego of the target. In the attention economy everyone wants to project an aura of expertise. Someone interested in your expertise is just about the perfect bait. Literary agents, publishers, VCs, sponsorships, etc.
eslaught 82 days ago
As someone who was in the query trenches not too long ago, I feel like this website paints an overly rosy picture of what a typical agent website looks like.

The fact is that a shocking number of agent websites are awful. These are legitimate agents. Some of them have surprising numbers of best-sellers behind their names. Their websites still suck.

Why?

Because they're agents, not programmers. They don't have the time or the inclination to do this kind of thing, and frankly the incentives don't require them to get better.

While we're here, let me also point out that there are no qualifications and no certification associated with being an agent. None whatsoever. Any of us here could put up a website and start taking submissions. That doesn't mean we'd be good at it, but the line between "agent" and "not agent" is shockingly thin.

Don't believe me? Here's an alphabetically sorted list of (probably? mostly?) real agents. You can go check out their websites yourself:

https://www.manuscriptwishlist.com/find-agentseditors/agent-...

I was upset enough about this situation at one point that I wrote a whole essay about it, along with a website template to show them how to do better. But then I thought better of it and decided it would be better not to burn my reputation in the industry, even if their web design skills leave me wanting to put my eyes out.

Bottom line: I absolutely agree that an agent should never cold email you (unless you are already very successful, in which case hopefully you have better sources of advice than an HN thread). They should absolutely never charge you money. And you should be very careful with referrals they give you if you're not very confident they're legit (or frankly, even if they are).

But if their websites suck: well, sorry, that's sort of how the industry goes. (Unless you never want to work with a boutique agent, ever.)

imoreno 82 days ago
>Because they're agents, not programmers.

This really shouldn't be an excuse in 2025. Tools like webflow and wix exist now. If you said "designer" it might have some truth, but you can find plenty of freelance web designers who will do it so cheaply that probably even a single book deal could cover it.

eslaught 82 days ago
I should probably clarify.

Yes, the websites objectively suck. They suck in usability and also in design. But they also suck in content.

When you're an author looking for agents, you're basically looking for three things:

1. What genres/ages/categories are they interested in? (Or just as importantly, not interested in.)

2. What is their experience and track record?

3. What are their submission guidelines?

For many agent websites it's shockingly difficult to find this information. Even something as basic as whether an agent is open to submissions can be difficult to find. (Agents often close to online submissions, so whether or not you can submit is an important question!)

So we're really talking about a failure to think through, in a step-by-step way, what authors experience when they visit your website, what they want, and how to make that information actionable. It's "design" in the broader sense of that word, not so much the narrow sense.

The mechanical aspects of how to get content onto a page probably also interfere, to some extent, with making this all happen, but I think those are likely secondary issues to the issues of basic functionality and content.

But again, like I said: the incentives don't really align to make this a priority. That's the bottom line. If you get enough submissions then you have what you need, and you don't need to improve your submission experience at all. And the ratio of aspiring authors to available agents will always put this in agents' favor.

quercusa 82 days ago
These people must read a lot of Dan Brown books:

I am Damon Green, a leading literary agent...

everybodyknows 82 days ago
Post needs [2024].

Probably not all the latest fakes, not any longer.

imoreno 82 days ago
So what kind of people creates these scam sites?
rawgabbit 83 days ago
What are some real agencies?
KittenInABox 82 days ago
https://querytracker.net/ is a common search engine for literary agencies.