The Latest Fake Literary Agencies
29 comments
·January 6, 2025anarchonurzox
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.
cobertos
> 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
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
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.
slightwinder
> 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.
wyager
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
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.
InDubioProRubio
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
Two wrongs don't make a right.
cindycindy
potcallingthekettleblacksayswhat
bryanrasmussen
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
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.
api
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.
flpm
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.
bsenftner
This is abut literary agencies, but the fake business scam is growing and can be in any industry.
magic_smoke_ee
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.
relistan
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
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
All variations of advance fee fraud?
pjc50
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.
bryanrasmussen
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
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/
deeviant
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!
everybodyknows
Post needs [2024].
Probably not all the latest fakes, not any longer.
quercusa
These people must read a lot of Dan Brown books:
I am Damon Green, a leading literary agent...
rawgabbit
What are some real agencies?
KittenInABox
https://querytracker.net/ is a common search engine for literary agencies.
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.