Beware the Tricksters out there 14th September 2010.

Since I subscribe to several web services and blogs, and belong to some newsgroups and so on , s well as having “author” prominently on my Facebook profile, I tend to get quite a bit of spam e-mails about the writing world and profession.

Some of these are offering services to us as a company, which we don’t want or need. “We’ll convert your books to the most popular format for free.” “We’ll help you get your books on the Apple iBooks store - worldwide.” You get the picture – and for those guys information – we already have our eBooks in the most popular format, and we have them on Apple too, and apple are not yet marketing their iBooks store worldwide so how they can do something that Apple don’t do beggars belief.

My all time favourite was one I recently yesterday and which sparked the thought train that became this blog.

“Sign up as an author with us and we can guarantee you will receive twice the average earnings.”
I just about rolled on the floor over this one. Let me explain why, to those of you who don’t already know.

There is NO minimum wage agreements in force for authors anywhere. Sure one or two reach the stellar heights and the millions roll in, there are many who make a comfortable living from their writings. These fortunate souls are the very pinnacle of our profession, there are vastly outnumbered by those who scratch around at the bottom of the pyramid hoping to make it big someday. Authors live in hope rather than expectation.

Something like 0.1% of authors are fortunate to actually make a living wage from their writing – that’s one in a thousand. Around about 10 times this many, i.e. one in a hundred make enough to consider it more than pin money.

The rest, me included, don’t really make enough to buy the pins. LOL. Certainly not enough to put the food on the table. It’s why I moved into cover work, submissions handling and eventually publishing as well.

So, if only 1% of authors make anything close to decent money, and there is a vast pool of authors who end up with nothing to show for it, and the rest make peanuts – how low is the average going to be?

You do the math.

Anyone want a couple of peanuts?

I’m not trying to discourage anyone, far from it, but it’s these “I can help you make money from your writing” guys that really get to me.......