Lore Sjöberg in his excellent Alt Text blog offers up some helpful advice to new writers in the internet age.
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| Scammers can smell fear, and to them it smells like the still-living flesh strips that make up most of their diet. A lot of aspiring writers see publishers and agents as bored nobility, offering contracts in a whimsical attempt to inject some entertainment into an otherwise tedious existence. They suspect that even putting too long a delay between "yes" and "please" will cause the contract to be withdrawn and fed to a purebred Saluki. |
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| Now, even if the editor initially appears to be a mammal, it’s still possible to get scammed. There’s a wonderful rule of thumb known as Yog’s Law: "Money flows toward the writer."
I know that in a world filled with kickbacks and graft, this seems too good to be true. It seems perfectly logical that you might have to spread around some cash, grease some palms and lubricate the chassis of commerce with some crude currency in order to make publishing run smoothly. Scammers leap on this misapprehension like a cat on cantaloupe. |
A cat on cantaloupe?