Pick up the pieces of your life who put them back together with the words you write, all the beauty and piece and the magic that you'll start too fun when you write your story. You got the words and said, don't you think it's down to let them out and write them down and cold. It's all about and write your story. Write, write your story. Hi, and welcome back to the Write Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon. I'm your host, and on today's episode, I want to talk about a publishing scam that I heard about recently from my producer. Actually, and when I heard about this scam, it immediately stood out as a scam to me. There were red flags all over it. But I also have a ton of experience in the publishing world, so this is not a scam that I would have fallen for. But because the average consumer doesn't have a ton of experience in publishing, it is a really brilliant scam that many many people would fall for. So I thought if I could give you a quick twenty minute rundown on the publishing industry and how it works, it would save you from ever falling for a scam like this and hopefully save you from any kind of pain and suffering, especially if you're someone who wants to write your story. I think anybody who wants to write their story is particularly vulnerable to this kind of scam, which, by the way, is not new in publishing. I'll talk about a little history of the publishing industry and how these scams slash. I mean, there's a great area here. They're not always scammers who are doing this, but scams slash vanity publishers have been around for a really long time, and it's just important that you read the fine print and know what you're getting yourself into. Not every hybrid publisher is a vanity publisher, and I'll talk about in a minute what a hybrid publisher is. Not every hybrid publisher is a vanity publisher, and not every vanity publisher is a scammer. But what I want you to know is this, which is that if you want to write your story, you are particularly vulnerable to this type of scam. So tune in for that episode, learn the little bit that I'm going to teach you about the publishing industry. All you need to know is the most basic information, and when a scam like this comes across your path, it's going to ring all the bells and you will not be vulnerable, and I promise you will not fall prey to this scam. The first thing that feels important to do is to teach you about the two main publishing paths. There actually are three main publishing paths now, but just to give a little bit of historical context, I'm going to back up, like, let's say twenty years so to the turn of the century. Let's say the early two thousands. These are the two publishing paths that were at play. I'll talk about those two and how the third one has formed over the course of the last twenty years, and how that third lane has also evolved over the course of the last twenty years. So the two main publishing paths are traditional publishing and self publishing. Traditional publishing is the kind of publishing you probably think of when you pick up a book from the bookstore, or when you think about an author getting a book published. There are five main publishing houses there. Let's see Penguin, Random House, HarperCollins, Simon, and Schuster. I'm blinking on the last two, but five main publishing houses that each have several subsidiary publishing houses. So when you pick up a book. If you wanted to know who published the book, you could open, you know, to the first inside cover and you could read the publisher right there, or you could flip over to the backside. You could also look on the spine of the book and you'd be able to see the book publisher there. It's usually if you're buying the book from a major bookstore. If you've walked into a Barnes and Noble or Books a Million and you're buying a book there, usually you're going to see either one of those big five names on the spine of the book, or you're going to see a subsidiary of one of those big five. Now there's hundreds of subsidiaries for some of these, so there may be a publishing house that you don't recognize. More than likely, if you're reading that name inside of a brick and mortar like you know, one of the bigger brick and mortar stores, more than likely, and also like independent bookstores are similar, more than like, the name that you're reading is going to be a subsidiary of one of those big five publishers. That's not always true, and it's becoming less and less true over time, but it is you know, eighty five percent of the time mostly true when you're inside of a major brick and mortar store picking up a book. Now, the flip side of that traditional publishing coin is self publishing. So a similar thing happened in books that happened in music, although in books it happened a little bit behind the music industry. So maybe like, let's say, a decade behind the music industry where authors started to say, Okay, what am I doing. I have this art that I want to make, I want to put it out in the world. But I'm sitting here with this beautiful thing that I've created, waiting for some big publisher, some big label in the case of music, to come and find me, to come and tell me that I'm enough, to come and tell me that my art is good, and to then you know, take me on their roster, invest their money in me, promote me to the world, and then they take ninety percent of the royalties and I take ten percent of the royalties. How is this good for me? One of the reasons self publishing started to become so popular at the turn of the century is because there were also at that time so many people blogging, and I was a part of this blogging revolution. Blogging has in many ways, you know, fallen off. The curve has fallen off, but now it's been replaced by substack or other ways, you know, newsletters, other ways of communicating with your audience. But in the early two thousands, or when I entered the scene in two thousand and eight two thousand and nine, blogging was like the it thing to be doing if you wanted to become an author, and so many of us that were blogging at the time we were really trying to, you know, write something that would connect with our audience, write something that would become popular enough that it could catch the attention of not just people who are reading, but also maybe an acquisitions editor at a publisher, or just create some sort of proof in the marketplace that what we were writing about mattered to people, and that what we were writing about was important in the market at the time, so that we could catch the attention of a publisher and get a publishing deal. And also many of us were talking about this at the time. I was in a tight knit group of other bloggers who were all saying, hey, wait a minute, I have this thing that I'm doing. I know I'm a talented writer. I have an audience that I could directly sell to. So why would I sit around and wait for a publisher to approve of me or a publisher to sign me on when I could compile my work in whatever way that I wanted to and I could publish it on my own. The other thing that took place around this time was that Amazon released their own self publishing platform that was called create Space at the time. It's something different now, but once create Space was released, it was like, well, why would you wait for a traditional publisher to notice you, to pick you out of a crowd, to write you a contract that may or may not be favorable to you when you could use create Space. This made it much easier for authors to immediately publish their work, to make it available on Amazon, and to have much more creative control over their projects all at all. A couple of things to note, there's still at this time in the early two thousands, were a lot of drawbacks to self publishing. There still are today a lot of drawbacks to self publishing. One of the drawbacks is that most new authors, who are the people in many cases who are considering self publishing, most new authors don't have the first clue where to start as it relates to publishing a book. They've never done a cover layout before, they've never done an interior layout before. They don't know where they would find an editor to edit their work. You know, they don't know how to get an ISBN number. They aren't sure how to file for a copyright. They wouldn't know when in the process to do any of these things. You know, they've never been through the process of writing and publishing a book before. And also, many authors are in a position where they're like, I don't even know if what I'm writing is interesting enough or good enough, or if it would even be if a reader would even find this interesting, were to self publish it and put it on the internet, would anyone even purchase it? And that's a big risk for an author to take, especially when they're brand new. And so I think one of the things that many of us were weighing at the time, and that authors are still weighing, is what are the benefits to having a traditional publisher on your team. There is the more emotional benefit of knowing like, Okay, well, if the publisher picked me, they believe in me, they think that what I'm writing is interesting and that it's going to be interesting to a reader. And so it's easy as an author to be able to kind of lean on that and rely on that. And this is a big part of what I want to talk about today, because this is where authors and new authors become extremely vulnerable to scams, is we really want someone to validate us in our work. We want them to tell us like, I think what you are doing is great and I want to publish you. And the need that we have for someone to tell us that makes us extremely vulnerable. The need is also incredibly human. And for anybody who has did any amount of time or energy in their art, you can understand this basic human need. You just like want someone to tell you like, that's great, You're doing a great job. You know. I think about with my daughter who's four, sitting at the table working on an art project, like she's like, Mom, what do you think? What do you think? Do you like? This? Is this pretty? You know? And I'll try to do the thing that a lot of parenting coaches will say to do now, which is instead of immediately saying it's beautiful, you're incredible, which is true, I'll try to be like, what do you think about it? Do you like the color? And it doesn't matter how much I try to deflect the question back to her, she still wants to know. But what about you, mom? Do you like it? Do you think this is pretty? She really does want that external validation, and I think that's just a basic human need that so many of us have. We can supplement the need by learning to anchor inside of our own selves and give it to ourselves the way I'm trying to teach my daughter to do, to go, yeah, I love the color. I picked this color. This is my favorite color, or to say, I'm proud of this. I put a lot of energy into this and a lot of work into this, and I'm proud that it's mine. But at the same time, we're human beings and we do need and crave that external validation. And what I want to linger on throughout this episode is that that basic human need that you have makes you extremely vulnerable to a publishing scam. So I want to just make you aware of that if you're someone who wants to write your story, who is working on a book, or who would love to get published someday, I want to just bring this into your conscious awareness so that you don't fall prey to this publishing scam like this friend of a friend of mine did. Okay, I got on a small tangent there, But back to the story. In the early two thousands, many of us were blogging, We're all trying to catch the attention of a publisher. We're all trying to decide should I self publish or should I traditional publish? And we're all bumping up again, and these pluses and minuses of both self publishing and traditional publishing. If you self publish, you get total control, total creative control over your project. You get to decide when it releases, you get to pick the editor, you get to design the cover yourself. You get to make it look and feel however you want it to feel. And also that's a lot of pressure. It's like, how am I supposed to know how to do all these things or when to do all of them, or what's going to work and what's not going to work. It would really feel nice to have the partnership of a publisher who has done this before. So traditional publishing you have less control, You keep less of the profits from your artwork once it publishes. In most publishing contracts, the author keeps ten percent, the publisher keeps ninety percent, and you keep ten percent until you buy out your advance on royalties, which is a whole other conversation, and then once you buy it or sorry, the publisher keeps one hundred percent until you buy out your advance on royalties. And then once you buy out your advance on royalties, then you get to retain your ten percent royalty. So there are benefits and drawbacks to both ways of doing it, and many of us were trying to decide, you know, which one should we try. And I have had experience with both traditional publishing and also some with self publishing, and so I have firsthand experience of the benefits and drawbacks of both. Now. Somewhere around this time, honestly, probably about the time that I started blogging, I'm guessing it was like early, like twenty eight nine, ten. Somewhere in there, someone really smart looked at the current landscape that authors were having to make a decision between self publishing and traditional publishing, and that many of these authors you know, had their own platforms, were building audiences on social media, that were building audiences via a blog and they had this impossible choice to make. Self publishing wasn't a great option because you know, you basically have to administrate and project manage your entire book launch, and traditional publishing wasn't a great option because you're giving away the majority of your creative control, the majority of your intellectual property, and the majority of your profits on your project. And so someone goes, oh, let's come up with a middle option. Let's come up with a hybrid publishing option. And so you saw a lot of these hybrid publishing options entering the picture. A hybrid publishing option was an option where you could pay a publisher a fee to help you publish your book. They would basically help you project manage the whole thing. They would help get your ISBN number, they would you walk you through the process. They would get you an editor, they would get you a cover designer. Every hybrid publisher was a little bit different, but they would essentially hold your hand, walk you through the publishing process. You paid them a fee for that, and then they would help you to self publish your book at the end of the process, so your book would be published. It would be published under this hybrid publisher's name, but you would get to keep the majority of the royalties from your project. You would maintain one hundred percent creative control, you would get to keep in most cases your intellectual property, and this hybrid publisher would simply just help you through the process and you would pay them a fee for that. And so hybrid publishing was this amazing third way that entered into the picture in the early two thousands, somewhere where authors didn't have to pick between just self publishing all by themselves or waiting around for a traditional publisher to pick them. They could engage the service of this hybrid publisher and pay the fee, and they could get their book published. A few problems entered into the scene along with hybrid publishers. In fact, many times I would hear these hybrid publishers called vanity publishers, and I think the nickname or whatever you want to call it, is fair. And let me talk about why. One of the reasons that they were called vanity publishers is because these publishers would often appeal to your vanity in order to get you to pay their fee. Depending on the publisher, sometimes their fee was as low as one dollar. Yeah, I know, that's kind of a weird thing, but sometimes their fee was as low as one dollar, and the entry, the point to entry was more like, send us a copy of your manuscript or send us a piece of sample writing. We'll decide if we want to work with you or not based on, you know, what we think about your writing and what we think about your book idea. And then you pay us the fee of a dollar and will walk you through the process of getting your book published. And then you keep fifty percent royalties and we keep fifty percent. So that was one kind of way or structure that a hybrid publisher could look like. And then another structure that a hybrid publisher could have would be more like something like this, where they would say, you don't need to send us a sample of you're writing. You're in send us a check for seven thousand dollars or send us a check for ten thousand dollars or twelve thousand dollars or something like that. That's your fee that you pay us to get you published, and we're going to walk you through the process. We're going to stroke your ego, we're going to tell you you're amazing, We're going to be like you are going to crush it out there in the marketplace because we don't really care because we have your money. And once we have your money and your book is public, then you're kind of on your own and you can figure it out. The second model that I'm describing, where there's a high fee paid up front and no screening process for bringing in the manuscript, is not inherently bad or wrong, but it did appeal to the vanity of the author, which is why it's called a vanity publisher. And the other thing to think about with this second model is that the publisher doesn't require you to succeed in order for them to get their money. So in a traditional publishing model, the publisher requires the author to succeed in order to get paid, so they need you to sell books in order to get their paycheck, so they have a vested interest in helping you to succeed. In that vanity publishing model that I described to you, where you pay a high fee upfront and then they help you get your book, you know, on Amazon or in a bookstore or whatever, and then they've been paid, so they don't need you to succeed. They don't have as much of a vested interest in your success because they've already been paid their fee. And so what started to happen, and the reason that these publishers, many of them, earned the nickname vanity publishers, is because they would swoop in, they would do a bunch of sales calls. They would appeal to your vanity. They would tell you, we think you're amazing. We saw your blog online. You know, we really believe in you. We want to publish your book. And of course you're just like, oh my gosh, someone wants to publish my book. That's incredible. And then they would say, all you need to do is send a check for X amount of dollars to this address, or wire the money or whatever you're however you're going to pay us, and then we will help you get your book published. So you can see how this made a group of authors who were really hoping to get noticed by a publisher extremely vulnerable to what I wouldn't necessarily consider a scam. They're trading a service for a fee, which is not a scam in my in my mind. And yet I also can see where the term vanity publisher came from. And it's a well earned nickname. And here's where things get tricky because vanity publishers and the way that hybrid publishers operate makes the average consumer extremely vulnerable to a publishing scan Because imagine that you're a person who is working on writing your story. You're extremely invested in getting this story out into the world. You're wondering if you have what it takes. You question yourself every day, you feel crazy. You're working hard on your story. You're hoping that someone is noticing. You're trying to post on social media. You maybe have a substack or a blog or something where you're putting your work and an email pops into your inbox one day from Penguin Random House, or so it says, and the email says, dear so and so, we believe in you. We think you're amazing. We've been reading your blog or a subscribe to your substack. What you're working on matters. It's really important. The world needs it. We want to help you publish it. We have this new publishing division called X where we're going to publish your book, and all you need to do as a wire as five thousand dollars. Even though to me, with my experience in the publishing industry, this looks like a scam. It smells like a scam. It smacks like a scam. There's no way that I would fall for this. But I'm telling you two thousand and eight, Ali would have fallen for this. I was in my twenties, I was newly trying to, you know, get my writing business off the ground. I was blogging every day, I was trying to write a book. I was really wanting to be published. And if this email had come into my inbox in two thousand and eight, I guarantee you I would have fallen for this scam. I may have shown it to my parents first at that point in my life. I wouldn't do that now, but at twenty something I might have been like, Mom, Dad, look at what I got. And I can see my dad being like, no, that's a scam. But if I didn't show it to anyone, if I just was like, you know, immediately responded and went to go wire the money, I could see myself falling for a scam like that. And so this is why I think it's important to have just a little bit of historical context to the publishing industry. If you're someone who wants to write your story and also to have awn awareness, a consciousness of your own hunger for external validation, because having just the slightest awareness of that that there's nothing wrong with wanting external validation. I'm a firm believer of that. If you want a publisher to tell you you're amazing, you're doing great. Everybody wants that from their spouse, from their parents. Still, even though we're you know, we're grown, from your friends, from a publisher or whatever it is, we all want external validation. But having the consciousness that, oh, I'm aware that I want that external validation from someone, so that you don't receive the external validation unconsciously and think like, oh my god, I'll do anything, Yes, five thousand dollars, tell me where to wire it. I'll do anything in order to get this book published. What I would challenge every single artist to do, and this is true whether you're a writer or a musician or something else entirely, whatever the art is that you're working on, I would challenge you to fall so deeply in love with the art that you don't care whether anyone else ever reads it or listens to it, or thinks it's great or loves it or hates it or whatever, easier said than done. I am forty two years old, or about to be forty two next month. I have not arrived there yet, But this is the way that I approach my art every single day. Is there a way where I can do this even this podcast recording this episode? Is there a way that I can do this where this is for me? This is not about receiving external validation from someone else. Oh my god, I love your podcast. It changed my life. There's nothing wrong with that, and there can be some good in that. But the way that I approach this podcast and every other thing that I do is how could I use this to get better at what I'm doing, to learn to grow and to fall deeper in love with the craft every single day? How can I use this for me? And in using it for me that sounds like it's a selfish motive, but it actually ends up serving others, And that would be how I want you to approach your writing and approach whatever art you're doing. How can I do this in a way where this is for me, like this brings me such great joy. When and if you can achieve that, you become absolutely impervious to scams, Because some scammers going to email you and say we think you're great, and you're going to be like, yeah, I know, and they're going to be like, all you have to do is wire is five thousand dollars and you've already got your spidy senses up and your head tilted just a little and you're like, wait what, And I do think that, you know, Scamming is becoming even more sophisticated now with AI, and scams are harder to detect. So I think we have to really remove the stigma when we get hooked or hoodwinked by a scam, because there have been a few recently where I'm like, what's this, you know, and I'll show my husband and he's like, I think that's a scam, And I mean, scammers are getting more and more sophisticated. There was one other day where I got an email in my inbox about my bank account balance being low, and I was like, what's going on. I'm like checking my bank account balance, and sure enough, my account balance is not low, and so I'm like, how on earth did they replicate the logo of my bank and send the email that looks so like authentic and it says it's from the you know, the URL attached to the email address says it's from the bank, but it's not. So I'm calling the bank, I'm looking on my account. So I think spammers are going to get more and more sophisticated, and we also as consumers, have to get more and more sophisticated. And one of the ways that I'm suggesting that we do that as authors and aspiring authors is to shore up our need for external validation. Know that you need it, know that you crave it, get it from people who are close to you, and don't trust someone who says that I'll give you this external validation if only you give me five thousand dollars or whatever amount it is that they're asking for from you. Okay, So all of this to say, now that I've given you a little bit of history and context about the publishing industry, the whole reason that I brought this up is I got a message from my producer, Houston, who is so incredible and who makes this podcast possible. Thank you Houston. And Houston was saying that he had heard about this publishing scam where basically a publisher emails you and says, we love what you do, we love your work. We would love to publish you. We're going to get you on the New York Times List, We're gonna get you this and that, but first you need to wire us x amount of dollars. Now, at first, blush, this sounds like a hybrid publisher. So I can see how this scam would be highly sophisticated in this time and could actually seem like this is real. It's like, wire us this amount of money and will engage your services, and some subsidiary of Penguin Random House is going to help you get your book published. Now, the reason that this would stick out to me is because Penguin Random House is not a hybrid publisher, and as far as I know, Penguin Random House doesn't have a hybrid publisher attached to their name at all. And so because I have a little bit of information and a little bit of experience in the publishing industry, this would raise all the red flags for me, and I'd be like no. And yet the average consumer could quite easily fall prey to this scam. And I think you know, especially because we have that vulnerability as artists and as authors around external validation, that when someone says to you, I think you're amazing. What you're working on is so great. It's almost like our thinking part of our brain turns off at that point, and then we become much more apt to follow the pathway and eventually fall for the scam. So now that we're in this AI era, I think as consumers in general, we just have to have our spidy senses up. Scammers are becoming more sophisticated. It's becoming easier for them to, you know, to hook us, and so in every area of our life we have to have our spidy senses up. But I would say to you, particularly around hybrid publishing, if you are an aspiring author or if you really want to write your story, I would advise you to number one, bring into your conscious awareness your need for external validation because we all have it. So there's no like, you know, there's no advice I could give you where it's like, don't have a need for external validation. We all have this need for external validation. It's very human. So just bring into conscious awareness your need for external validation so that when the external validation comes in, you can check yourself, hold on, this is external validation? Am I truly paying attention to what's going on here? Am I truly tapped in to the details of the situation. Have I researched this hybrid publisher, this publisher that they say that they are these people who are attached to this email or to this message that comes into my space? You know? Have I checked the email address that it came from. I hate that we have to be this aware as consumers now, but we really do have to be this aware otherwise, you know, any of us could fall victim to any one of these scams. It's the scammers truly have just become more and more sophisticated. So it's not just you know, my grandma who's going to fall for the scam. It's easily could be me. In fact, just the other day, I was sitting at the table and got an email from what looked like my bank saying my account balance was low. And I it took me like ten or fifteen minutes to figure this out. I finally showed my husband and he was like, I think that's a scam, you know, but I'm like, how did they get the email to come from the bank address? And like, it's really truly amazing what these scammers are able to do, and so I think we just all need to be on high alert. And I hope that understanding a little bit more about how the publishing industry works and about, you know, what a hybrid publisher actually is and what a hybrid publisher actually does, because there are so many great self publishing resources out there now and hybrid publishing resources that are legit businesses, and you know, I can list a few of them for you. Number one, book launchers dot com. My friend Julie Broad started book Launchers, and book Launchers is a platform that supports self published authors, so it's not even a hybrid publisher. They do not consider themselves a publisher, but they're a platform that supports self published authors, and they charge a fee to help you do all the things that we just talked about, get your ISPN number, get your copyrights in order. They can book podcast episode or you know, podcast interviews for you after the book goes live. They can help you with editing, cover design, all of the above, and they have a whole process that they can walk you through. And several of my clients, and you know, my coaching clients have worked with book Launchers and have just sung the praises of Julie and her team. They've done a really amazing thing at book launchers. And then, of course I have published my most recent book, Write Your Story, is published with a hybrid publisher. Technically, the publisher is story Brand Books, which is a subsidiary of Forefront Books. For Front Books is the hybrid publisher. Story Brand Books is owned by Donald Miller, and my book was the first book that was published on Storybrand Books platform. So you know, there are hybrid publishers that are great and that follow through and that deliver on their promises. And not every hybrid publisher is a vanity publisher. Not every vanity publisher is a scammer. But I think the more aware you can be of your own need for external validation, the more aware you can be of how the industry works, what they're looking for, the better off you'll be in the end. Above all, I'm hoping that this episode can just help you avoid a scam, avoid a situation where you pay a bunch of money and don't get what you paid for. So questions to ask, let's talk about this really quickly before we wrap up. Questions to ask, who is this hybrid publisher or who is this publisher in general, I would go to their website. I would see who works for them, I would see who else they've published. I would ask them what services are they going to provide for the fee? So the services should be things like typesetting, lay out editing, copy editing, cover design, ISBN numbers, securing your copyright, booking podcast interviews for you. If those things aren't on the list of services, it should be things like that that are on the list of services. So I would make sure that before you engage a publisher like this, you're signing a services agreement. You're not just wiring five thousand dollars, but you're asking them what's your services agreement look like? And have you signed it? And have they signed it? And are they going to deliver on the services that are in that services agreement. Once that services agreement is signed, you can wire the money and then you have legal recourse should the hybrid publisher choose to READNIG on their promise to deliver those services. I hope that little bit of context helps. I hope the history helps. I hope self reflecting on your need for external validation helps, and ultimately I hope that you can avoid the scam that this other person fell for, not because they were stupid to fall for it, but because it was a really great scam. So here's to avoiding scams. Here's to writing our stories. Here's to learning to lean on our own internal validation and keep up the good work, Keep up the writing. I'll see you next week on the Write Your Story podcast.

Pick up the pieces of your life who put them back together with the words you write, all the beauty and piece and the magic that you'll start too fun when you write your story. You got the words and said, don't you think it's down to let them out and write them down and cold. It's all about and write your story. Write, write your story. Hi, and welcome back to the Write Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon. I'm your host, and on today's episode, I want to talk about a publishing scam that I heard about recently from my producer. Actually, and when I heard about this scam, it immediately stood out as a scam to me. There were red flags all over it. But I also have a ton of experience in the publishing world, so this is not a scam that I would have fallen for. But because the average consumer doesn't have a ton of experience in publishing, it is a really brilliant scam that many many people would fall for. So I thought if I could give you a quick twenty minute rundown on the publishing industry and how it works, it would save you from ever falling for a scam like this and hopefully save you from any kind of pain and suffering, especially if you're someone who wants to write your story. I think anybody who wants to write their story is particularly vulnerable to this kind of scam, which, by the way, is not new in publishing. I'll talk about a little history of the publishing industry and how these scams slash. I mean, there's a great area here. They're not always scammers who are doing this, but scams slash vanity publishers have been around for a really long time, and it's just important that you read the fine print and know what you're getting yourself into. Not every hybrid publisher is a vanity publisher, and I'll talk about in a minute what a hybrid publisher is. Not every hybrid publisher is a vanity publisher, and not every vanity publisher is a scammer. But what I want you to know is this, which is that if you want to write your story, you are particularly vulnerable to this type of scam. So tune in for that episode, learn the little bit that I'm going to teach you about the publishing industry. All you need to know is the most basic information, and when a scam like this comes across your path, it's going to ring all the bells and you will not be vulnerable, and I promise you will not fall prey to this scam. The first thing that feels important to do is to teach you about the two main publishing paths. There actually are three main publishing paths now, but just to give a little bit of historical context, I'm going to back up, like, let's say twenty years so to the turn of the century. Let's say the early two thousands. These are the two publishing paths that were at play. I'll talk about those two and how the third one has formed over the course of the last twenty years, and how that third lane has also evolved over the course of the last twenty years. So the two main publishing paths are traditional publishing and self publishing. Traditional publishing is the kind of publishing you probably think of when you pick up a book from the bookstore, or when you think about an author getting a book published. There are five main publishing houses there. Let's see Penguin, Random House, HarperCollins, Simon, and Schuster. I'm blinking on the last two, but five main publishing houses that each have several subsidiary publishing houses. So when you pick up a book. If you wanted to know who published the book, you could open, you know, to the first inside cover and you could read the publisher right there, or you could flip over to the backside. You could also look on the spine of the book and you'd be able to see the book publisher there. It's usually if you're buying the book from a major bookstore. If you've walked into a Barnes and Noble or Books a Million and you're buying a book there, usually you're going to see either one of those big five names on the spine of the book, or you're going to see a subsidiary of one of those big five. Now there's hundreds of subsidiaries for some of these, so there may be a publishing house that you don't recognize. More than likely, if you're reading that name inside of a brick and mortar like you know, one of the bigger brick and mortar stores, more than likely, and also like independent bookstores are similar, more than like, the name that you're reading is going to be a subsidiary of one of those big five publishers. That's not always true, and it's becoming less and less true over time, but it is you know, eighty five percent of the time mostly true when you're inside of a major brick and mortar store picking up a book. Now, the flip side of that traditional publishing coin is self publishing. So a similar thing happened in books that happened in music, although in books it happened a little bit behind the music industry. So maybe like, let's say, a decade behind the music industry where authors started to say, Okay, what am I doing. I have this art that I want to make, I want to put it out in the world. But I'm sitting here with this beautiful thing that I've created, waiting for some big publisher, some big label in the case of music, to come and find me, to come and tell me that I'm enough, to come and tell me that my art is good, and to then you know, take me on their roster, invest their money in me, promote me to the world, and then they take ninety percent of the royalties and I take ten percent of the royalties. How is this good for me? One of the reasons self publishing started to become so popular at the turn of the century is because there were also at that time so many people blogging, and I was a part of this blogging revolution. Blogging has in many ways, you know, fallen off. The curve has fallen off, but now it's been replaced by substack or other ways, you know, newsletters, other ways of communicating with your audience. But in the early two thousands, or when I entered the scene in two thousand and eight two thousand and nine, blogging was like the it thing to be doing if you wanted to become an author, and so many of us that were blogging at the time we were really trying to, you know, write something that would connect with our audience, write something that would become popular enough that it could catch the attention of not just people who are reading, but also maybe an acquisitions editor at a publisher, or just create some sort of proof in the marketplace that what we were writing about mattered to people, and that what we were writing about was important in the market at the time, so that we could catch the attention of a publisher and get a publishing deal. And also many of us were talking about this at the time. I was in a tight knit group of other bloggers who were all saying, hey, wait a minute, I have this thing that I'm doing. I know I'm a talented writer. I have an audience that I could directly sell to. So why would I sit around and wait for a publisher to approve of me or a publisher to sign me on when I could compile my work in whatever way that I wanted to and I could publish it on my own. The other thing that took place around this time was that Amazon released their own self publishing platform that was called create Space at the time. It's something different now, but once create Space was released, it was like, well, why would you wait for a traditional publisher to notice you, to pick you out of a crowd, to write you a contract that may or may not be favorable to you when you could use create Space. This made it much easier for authors to immediately publish their work, to make it available on Amazon, and to have much more creative control over their projects all at all. A couple of things to note, there's still at this time in the early two thousands, were a lot of drawbacks to self publishing. There still are today a lot of drawbacks to self publishing. One of the drawbacks is that most new authors, who are the people in many cases who are considering self publishing, most new authors don't have the first clue where to start as it relates to publishing a book. They've never done a cover layout before, they've never done an interior layout before. They don't know where they would find an editor to edit their work. You know, they don't know how to get an ISBN number. They aren't sure how to file for a copyright. They wouldn't know when in the process to do any of these things. You know, they've never been through the process of writing and publishing a book before. And also, many authors are in a position where they're like, I don't even know if what I'm writing is interesting enough or good enough, or if it would even be if a reader would even find this interesting, were to self publish it and put it on the internet, would anyone even purchase it? And that's a big risk for an author to take, especially when they're brand new. And so I think one of the things that many of us were weighing at the time, and that authors are still weighing, is what are the benefits to having a traditional publisher on your team. There is the more emotional benefit of knowing like, Okay, well, if the publisher picked me, they believe in me, they think that what I'm writing is interesting and that it's going to be interesting to a reader. And so it's easy as an author to be able to kind of lean on that and rely on that. And this is a big part of what I want to talk about today, because this is where authors and new authors become extremely vulnerable to scams, is we really want someone to validate us in our work. We want them to tell us like, I think what you are doing is great and I want to publish you. And the need that we have for someone to tell us that makes us extremely vulnerable. The need is also incredibly human. And for anybody who has did any amount of time or energy in their art, you can understand this basic human need. You just like want someone to tell you like, that's great, You're doing a great job. You know. I think about with my daughter who's four, sitting at the table working on an art project, like she's like, Mom, what do you think? What do you think? Do you like? This? Is this pretty? You know? And I'll try to do the thing that a lot of parenting coaches will say to do now, which is instead of immediately saying it's beautiful, you're incredible, which is true, I'll try to be like, what do you think about it? Do you like the color? And it doesn't matter how much I try to deflect the question back to her, she still wants to know. But what about you, mom? Do you like it? Do you think this is pretty? She really does want that external validation, and I think that's just a basic human need that so many of us have. We can supplement the need by learning to anchor inside of our own selves and give it to ourselves the way I'm trying to teach my daughter to do, to go, yeah, I love the color. I picked this color. This is my favorite color, or to say, I'm proud of this. I put a lot of energy into this and a lot of work into this, and I'm proud that it's mine. But at the same time, we're human beings and we do need and crave that external validation. And what I want to linger on throughout this episode is that that basic human need that you have makes you extremely vulnerable to a publishing scam. So I want to just make you aware of that if you're someone who wants to write your story, who is working on a book, or who would love to get published someday, I want to just bring this into your conscious awareness so that you don't fall prey to this publishing scam like this friend of a friend of mine did. Okay, I got on a small tangent there, But back to the story. In the early two thousands, many of us were blogging, We're all trying to catch the attention of a publisher. We're all trying to decide should I self publish or should I traditional publish? And we're all bumping up again, and these pluses and minuses of both self publishing and traditional publishing. If you self publish, you get total control, total creative control over your project. You get to decide when it releases, you get to pick the editor, you get to design the cover yourself. You get to make it look and feel however you want it to feel. And also that's a lot of pressure. It's like, how am I supposed to know how to do all these things or when to do all of them, or what's going to work and what's not going to work. It would really feel nice to have the partnership of a publisher who has done this before. So traditional publishing you have less control, You keep less of the profits from your artwork once it publishes. In most publishing contracts, the author keeps ten percent, the publisher keeps ninety percent, and you keep ten percent until you buy out your advance on royalties, which is a whole other conversation, and then once you buy it or sorry, the publisher keeps one hundred percent until you buy out your advance on royalties. And then once you buy out your advance on royalties, then you get to retain your ten percent royalty. So there are benefits and drawbacks to both ways of doing it, and many of us were trying to decide, you know, which one should we try. And I have had experience with both traditional publishing and also some with self publishing, and so I have firsthand experience of the benefits and drawbacks of both. Now. Somewhere around this time, honestly, probably about the time that I started blogging, I'm guessing it was like early, like twenty eight nine, ten. Somewhere in there, someone really smart looked at the current landscape that authors were having to make a decision between self publishing and traditional publishing, and that many of these authors you know, had their own platforms, were building audiences on social media, that were building audiences via a blog and they had this impossible choice to make. Self publishing wasn't a great option because you know, you basically have to administrate and project manage your entire book launch, and traditional publishing wasn't a great option because you're giving away the majority of your creative control, the majority of your intellectual property, and the majority of your profits on your project. And so someone goes, oh, let's come up with a middle option. Let's come up with a hybrid publishing option. And so you saw a lot of these hybrid publishing options entering the picture. A hybrid publishing option was an option where you could pay a publisher a fee to help you publish your book. They would basically help you project manage the whole thing. They would help get your ISBN number, they would you walk you through the process. They would get you an editor, they would get you a cover designer. Every hybrid publisher was a little bit different, but they would essentially hold your hand, walk you through the publishing process. You paid them a fee for that, and then they would help you to self publish your book at the end of the process, so your book would be published. It would be published under this hybrid publisher's name, but you would get to keep the majority of the royalties from your project. You would maintain one hundred percent creative control, you would get to keep in most cases your intellectual property, and this hybrid publisher would simply just help you through the process and you would pay them a fee for that. And so hybrid publishing was this amazing third way that entered into the picture in the early two thousands, somewhere where authors didn't have to pick between just self publishing all by themselves or waiting around for a traditional publisher to pick them. They could engage the service of this hybrid publisher and pay the fee, and they could get their book published. A few problems entered into the scene along with hybrid publishers. In fact, many times I would hear these hybrid publishers called vanity publishers, and I think the nickname or whatever you want to call it, is fair. And let me talk about why. One of the reasons that they were called vanity publishers is because these publishers would often appeal to your vanity in order to get you to pay their fee. Depending on the publisher, sometimes their fee was as low as one dollar. Yeah, I know, that's kind of a weird thing, but sometimes their fee was as low as one dollar, and the entry, the point to entry was more like, send us a copy of your manuscript or send us a piece of sample writing. We'll decide if we want to work with you or not based on, you know, what we think about your writing and what we think about your book idea. And then you pay us the fee of a dollar and will walk you through the process of getting your book published. And then you keep fifty percent royalties and we keep fifty percent. So that was one kind of way or structure that a hybrid publisher could look like. And then another structure that a hybrid publisher could have would be more like something like this, where they would say, you don't need to send us a sample of you're writing. You're in send us a check for seven thousand dollars or send us a check for ten thousand dollars or twelve thousand dollars or something like that. That's your fee that you pay us to get you published, and we're going to walk you through the process. We're going to stroke your ego, we're going to tell you you're amazing, We're going to be like you are going to crush it out there in the marketplace because we don't really care because we have your money. And once we have your money and your book is public, then you're kind of on your own and you can figure it out. The second model that I'm describing, where there's a high fee paid up front and no screening process for bringing in the manuscript, is not inherently bad or wrong, but it did appeal to the vanity of the author, which is why it's called a vanity publisher. And the other thing to think about with this second model is that the publisher doesn't require you to succeed in order for them to get their money. So in a traditional publishing model, the publisher requires the author to succeed in order to get paid, so they need you to sell books in order to get their paycheck, so they have a vested interest in helping you to succeed. In that vanity publishing model that I described to you, where you pay a high fee upfront and then they help you get your book, you know, on Amazon or in a bookstore or whatever, and then they've been paid, so they don't need you to succeed. They don't have as much of a vested interest in your success because they've already been paid their fee. And so what started to happen, and the reason that these publishers, many of them, earned the nickname vanity publishers, is because they would swoop in, they would do a bunch of sales calls. They would appeal to your vanity. They would tell you, we think you're amazing. We saw your blog online. You know, we really believe in you. We want to publish your book. And of course you're just like, oh my gosh, someone wants to publish my book. That's incredible. And then they would say, all you need to do is send a check for X amount of dollars to this address, or wire the money or whatever you're however you're going to pay us, and then we will help you get your book published. So you can see how this made a group of authors who were really hoping to get noticed by a publisher extremely vulnerable to what I wouldn't necessarily consider a scam. They're trading a service for a fee, which is not a scam in my in my mind. And yet I also can see where the term vanity publisher came from. And it's a well earned nickname. And here's where things get tricky because vanity publishers and the way that hybrid publishers operate makes the average consumer extremely vulnerable to a publishing scan Because imagine that you're a person who is working on writing your story. You're extremely invested in getting this story out into the world. You're wondering if you have what it takes. You question yourself every day, you feel crazy. You're working hard on your story. You're hoping that someone is noticing. You're trying to post on social media. You maybe have a substack or a blog or something where you're putting your work and an email pops into your inbox one day from Penguin Random House, or so it says, and the email says, dear so and so, we believe in you. We think you're amazing. We've been reading your blog or a subscribe to your substack. What you're working on matters. It's really important. The world needs it. We want to help you publish it. We have this new publishing division called X where we're going to publish your book, and all you need to do as a wire as five thousand dollars. Even though to me, with my experience in the publishing industry, this looks like a scam. It smells like a scam. It smacks like a scam. There's no way that I would fall for this. But I'm telling you two thousand and eight, Ali would have fallen for this. I was in my twenties, I was newly trying to, you know, get my writing business off the ground. I was blogging every day, I was trying to write a book. I was really wanting to be published. And if this email had come into my inbox in two thousand and eight, I guarantee you I would have fallen for this scam. I may have shown it to my parents first at that point in my life. I wouldn't do that now, but at twenty something I might have been like, Mom, Dad, look at what I got. And I can see my dad being like, no, that's a scam. But if I didn't show it to anyone, if I just was like, you know, immediately responded and went to go wire the money, I could see myself falling for a scam like that. And so this is why I think it's important to have just a little bit of historical context to the publishing industry. If you're someone who wants to write your story and also to have awn awareness, a consciousness of your own hunger for external validation, because having just the slightest awareness of that that there's nothing wrong with wanting external validation. I'm a firm believer of that. If you want a publisher to tell you you're amazing, you're doing great. Everybody wants that from their spouse, from their parents. Still, even though we're you know, we're grown, from your friends, from a publisher or whatever it is, we all want external validation. But having the consciousness that, oh, I'm aware that I want that external validation from someone, so that you don't receive the external validation unconsciously and think like, oh my god, I'll do anything, Yes, five thousand dollars, tell me where to wire it. I'll do anything in order to get this book published. What I would challenge every single artist to do, and this is true whether you're a writer or a musician or something else entirely, whatever the art is that you're working on, I would challenge you to fall so deeply in love with the art that you don't care whether anyone else ever reads it or listens to it, or thinks it's great or loves it or hates it or whatever, easier said than done. I am forty two years old, or about to be forty two next month. I have not arrived there yet, But this is the way that I approach my art every single day. Is there a way where I can do this even this podcast recording this episode? Is there a way that I can do this where this is for me? This is not about receiving external validation from someone else. Oh my god, I love your podcast. It changed my life. There's nothing wrong with that, and there can be some good in that. But the way that I approach this podcast and every other thing that I do is how could I use this to get better at what I'm doing, to learn to grow and to fall deeper in love with the craft every single day? How can I use this for me? And in using it for me that sounds like it's a selfish motive, but it actually ends up serving others, And that would be how I want you to approach your writing and approach whatever art you're doing. How can I do this in a way where this is for me, like this brings me such great joy. When and if you can achieve that, you become absolutely impervious to scams, Because some scammers going to email you and say we think you're great, and you're going to be like, yeah, I know, and they're going to be like, all you have to do is wire is five thousand dollars and you've already got your spidy senses up and your head tilted just a little and you're like, wait what, And I do think that, you know, Scamming is becoming even more sophisticated now with AI, and scams are harder to detect. So I think we have to really remove the stigma when we get hooked or hoodwinked by a scam, because there have been a few recently where I'm like, what's this, you know, and I'll show my husband and he's like, I think that's a scam, And I mean, scammers are getting more and more sophisticated. There was one other day where I got an email in my inbox about my bank account balance being low, and I was like, what's going on. I'm like checking my bank account balance, and sure enough, my account balance is not low, and so I'm like, how on earth did they replicate the logo of my bank and send the email that looks so like authentic and it says it's from the you know, the URL attached to the email address says it's from the bank, but it's not. So I'm calling the bank, I'm looking on my account. So I think spammers are going to get more and more sophisticated, and we also as consumers, have to get more and more sophisticated. And one of the ways that I'm suggesting that we do that as authors and aspiring authors is to shore up our need for external validation. Know that you need it, know that you crave it, get it from people who are close to you, and don't trust someone who says that I'll give you this external validation if only you give me five thousand dollars or whatever amount it is that they're asking for from you. Okay, So all of this to say, now that I've given you a little bit of history and context about the publishing industry, the whole reason that I brought this up is I got a message from my producer, Houston, who is so incredible and who makes this podcast possible. Thank you Houston. And Houston was saying that he had heard about this publishing scam where basically a publisher emails you and says, we love what you do, we love your work. We would love to publish you. We're going to get you on the New York Times List, We're gonna get you this and that, but first you need to wire us x amount of dollars. Now, at first, blush, this sounds like a hybrid publisher. So I can see how this scam would be highly sophisticated in this time and could actually seem like this is real. It's like, wire us this amount of money and will engage your services, and some subsidiary of Penguin Random House is going to help you get your book published. Now, the reason that this would stick out to me is because Penguin Random House is not a hybrid publisher, and as far as I know, Penguin Random House doesn't have a hybrid publisher attached to their name at all. And so because I have a little bit of information and a little bit of experience in the publishing industry, this would raise all the red flags for me, and I'd be like no. And yet the average consumer could quite easily fall prey to this scam. And I think you know, especially because we have that vulnerability as artists and as authors around external validation, that when someone says to you, I think you're amazing. What you're working on is so great. It's almost like our thinking part of our brain turns off at that point, and then we become much more apt to follow the pathway and eventually fall for the scam. So now that we're in this AI era, I think as consumers in general, we just have to have our spidy senses up. Scammers are becoming more sophisticated. It's becoming easier for them to, you know, to hook us, and so in every area of our life we have to have our spidy senses up. But I would say to you, particularly around hybrid publishing, if you are an aspiring author or if you really want to write your story, I would advise you to number one, bring into your conscious awareness your need for external validation because we all have it. So there's no like, you know, there's no advice I could give you where it's like, don't have a need for external validation. We all have this need for external validation. It's very human. So just bring into conscious awareness your need for external validation so that when the external validation comes in, you can check yourself, hold on, this is external validation? Am I truly paying attention to what's going on here? Am I truly tapped in to the details of the situation. Have I researched this hybrid publisher, this publisher that they say that they are these people who are attached to this email or to this message that comes into my space? You know? Have I checked the email address that it came from. I hate that we have to be this aware as consumers now, but we really do have to be this aware otherwise, you know, any of us could fall victim to any one of these scams. It's the scammers truly have just become more and more sophisticated. So it's not just you know, my grandma who's going to fall for the scam. It's easily could be me. In fact, just the other day, I was sitting at the table and got an email from what looked like my bank saying my account balance was low. And I it took me like ten or fifteen minutes to figure this out. I finally showed my husband and he was like, I think that's a scam, you know, but I'm like, how did they get the email to come from the bank address? And like, it's really truly amazing what these scammers are able to do, and so I think we just all need to be on high alert. And I hope that understanding a little bit more about how the publishing industry works and about, you know, what a hybrid publisher actually is and what a hybrid publisher actually does, because there are so many great self publishing resources out there now and hybrid publishing resources that are legit businesses, and you know, I can list a few of them for you. Number one, book launchers dot com. My friend Julie Broad started book Launchers, and book Launchers is a platform that supports self published authors, so it's not even a hybrid publisher. They do not consider themselves a publisher, but they're a platform that supports self published authors, and they charge a fee to help you do all the things that we just talked about, get your ISPN number, get your copyrights in order. They can book podcast episode or you know, podcast interviews for you after the book goes live. They can help you with editing, cover design, all of the above, and they have a whole process that they can walk you through. And several of my clients, and you know, my coaching clients have worked with book Launchers and have just sung the praises of Julie and her team. They've done a really amazing thing at book launchers. And then, of course I have published my most recent book, Write Your Story, is published with a hybrid publisher. Technically, the publisher is story Brand Books, which is a subsidiary of Forefront Books. For Front Books is the hybrid publisher. Story Brand Books is owned by Donald Miller, and my book was the first book that was published on Storybrand Books platform. So you know, there are hybrid publishers that are great and that follow through and that deliver on their promises. And not every hybrid publisher is a vanity publisher. Not every vanity publisher is a scammer. But I think the more aware you can be of your own need for external validation, the more aware you can be of how the industry works, what they're looking for, the better off you'll be in the end. Above all, I'm hoping that this episode can just help you avoid a scam, avoid a situation where you pay a bunch of money and don't get what you paid for. So questions to ask, let's talk about this really quickly before we wrap up. Questions to ask, who is this hybrid publisher or who is this publisher in general, I would go to their website. I would see who works for them, I would see who else they've published. I would ask them what services are they going to provide for the fee? So the services should be things like typesetting, lay out editing, copy editing, cover design, ISBN numbers, securing your copyright, booking podcast interviews for you. If those things aren't on the list of services, it should be things like that that are on the list of services. So I would make sure that before you engage a publisher like this, you're signing a services agreement. You're not just wiring five thousand dollars, but you're asking them what's your services agreement look like? And have you signed it? And have they signed it? And are they going to deliver on the services that are in that services agreement. Once that services agreement is signed, you can wire the money and then you have legal recourse should the hybrid publisher choose to READNIG on their promise to deliver those services. I hope that little bit of context helps. I hope the history helps. I hope self reflecting on your need for external validation helps, and ultimately I hope that you can avoid the scam that this other person fell for, not because they were stupid to fall for it, but because it was a really great scam. So here's to avoiding scams. Here's to writing our stories. Here's to learning to lean on our own internal validation and keep up the good work, Keep up the writing. I'll see you next week on the Write Your Story podcast.