Jamie

While you are worrying about whether beta readers will steal your ideas, there is a more genuine threat on the horizon.

When offered a publishing contract, please do all your research before you sign. There are a number of fakes and scammers out there, as well as good-intentioned amateurs that don’t know how to get your work to a wide audience. I won’t tell the heartbreaking stories here - there are too many.

Being published badly is worse than being never published.

It can destroy your career and your dreams.

The quick check is to google the publishing house name + scam or warning.

But, to be sure, check with these places first. They aren’t infallible (nothing is) but they can help you protect yourself. They are written and maintained by expereinced writers, editors, publishers and legal folks.

Absolute Write: Bewares and Background Checks

Preditors and editors

Writer Beware

and the WRITER BEWARE blog

Keep yourself and your work safe.

Equally important to know is that you can SELF-PUBLISH through a number of platforms these days. @ean-amhran and I used Amazon’s CreateSpace and Kindle Direct Publishing to publish both of our books. No editors, no contracts, no finagling with publishers who want to change your materials. Just direct-to-market material.

(Granted, it means you’ve got to do a LOT more work yourself with editing and formatting and cover art, but it’s worth it to miss the headache of trying to bargain with publishing houses or avoid scams.)

It lays out how to neatly format an e-book in a wonderful step by step format, and you can get it free from Smashwords. Just leave off the couple of things that are (very obviously) Smashwords specific.

Writer Beware is a wonderful resource, and I highly recommend it. It’s both a good general guide to the scams people run/red flags to watch out for (such as giving up your copyright entirely as opposed to specific rights, or being charged to publish something or have it edited, when they’re trying to act like they’re a “normal” publisher), and a frequently-updated list of the latest specific known scammers, both in “fake agents” and fake/scammy publishers categories. (The company formerly known as Publish America is one of the most famous and egregious cases, but by far not the only one)

Also related to agents: Should you go this route and seek one, DO NOT PAY ONE DIME TO THEM upfront! A real agent only gets paid when he sells your book to a publisher! The average cut is about 10-15% of the first sale profits, if I remember right, with cuts of film and other rights maybe being more, when sold. At most, writers should only be responsible for the costs of phone calls and postage.

For more information see: How Literary Agents Get Paid. Standard Commission Practices and Payments for Literary Agents

Edited to Add: Some other great, highly respected resources for writing and getting published are:

Writer’s Digest

The Writer

I’m owning my decisions and making effective use of them.

I know that if I speak negatively about something and then put a link in the description, it will be hammered with dislikes and critical comments. Hence I only include the videos that ought to be hammered and criticized. I deliberately left out the summary videos to avoid them being hammered, and it worked.

I’ve also deliberately cultivated a more tactical-thinking and pragmatic audience. I’ve kept far-right bullshit as far away from my work as humanely possible by alienating those people and making them hate me.

Josh never owns his fucking decisions, he’s always got to find some way to wash his hands of all responsibilities. He gives limp-handed “Now don’t go do this thing” disclaimers, knowing full well that his audience will ignore it. He does this explicitly to give him an excuse to say that he’s not responsible for what his audience does.

My audience was more pragmatic and surgical in their distaste, but there was always the risk they would also be threat-spewing fuckheads. And if they were, that was going to be entirely on me and the consequences mine to bear.

Honorable Mentions

Dash Spectrum - By Casmic B

Esmeralda Spectrum - By DG Cakes

Suggestive Spectrum - By 4rcadia

Sweater Spectrum - By Lihangins

Honeycrisp Spectrum - By Beach City Mystery Girl

Runner Up ($50 USD) Denim Spectrum, by Poison Barb

Winner ($100 USD, Official Character Design) Flutter Spectrum, by Strawberry Crisis

The two winners please throw me your Paypal address/donation link/whatever it is you use to accept money thrown at your face like a paper snowball.

Congratulations to everyone who made it into the winner’s circle, and/or made me go “HOLY SHIT” on stream like a dingus.

This is what the school walkouts looked like 

CNN | March 14, 2018

Across the United States, many students walked out of school Wednesday to say enough is enough with regards to gun violence.

The national school walkout started at 10 a.m. in each time zone and was scheduled to last for at least 17 minutes — one minute for each person killed in a school shooting that happened exactly one month ago in Parkland, Florida.

More than 2,500 walkouts were planned across the country, according to Empower, the youth branch of the Women’s March that has been organizing the event.

Participants called for stricter gun laws as they also remembered the people who lost their lives in Parkland.

A huge pedophile ring was caught by the police! 900 arrests were made and 300 kids were saved!

Around 1000 sex traffickers were arrested!

Oliver Willis at Shareblue: 

A Florida teenager who survived the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Florida, issued a rousing call to action at a rally against gun violence.

Emma Gonzalez declared that the shooting at her school should be “the last mass shooting.”

And she responded directly to Trump’s tweet, which blamed students at the school for not reporting on the shooter’s behavior before the event.

“We did,” Gonzalez said, “time and time again, since he was in middle school.”

“We need to pay attention to the fact that this isn’t just a mental health issue,” she continued. “He wouldn’t have harmed that many students with a knife.”

“How about we stop blaming the victims for something that was the shooter’s fault?” she demanded, and called out those who do deserve to shoulder that blame.

“[The people] who let him buy the guns in the first place. Those at the gun shows. The people who encouraged him to buy accessories for his guns to make them fully automatic. The people who didn’t take them away from him when they knew that he expressed homicidal tendencies. And I am not talking about the FBI. I am talking about the people that he lived with, I’m talking about the neighbors who saw him outside holding guns.”

And Gonzalez again did not let Trump’s responsibility go unremarked upon

“If the president wants to come up to me and tell me to my face that it was a terrible tragedy, and how it should never have happened, and maintain telling us that nothing is going to be done about it, I’m going to happily ask him I’m going to happily ask him how much money he received from the National Rifle Association.”

Gonzalez then called attention to the $30 million spent by the NRA in support of Trump in the 2016 presidential election, and how that translates onto each life lost to gun violence.

“That comes out to being $5800. Is that how much these people are worth to you, Trump?” She asked.

“To every politician who has taken donations from the NRA: Shame on you!”

The crowd erupted into a loud chant, echoing her cry: “Shame on you!”

Emma Gonzalez and her Florida community are not allowing Trump, the Republican Party, or the NRA to intimidate them into silence. They are speaking up to defend their families, and shaming those who enable this epidemic of violence.

The video of the full speech by Emma Gonzalez, via CNN’s YouTube:

The people he fondled and molested at cons. People who were blackmailed or tricked into helping him cheat on his partners. Girlfriends and boyfriends alike who were openly treated like garbage, abused, and dumped like it was nothing. People he tried to pressure into sex and threw away when they refused to be treated like an object.