This looks like an excellent new business line for Wolfram Research!

Can you catch the trick in the above letter? I was staring and staring and couldn’t figure out the scam. Yes, I get it that “Mushens and Churchill” is a fake literary agency (according to this post from Victoria Strauss, which is where I found this story, this particular scammer is taking the name of the legitimate literary agent Juliet Mushens, which is a really horrible thing to do), and they’re preying on the hopes of authors. I get that “we cannot promise the moon and the stars” is classic soft-sell. What I couldn’t figure out is what’s the motivation for the scammer. They get someone to send them their unpublished manuscript? Later they ask for money to publish the book? But that doesn’t make sense—the author is already self-publishing. (And, yes, there’s no shame in paying money to publish your own work—do you think this blog hosting comes for free?)

Strauss explains how the scam works:

Although I haven’t yet heard from anyone who has actually signed up with MCLit, and therefore don’t know what they’re charging, the fifth paragraph of the solicitation above gives away what they’re selling: an “International Literary Registration Seal and Bookstore Access Code”. Both of these are completely bogus items that scammers have invented to enable them to drain writers’ bank accounts.

Ha! I didn’t catch that at all.

Here’s another:

Strauss spells it out for us:

Story Arc Literary Groups employs an approach common to many fake literary agency scams: promising to work on commission only, with no other fees due (note especially paragraph 5, which helpfully explains that “a reputable literary agent should not charge upfront fees”). The aim of such solicitations, however, is always money, and writers who sign up with Story Arc soon discover this. In order for Story Arc to successfully pitch a book to traditional publishers, authors are told they must first “re-license” their book (a requirement that, as I’ve explained in another blog post, is completely fictional). As is typical for this type of scam, they’re referred to a “trusted” company to perform the service–in this case, an outfit called CreativeIP. The price tag: $5,000.

Ouch!

Here’s another:

Typical of fake literary agency scams, Zenith Literary is an aggressive solicitor. One writer who responded to this solicitation was told that in order to snag a traditional publisher’s interest, they needed to gather various “action items”, including “ten editorial reviews and endorsements” (hint: reviews and endorsements are nice, but they are absolutely not required by traditional publishers). To obtain these, the writer was referred to Verse Bound Solutions, a company with no apparent existence beyond a Wyoming business registration but active enough to phone the author and offer them ten book reviews for $3,000.

And another:

The author who was targeted with [a solicitation from “ImplicitPress Literary Agency”] was asked to supply a variety of necessary “documents”; note #5, which is what this scam is hoping to sell (no publisher requires or cares about a book trailer):

If you’re itching for more such stories, just go here:

What a world we live in.

P.S. In case you’re wondering about the title of this post, see here for the relevant background.