A lot of authors have received PMs or emails from so-called publishers gushing about how much they love their work and would love to publish their novel. It's exciting to believe that some publisher happened across your work and loved it so much they want to publish it.

The issue with many of these messages is they're not what they seem. There are so many scam publishers out there. You should always beware of cold contact from any publisher. 

Many people have heard of places like Dreame and Webnovel. They cold contact Wattpaders all the time. While these sites do exist and seem to be completely legitimate on the surface, once you scrape away at that surface and begin investigating, you discover how bad they really are. 

Most of these so-called publishers will try and lock you into an exclusive contract, meaning you can't post your work anywhere else. Sometimes they even ask you to give up your rights to the work. With these exclusive contracts you can't even post on sites like Inkitt or Wattpad, and you can forget ever actually publishing it either through a legitimate publisher or someplace like Amazon. A lot of them also require you to post a certain number of chapters in a given period of time (a week, month, or whatever they determine is appropriate). It's usually a larger number because they make money on volume. The more chapters for readers to read the more they make. 

A good rule of thumb when you get one of these cold messages is to Google the publisher. You can google some of the following items -

is ___________ legitimate

lawsuits associated with ____________

complaints associated with _________  (you could even add author or customer at the beginning of this one)

how does _____________ pay their authors

Many times you'll discover these publishers, especially the slew of publishing apps, have a handful of 'affiliated' sites all under the same parent company and many of these companies are located in foreign countries were contract law is shady at best. 

A good thing to remember about publishing houses and agents, legitimate places receive hundreds of thousands of manuscripts on a daily basis, they don't need to beg authors for their work. 

Always err on the side of caution with messages from random places. While it's flattering to think that someone wants to publish your work, it doesn't happen often (or ever really). I do have an author friend who was approached by a publisher about a book idea of hers but it was a well known publisher who happened to overhear her talking to some other authors about the idea while she was at a very well known convention for writers.  It wasn't blindly through some email or PM. The incident occurred in a place where it would make sense for her to run into someone representing a publishing house.

If anyone offers you a contract, ask questions, a lot of them! And if they become evasive about answering them, then run the other direction. Legitimate publishers are more than happy to explain every detail of their contracts. If you really feel you'd like to move forward with a contract then find a lawyer to look it over before you sign anything or you may find yourself stuck with no recourse for whatever they may do. And if you're underage, check your local contract laws. Every place that I've checked you must be at least eighteen to sign a legally binding contract. Which is why many of these publishers hit up places like Wattpad. They sign underaged authors and the contract isn't binding. How do you complain about not being paid or having your work stolen when your contract isn't valid?

In this book we're going to discuss publishers and I'll give you information on some of the sites I've investigated. A lot of them are publishers that have popped up messaging authors or ones I've seen ads for or received emails from.

If you stumble across a possible shady publisher not listed in this book please let me know and I'll do some poking around. 

I will continue to update this book as I find more publishers to look into. I will also answer questions about publishing if readers have any. 

Thank you for reading.