This is an edition of Joanna Penn’s highly regarded podcast. The section on self-editing begins at the 29-minute mark:
How can you improve your self-editing process? How can you find and work with professional editors and beta readers? How do you know when editing is done and the book is finished? With Joanna Penn.
POSTED BY VICTORIA-STRAUSS FOR WRITER BEWARE® ON
I’ve recently gotten a slew of reports of emails purporting to be from editors at Big 5 and other large publishers, in which the supposed editor expresses interest in the writer’s work and asks whether they have a literary agent.
I’ve posted a number of examples below. Apologies for so many images, but I wanted you to see, beyond the gen AI personalization and praise, how similar they are–including the identical phrases I’ve highlighted in red (I’ve redacted the authors’ details, along with information specific to their books).
This is an excellent interview that gives an accurate account of how traditional publishing works. It’s a long interview, but worth watching to the end.
POSTED BY VICTORIA-STRAUSS FOR WRITER BEWARE® ON
It’s been a busy year in writing scams (but then what year isn’t?). From the new AI marketing scams, to nasty contract clauses, to publishers behaving badly, to the biggest copyright infringement restitution in history, Writer Beware has been on the beat. If you missed any of our posts, here’s your chance to catch up.
On a personal note, it’s always instructive for me to do these overviews, not just because they help me take stock of how well Writer Beware is fulfilling its mission, but also because looking at the trends and changes of the year just past can give me a sense of what I’ll likely be focusing on in the year ahead. I was a little surprised, for example, to see how much space I devoted to generative AI.
Also somewhat surprising: scams are what most people think of when they think of Writer Beware, but my posts about scams actually comprised less than half of what I published in 2025. Just a reminder that “beware” applies to much more than literary fraud.
Ramping up more quickly than any scam I’ve ever seen, Nigerian marketing scams burst on the scene in the late spring and early summer of 2025, in the form of highly personalized emails from alleged marketing experts with often odd Gmail addresses and a suspicious lack of web presence. Authentic-seeming (AI-generated) plot details, bolstered by (also AI-generated) over-the-top praise, made it seem the purported marketer really had read the books and that the promotional services on offer had been carefully targeted. For payment, writers were referred to Nigerian third parties, described as “assistants” or “payment processors”, via job sites like Upwork or bank transfers to accounts at Wells Fargo and Lead Bank.