Scammers Abound

I have been contacted by several different people about “publishing” using their services. So far only one has turned out to not be a scam.

None have included any sort of marketing, and instead mostly are expecting me to do so on my own.

The latest one from “A&D Entertainment” talked about being “simultaneously published to our partners,” which had a list of 4 sites, but also ‘to name a few.’. It then talked about paywalls but didn’t give any specific values. Then have the ‘offers’ of ‘Feature Priority’ from their partnership, ‘Comics Adaptation,’ that I would retain copyright, Amazon KDP “When your book reaches a certain level of readers, we can talk about publishing your book in Amazon”, and 50% profit share.

Looking at the ‘partner’ sites, one I could see was from China, and the others all had privacy locks on the Whois domain data (which tells you who owns the domain, what the IP of the host, email server, etc., is), so I could not see any details on them.

Copyright of items is not protected in China, as they have very lax enforcement of other countries' copyrights. That is why there are a great many counterfeit products found. I have heard of major manufacturing companies having them produce machinery, and then suddenly there is a cheaper Chinese version of it.

The fact they are not providing a full list of their ‘partners’ where it will be released makes it much more suspect, and not a company I really want to deal with.

I found this: https://writerbeware.blog/2023/01/20/bad-contract-alert-webnovel/ and that just makes it even more so not someone I want to deal with. They saw most of the issues. The one they don’t touch on… is while all the profits are shared 50/50, the liability is all to the ‘Party A’ (i.e. the author).

The biggest red flag, to me, is that their email was from a Gmail, not their own domain name. Since they have a website, there is almost always included email hosting with the web hosting, and if not, even Gmail has fairly cheap email hosting if you have a domain name! Most scammers do not use their domain, as they don’t want it to get hit with a mail blacklist or be flagged as spam. They hide behind something like Gmail, and if it gets blocked or flagged, they just change to another address.