Diary of a Mad Editor

It’s time for another scam alert. If you are a regular follower of the Writer Beware blog you’re probably already familiar with this one, but if not here’s the scoop:

It seems that, like that great and terrible mythical monster the Hydra, you cut off the head of Airleaf, the publishing scammers that were put out of business a while back, another head just grows to take it’s place.  I give you Jones Harvest Publishing founded by Brien Jones, a former executive at Airleaf aka Bookman Marketing aka Bookman Publishing(who it’s been alleged in the past that he was guilty of theft and sexual harrassment — who knows if any of that is true, but you got to figure he learned a few tricks from his former employer).  The thing that I found most entertaining is the tagline on the Jones Harvest blog: “Good people doing the right thing in an industry where most people do the wrong thing.  That’s some hilarious shit when you consider the brand of publishing Jones is into.

Go to the website and you can clearly see that it’s  yet another vanity press for no-talent wannabe writers. Bad writers of godsmack awful books with badly-designed covers.

I tracked one of these so-called authors on the Internet, a poet who is allegedly “world-renowned” despite the fact that I’d never heard of him (And let’s face it, when it comes to poets that matter, I’ve either heard of them, read them, know them by reputation or know them personally).  The poet, who’s name is J. Kellogg Burnham has a book of George Bush – themed poetry called The Long Shadow of the Bush.  Imagine a really awful poet who was writing bad poetry about a hundred years ago and you can kind of imagine what Burnham’s style of poetry is like.  But, you don’t have to take my word for it — you can find his book on Google Book Search and  read suffer through it yourself.  In tracking Burnham, the only place I could find anything about him was on websites of other “affiliate sites” owned and operated by Jones Harvest (unless you count the 1907 NYT obiturary of a James Kellogg Burnham — think it’s the same guy?): authorcelebrity.com, greatconceptbooks.com, starredreview.com, etc. Brien Jones makes no secret of the fact that he owns all of these websites (and even if he did make a secret of it Whois.net tells the tale), but it does pose the question to aspiring authors: If the only place you can find these writers is on websites owned by the publisher, how can any of them be “world renowned,” “distinguished” or “bestsellers,” huh?  Who’s talking about these authors? Where are their books being reviewed? Who’s buying them?

Hey, even bad writers have the right to put their work out there (can’t imagine why anyone would want to read their shit, but bless their hearts for trying), but there are certainly better, cheaper, less ethically-challenged options than signing a contract with a company that makes it’s money exploiting those delusions.