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 This is a continuation of my blogging here at WdC |
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This will be a blog for my writing, maybe with (too much) personal thrown in. I am hoping it will be a little more interactive, with me answering questions, helping out and whatnot. If it falls this year (2024), then I may stop the whole blogging thing, but that's all a "wait and see" scenario. An index of topics can be found here: "Writing Blog No.2 Index"  Feel free to comment and interact. |
| Writing Scandals 4: Filippo Bernardino Schnujo's next semester starts asked me about writing scandals. What a great topic! Now, I am not going to go and research any. These are ones I know about from university study or personal interest. This last one I know about comes only from what I was taught at university. Otherwise, it would have passed me by. Filippo Bernardino This one is weird, and it was related to us as a cautionary tale. Bernardino was a low-level employee at Simon & Schuster. But he liked reading. And so he sent out to a bunch of authors letters asking to see their unpublished manuscripts. This included authors as famous as Margaret Atwood to writers who’d had one book published by small boutique outfits. What he did was set up a bunch of fake email addresses and even fake domains, and reached out to these already published authors. But his impersonations of big publishers was clever; for example, instead of “Random House”, he wrote from “Randorn House”, the M replaced by RN. And doing this, he managed to get his hands on 1000 unpublished manuscripts. Somehow a small Melbourne (Victoria, Australia) bookshop even got involved when he impersonated them! When this came to light, authors were afraid their works were going to appear online under someone else’s name, or be held for ransom or something else. But, no, nothing like that. Bernardino just wanted to read them and have them. At least he wasn’t nefarious. It came to light as my degree was ending, and he was charged the same month I graduated. Doing some quick research, I discovered that he plead guilty and his punishment was to be deported from the USA, with a “never to return” stamp on his name. Not nefarious, but what if? We were taught about this as it unfolded for 3 reasons: 1) It was a reminder that legitimate publishers do not cold-contact authors. Ever. They will contact your publisher, not you. 2) Do not take any offer at face value, and read everything clearly. 3) If an alleged employee of a publisher contacts you, contact the publisher in question to be sure of their bona fides. Yes, nothing serious happened in this case, but with the growth in AI and AI’s unscrupulous owners/ controllers, that will not always be the case. |
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