Milli Vanillis of the Literary World

 

Milli Vanilli. If you don’t know who they are. Look them up here (Image courtesy of Mental Floss) I’ll wait.

There was a time when being an author was a noble profession. Even with the dawn of eBooks and the ease to digitally publish, people still admired a writer. In fact, there are many who support the Indy writer wholeheartedly. But what if the author you faithfully support wasn’t real? I’m not talking about pen names, I’m talking about an author created to mislead you.

Are they unscrupulous and deceiving or just brilliant business?

For centuries there have been pen names and ghostwriters. I know this, so please don’t toss out defensive examples like Hardy Boys, Patterson, etc. Famous examples don’t make deception acceptable. There are a lot of puppy mills out there, it doesn’t make it less wrong.

Pen names are created to protect the writer’s identity, to say ‘hey, I’m real, I just can’t say who I am’. Those are different. A deceitful variance of such, along with nestling your books under YA when they aren’t … are for another blog. But for now … Milli Vanilli.

The greed of the novelist has made its way into the apocalypse genre with a vengeance.

Today I write about book mills or book packaging companies. There are several types, a couple I dug into, posing as a fake author to get my information. Yep, I played their game.

My focus today is on the ones that buy story ideas, then hire struggling writers to create an absurdly detailed outline for only a couple hundred bucks, then hire another desperate ghostwriter to pen the novel for not much more and they publish it under one of their stock author names. Not real writers that sit for hours and pour their heat and soul onto each page they write. They are manufactured names just like the books.

One in particular company is huge. They call themselves a publisher but they’re producers. But if you look up their titles on Amazon, the publisher isn’t mentioned. These authors are marketed as Indy Authors. Hundreds upon hundreds of books, several genres and a dozen authors.

I saw an ad for one their mill authors., We’ll call her Mary Smith. On the FB ad, people commented that they love her. I wanted badly to tell them she wasn’t real and that book was the work of a half a dozen people who will never get credit for writing a best seller.

They made $300-500 while the producer rakes in the big bucks, and Mary Smith garnishes a fanbase the writer(s) earned in the literary sweatshop.

Just because I ate a steak at Gordan Ramsey’s in Vegas doesn’t mean Gordan made it. He got credit for something another wonderful chef cooked.

Gordan Ramsey is a brand, just like these fake authors. The difference is we know Ramsey’s Restaurant is a brand, readers haven’t a clue who’s real and who is not.

If you’re a writer reading this, and this blog angers you, makes you defensive, or you think I’m writing about you …then perhaps it might be time to reflect. Just sayin’

Never getting credit for creating a best seller you wrote is just as bad as getting credit for writing something you didn’t write.

If your name is on a book you did not write, then in my opinion you’re creating a brand, not a legacy that many of us truly leave behind on the pages of a book.

Milli Vanilli. People were angry, music lovers canceled them because of the deception, readers should be just as angry at these book mills and fake authors.

I was in a band and we had this guy who wanted badly to be a guitar player. He got up there every gig, strummed away, but was never plugged in. Being on stage made him no more a musician than putting your name on a cover makes you an author.

Am I jealous? No, I have my place in this genre and am very content, but there are passionate writers vying for a spot they deserve and will never get because it’s crowded with fake names and wannabe writers all out for the buck.

Am I upset? Sure, I write everything I put my name on. Hundreds of books. Every part of my being goes into my stories. They may not be great, but they’re mine. If my name is on it, I wrote it. There are a lot out there that can not say the same.

Some will call it great business and good for them. Others will call it deception.

Sadly, what can be done? Not much. We as real writers, just have to work harder. We’ll do what our phony counterparts can not do, and that is write books. The fakes will fade, hopefully, like Milli Vanilli, with a tarnished reputation to follow.