scammer agents
May. 24th, 2006 01:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
julesjonesI am annoyed, as are quite a number of writers today. Why are we annoyed? Because...
A group of sf folk do a sterling job in keeping track of scam literary agents and publishers, those people who through incompetence or active malice prey on the hopes of writers who don't know that you do not pay to be published. Writer Beware recently released a list of the Twenty Worst Agents. This stuff is all documented--they have bulging files of verified complaints against these agents. The list promptly propagated around writerly corners of the net, to the horror and outrage of one of the agents listed. Barbara Bauer is not happy because if a potential victim has the nous to Google on her name, they will discover that a lot of her former clients are not happy with her. She has been pursuing those who have posted this list, including trying to get Tor editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden fired by phoning a senior executive at Tor's parent company and claiming that TNH had libelled her on a Tor company website.
Barbara Bauer's latest action in trying to squash any discussion of her business practices is to make a threatening phone call to the webhost of popular writers' forum Absolute Write. The webhost owner panicked and pulled the plug, not just kicking the site off but denying the site owners access to their own database. As of early this afternoon it does look as if the forum archives can be saved, but for a few hours there it looked as if a major resource had been destroyed. Full report of Barbara Bauer's latest intimidation tactics can be found at Making Light.
ETA: There is now a Technorati tag for bloggers to use to tag posts relating to this, the better that Technorati may catalogue them:
http://technorati.com/tag/BarbaraBauer
used like so:
Barbara Bauer
A group of sf folk do a sterling job in keeping track of scam literary agents and publishers, those people who through incompetence or active malice prey on the hopes of writers who don't know that you do not pay to be published. Writer Beware recently released a list of the Twenty Worst Agents. This stuff is all documented--they have bulging files of verified complaints against these agents. The list promptly propagated around writerly corners of the net, to the horror and outrage of one of the agents listed. Barbara Bauer is not happy because if a potential victim has the nous to Google on her name, they will discover that a lot of her former clients are not happy with her. She has been pursuing those who have posted this list, including trying to get Tor editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden fired by phoning a senior executive at Tor's parent company and claiming that TNH had libelled her on a Tor company website.
Barbara Bauer's latest action in trying to squash any discussion of her business practices is to make a threatening phone call to the webhost of popular writers' forum Absolute Write. The webhost owner panicked and pulled the plug, not just kicking the site off but denying the site owners access to their own database. As of early this afternoon it does look as if the forum archives can be saved, but for a few hours there it looked as if a major resource had been destroyed. Full report of Barbara Bauer's latest intimidation tactics can be found at Making Light.
ETA: There is now a Technorati tag for bloggers to use to tag posts relating to this, the better that Technorati may catalogue them:
http://technorati.com/tag/BarbaraBauer
used like so:
Barbara Bauer
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-24 02:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-24 05:41 pm (UTC)