There's professional, and there's ... by Debbie Bennett

I’m in quite a few writerly groups on Facebook, of varying degrees of ability and professionalism. Some – like Authors Electric’s own former blogger Wendy Jones – runs an excellent group Women Writers, Editors, Agents and Publishers. This is a highly-moderated pro group for women only and full of useful advice and networking; I highly recommend it to any women involved in the literary world. 

Other groups are less professional and often have little-to-zero moderation, resulting in a large number of members of dubious reputation or ability. Sadly, newer writers join – all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, full of enthusiasm to write their book and are often sucked into offline chats almost immediately:

• How do I start my book? Is this a good opening line? Should I do x or y? 
• Let’s chat about that. Kindly DM me. 

And you just know that the newbie is going to drown in shady promises of instant fame and fortune. These incredibly generous offers of help come from people who are allegedly expert writers, expert ghostwriters, expert editors, cover designers, beta-readers, promoters and marketers. All at the same time. Honestly, I wonder why they are lurking on social media at all – they are so multi-talented. Their profile pictures are generally either stolen images or AI-generated, their names will often be a bizarre combination of two Western names – John Bella, Amelia Karen, Bennett Susan – and their profile headers will often have misspellings and bad punctuation.

Another common question asked is why they’ve found their book on such-and-such a site. Or why someone else is selling their book on Amazon. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that a physical book can be resold – that the paperbacks they buy in charity shops or at car boot sales don’t earn any more money for the author, and therefore anyone is entitled to sell their book second-hand anywhere they like. 

But it’s not second-hand, it’s new? Well lots of online book retailers, don’t actually have any books. Strange, I know, but if somebody buys your book from BooksRUs online, then BooksRUs will order it from you and ship it direct to their customer. If BooksRUs is selling your book for twice your price (and somebody is silly enough to pay the extra), you get paid your price and they pocket the extra. That’s the sales business. 

Ebooks on other sites? One I’ve seen a couple of times recently is an author complaining their ebook is being sold on a subscription site called Everand. Send a Takedown Notice, people cry. It’s piracy! You don’t know anything about that site! But do some research, please. Everand is a perfectly legitimate ebook site; it was formerly known as Scribd and books can be loaded there from various ebook aggregators. My books appear there via Draft 2 Digital (or it may have been Smashwords, but D2D and SW are merging). D2D distributes ebooks to a multitude of sites and if the author doesn’t bother to check or read the small print and/or opt out, their books will be in lots of places. My books go to Kobo – and Kobo itself distributes onto another level of sites such as WH Smith in the UK and other smaller ebook retailers worldwide. And that’s a good thing. More sales! 

Check all these things, obviously - if you aren't sure about a site your work appears on. But knee-jerk reactions, trying to get books removed from legitimate sites just makes you look unprofessional and frankly rather silly.

www.debbiebennett.co.uk