I was shown a link today for the blog of a budding writer.  She wrote about her road to publication and, to sum it up, how even though the road had been filled with rejection she ended up getting an agent and a book deal all in one day after self-publishing an ebook recently.  There were a couple of things in her story that seemed a bit strange to me – mainly the fact that the agent who contacted her then proceeded to sell her book to a publisher within a few hours and without a contract ever being signed between the agent and the writer.  I assumed she left that part out for legal reasons.

However, it turns out that my assumption was wrong.  She has just made a new post to say how the whole thing was a scam.  Not from her, but that she was scammed by someone pretending to be the agent in question.  She only found out when she called the agency to discuss some things and they let her know that they had recently been hacked and that they had no knowledge of her or her supposed contract.  I’m not going to link to her blog here because I’m not certain if she really was scammed, or if it was a publicity stunt to get more viewers to her blog with key phrases on the original post like “how I got published in one day!”.

If it really did happen then I feel for the girl, that must be a horrible thing to feel so elated and then so crushed in such a short amount of time.  But it’s a good lesson to everyone out there, to make sure that you are 100% certain of who you’re dealing with.

My writing isn’t at the query stage yet so I won’t be approaching agents for at least the next few months.  It’s a scary thing though, that there may be people who are doing these kinds of scams.