You’ve just received a very exciting approach from a publishing company who claim to love your self-published book. Could your dreams of fame and fortune be about to come true?

Unfortunately, almost certainly not.

We set up Self Publishing Australia largely to protect writers in Australia from getting stung by publishing scams. There’s a wide variety, from people selling “national radio interviews” to “representing your book for movie deals”.

The harsh fact is that an unsolicited email – unless your book is already selling tens of thousands of copies (like 50 Shades) – is a scam. It’s not how publishers work.

So if an out-of-the-blue offer seems very exciting – too good to be true – that’s because it’s not true.

Some of the clues to look out for are:

1. Google the company’s name – you’ll almost certainly find it popping up on known scam lists, such as this one by Writer Beware
2. Generic text – an opening paragraph that does not actually mention your book, genre or why the sender thought it was so great, but could essentially have been sent to anyone (because it has)
3. US/non-Australian companies – traditional publishing is very local. If you’re in Australia, and particularly if you’re writing a book set in Australia, then you are not going to get approached by a US publisher
4. Any requests for payment or suggestions of payment – a genuine publisher approaching you will never ask for payment. Those that do are vanity publishers or “hybrid publishers” (which are essentially vanity publishers under a new name). Some of these “small presses” may mean well, but they are rarely if ever successful in terms of making you a commercial return on your book

One approach that may be valid, particularly if you’re writing Romance, is from various online novel sites such as Sofanovel or Webnovel. They will contact you through social media or email and sometimes offer a few hundred dollars for “non-exclusive rights” to put your book on their platform. Some of them also offer royalties or ad-share payments (though you may never see these). But we know authors who have been paid around USD200 by some of these platforms as a one-off fee.

However, it is absolutely critical that you go through any contract clause by clause – we’ve seen the term “non-exclusive” in a draft contract altered to “exclusive” in the final contract. The site claimed an “error” and fixed it, but it seems a rather suspicious error to make.