You have probably heard about writing scams and say, “I’d never do anything that stupid. How could someone think this wasn’t a scam?”

A writer gets a letter in the mail; send us your manuscript for and instant evaluation. Maybe they’re a new writer, maybe they’ve been writing for a while. But one thing is for certain, they all want to be published. And they want it badly.

So when they see a new agent or publisher in town, it’s like a sign. They don’t think first. They just assume they are dealing with legitimate agent or publisher. But there are no shortcuts to getting legitimately published and getting paid for your writing. You have to be careful at all times.

To keep from being cheated, you’d have to investigate all the prospective agents and publishers, check out their customers, go online to the watchdog sites and call the Better Business Bureaus and attorney generals in their home states. Even then, you could get taken. Makes you wonder if it is worth the risk?

But what can writers do to protect themselves from scams, both online and off? Here are some things that should make you want to do more research about an agent or publisher:

1. Requests for up-front fees. This means any money out of the writer’s pocket before a book is sold, whether it is for expenses or marketing fees. Agents make their money by selling your work to publishers. They shouldn’t need to ask you for money to do that. Remember; “Money flows to the writer, not away from them.”

2. Referrals to paid services, such as editing or book doctors. While recommending you have your work looked at by an editing service is fine, the agent or publisher shouldn’t tell you where to go. Some agents have a list of editing services they deal with, but if you chose to see someone else that shouldn’t have an effect on whether they represent you.

3. Recommendations to use the agent’s or publisher’s own editing services. Legitimate agents don’t do editing themselves. They are much too busy selling their client’s works to publishers to deal with a manuscript full of typos and grammar errors. It’s easier to pass on it than fix it.

4. Offer of a “co-publishing” contract. If you wrote the book and it’s good enough to publish, why should pay your publisher to publish it? A publisher makes their money from the sale of the book, not from the author.

5. Being asked to buy something. If a publisher expects you to buy copies of your book as a condition of publication that should raise a very big red flag. That’s what a vanity press does.

6. Offers of representation or publication that come after reading just a synopsis or a few chapters. Legit companies want to read the whole book, not just a few pages, before they make a decision. How else would they know if the book is as good all the way through as the first few chapters? Or if the book is even completed?

7. An agent who won’t reveal details of his/her track record of book sales, or claims his/her client list is confidential. If they say you can’t know who they represent, then they might have something to hide. Legitimate agents and publishers have their clients on their web pages for all to see.

8. Always have a lawyer look over a contract with an agent or publisher before signing it. It is money well spent to have a lawyer check it out first. Just make sure you pick a lawyer who is well versed in publishing contracts.

9. Avoid agents/publishers who come to you first. If you didn’t submit to them, then how do they know about you? Ask questions; find out why they are contacting you. Remember, mailing lists come from everywhere, even magazine subscriptions. Also, be suspicious of an agent or publisher who contacts you via e-mail only. Some of the more unscrupulous ones haunt the writer’s message boards looking for desperate writer who are willing to believe their lies.

In addition, if the agent or publisher claims to have represented a famous author, then check it out. That’s easy enough to do. Just go down to your local bookstore and pick up a copy of the novel in question. By looking at the copyright page, you’ll see who the publisher is. In some cases, the agent’s name is listed as well. Checking out a writer’s web site will also give you their agent and publisher’s names.

Most importantly don’t let your desire to be published overcome your good sense. Join a local or national writer’s organization and see if they have a list of known writing scams. Get involved with an online writing newsgroup, forum or message board; if you have a question about an agent or publisher, you may get answers there. Be aware and you won’t get taken.

Remember the old adage; if it sounds too good to be true, it is!

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The wearily handsome, nervous, stubble-chinned man slowly and carefully got out of bed when he heard the soft, mysterious sound of footsteps in his apartment.

OR

The ex-con bolted up, rubbed his eyes and then the stubble on his chin, and crept out of bed. Those footsteps didn’t belong in his apartment.

Look at the above sentences, and see if you can figure out why the second example is better written than the first. If you still don’t know, look above that. At the risk of stating the obvious: nouns and verbs are the backbone of any sentence, and thus of all writing. I could have made my title really long and added “… and Adjectives and Adverbs Are Your Enemies,” but as you may have figured out, I like to keep it short.

It’s not only about eliminating adjectives and adverbs so that your writing contains few words that aren’t nouns and verbs. After all, if we did that to the first example, we’d be left with:

The man got out of bed when he heard the sound of footsteps in his apartment.

Not very exciting, is it? That’s why it’s important to focus your writing not only on nouns and verbs, but on interesting nouns and verbs. I began my second example with “The ex-con,” but of course, I’m inventing a sentence that has no manuscript surrounding it — no context. If we’ve already met the character, use his name or a more descriptive noun such as mine. If you’re introducing a new character, use the best noun possible. “The businessman” would evoke a completely different image in your readers’ minds, and it would be a stronger image than “The blond, well-groomed, middle-aged man.”

Why is one noun stronger than three adjectives (and one verb stronger than three adverbs)? Sure, we can picture a guy who’s blond, well-groomed, and middle-aged, and we might guess from that description that he’s a businessman. We can picture a “wearily handsome, nervous, stubble-chinned man” and perhaps guess that he’s an ex-con. But using the noun rather than a string of adjectives accomplishes two important things: First, it adds action to the character’s description. “Ex-con” not only calls forth a set of physical attributes, but also, by definition, tells you something about the guy’s life outside of this moment: he’s trying to recover from his time in the slammer and go straight. A “businessman” probably looks a certain way, and presumably spends his days doing business.

Then again, maybe the guy isn’t trying to go straight. Maybe he wants to return to a life of crime. Which brings me to the second advantage: involving the reader’s mind in the storytelling. If you string together a list of adjectives, you’re feeding a character to your readers without allowing them to draw their own pictures. Part of the fun — and the fascination — of fiction is the fact that everyone who turns the final page of a book has read a different one. And the more you allow people to be cocreators of your characters, your settings, etc., the more enveloped in your novel’s fictional world they will become.

Or in your nonfiction book’s world — nonfiction writers must leave less to the reader’s imagination, but editing using this principle will make nonfiction stronger as well. As with any other tips, customize it to your writing. It’s also, as I mentioned, about brevity. I don’t need to explain why “crept out of bed” beats “slowly and carefully got out of bed.”

Of course, adjectives and adverbs have their places. Otherwise languages wouldn’t contain so many. You might even find a few in this article (only a few). Again, customize this editing technique to your writing. Read a few pages and see if you find yourself using dull nouns such as “man” or “thing” a lot — chances are they’re surrounded by adjectives. If not, the potential book sitting in front of you may be dull indeed. Don’t go crazy with your thesaurus looking for obscure nouns to replace “man,” but do use this technique as a way to vary word choice. And, if you don’t have a thesaurus, for god’s sake, get one. The thesaurus in Microsoft Word, or anywhere online, won’t hold a candle to the old-fashioned bound kind.

Replace adjectives with more interesting, descriptive nouns, and watch your writing become streamlined, subtly evocative, laced with intrigue, varied in word choice… Oops, those are all adjective phrases. Just think of this noun: “bestseller.”

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