Avoidance

I've been avoiding blogging because there really hasn't been much for me to say. We're under a near Earth-wide quarantine and everywhere we turn the only thing being covered right now it seems is COVID-19 and I didn't want to write about that. I haven't wanted to. I wanted this blog to be COVID free. But I can't avoid writing about it, because it is affecting us all.

So with that said, let's move on to something else, shall we?

Today I got called by a "publishing company" (will explain these figurative finger quotes in a minute) called iUniverse. I was excited until they started asking for details about my manuscript. At first the questions seemed mundane: "How long is your book?" and "Have you ever been published before?" And then they started getting into what I call "the creep factor" asking me whether I use a computer, and what program I use, and if my files have been synced to say a cloud drive.

NO GENUINE PUBLISHING COMPANY WILL EVER ASK YOU THESE QUESTIONS! 

Making this entire situation even creepier, they asked what email address do I prefer to use. They quickly added that they needed this latter-most information to contact me, but I'm sorry when someone's prefacing such a question with inquiries into my cloud drive--yeah, no, that's when I slammed down the "we're done" card face up. 

Which is to say, writers I encourage you to always be cautious about giving away your book's information because believe me, the wrong company will look for ways to not only profit off it but make it theirs and leave you the heck out of it. And I have no doubt that's what they were doing; looking for ways to hack into my computer and steel my files to make their own.

Not to mention before they got into the creep-factor, they were already using red-flag-phrases such as, "we're the only professionals who can help market your material" and "we're the only ones who know how to sell your book".

The second they started talking--and using broken English no less--I typed in the words "iUniverse Scam" into Google, and oh did the search results come out fast! The top result, was this:

iUniverse is ALL about making money on selling services and copies of your book to you. They don't give a FLIP about doing any promo for their authors. Even if you do generate some book sales, your royalty fee is SO LOW, you'll never recoup your initial investment. Stay AWAY from these scammers!May 5, 2009

iUniverse Review | Self-Publishing Review

www.selfpublishingreview.com › 2009/05 › iuniverse-review

So with all that said, avoid iUniverse! I will gladly even provide their number so you can blacklist it so they never ever call you. To be honest, I'm not even sure how they got my number to begin with. But they'll never be contacting me again. Not only do they have an old no-longer-in-use email of mine that I couldn't recover even if I wanted to, I gladly blocked their number from my phone too. 

And that's my story on avoidance for today. You're welcome 😂