A Scam Isn't Always a Scam

 The day after New Year's I got a message on my author page that seemed pretty innocuous, asking about how I came up with Chance of a Lifetime.  Silly me actually thought this was a real reader asking about the story and so I answered it like a reader question.

Then I get back this message:

Thanks for your sharing, Actually I am an editor from other site. May I speak with you as a representative of another site? I believe you are the writer we are looking for. If you are interested, I would like to introduce some opportunities, which may bring financial support to you.

When I said "ok" they continued:

Great! here is a brief introduction to Ringdom: We are a new subsidiary platform of STARY, while our sister-platform, Dreame, has been a great success in distributing Romance (Ranks top 3 as a reading app in most countries), we focus on presenting more Genre Fiction that is adventurous, high-concept and fast-paced. By joining us, apart from advance/contracted work award (depends on the situation) and royalty, you would enjoy a targeted readership as well as a better promotion opportunity. You may visit www.ringdomstory.com or check on our app on Google Play. 

I went to their site and I thought at first it was like this Public Bookshelf thing I loaded the Children of Eternity series to back in 2008:  you sell them the book for $50 and they put it on their page and people read it.  That was before Amazon Kindle so it seemed like a way to make something off stories that otherwise weren't likely to do anything.

So I ask if that's the deal and then this person goes into this whole thing about royalties and exclusive or non-exclusive and blah blah blah:

I would like to introduce you our business mode:

Our marketing strategy is to concentrate on digital sale first. Bestsellers will have the opportunity to be published in hardcover or to be adapted. 

On Ringdom's portal, a contracted new arrival would be promoted by the operation team while being free for reading. Until it has gained 200 followers, it will be selected into Pay-to-read Program*. It is possible that we will put a book into Pay-to-read Program earlier than that when we find another right time to do it.

*Apart from discount and some free samples, a reader would pay $1 to read about 10,000 words of premium content. As we are willing to offer you an 8% royalty, you would get $0.08 from a reader's $1 payment. （our cost is above 80%）

Nevertheless, an exclusive agreement will require the corresponding work to take its Licensee as sole publishing access. If you are not expecting an exclusive agreement for your book, you might want to try a non-exclusive contract with us. However, while you may freely feature the work through your own channels, the royalty will decrease to 6% and less promotion accesses will be given.

My takeaway is that you get either a 6% or 8% royalty on books you sell to them.  Which is chump change, emphasis on the CHUMP.  For 10,000 words you would get a whopping 8 cents.  Do the math on how much that is per word.  In the old days I think a lot of the magazines or pulps would give you a penny a word, which would be a lot better.  To make a dollar I'd need 13 people to buy it.  To make $10 I'd need 130 people to buy it.  To make $100 I'd need 1300 people to buy it!  And so on.  Whereas for Amazon I get 35 cents to $2 per person who buys it depending on how much I charge.

As I told this person, I make 70% on Amazon and it's Amazon, so people have heard of it.  I've never heard of "Ringdom" before now.  I guess that was enough to take the wind out of his/her sails:

Yeah, it’s better,  anyway, it’s good to talk with you, thanks for your reply.

Since this is a reading app, it made me think of Wattpad, that site/app that's mostly for short stories/flash fiction.  I hadn't actually been there in years, but when I did log in, I saw this message in my mail from last November:

Hello PatrickDilloway,

My name is Anna. I'm an Author Liaison representative, representing W e b n o v e l. 

I've read the initial chapters and I feel that your novel showcases your capabilities as a writer thus, I would like to invite you to publish on our platform W e b n o v e l. You may find our App on Appstore or Google Play, which has over tens of millions installations. 

We would like to offer a non-exclusive contract for your novels currently on the site, this way, you can keep the novel on the site but at the same time also help you tap on the large reader base of on our platform with over 60 million unique user views, making it a win-win situation. 

Please feel free to reach out to me with regards to this, we want to understand your needs first and foremost as an author to help you reach the target market you want to hit. 

If you want to reach out personally, You can contact me at：

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WebnovelEditors

Facebook Messenger: WebnovelEditors (There should be a space between two words)

Instagram: WebnovelEditors (There should be a space between two words)

Discord: Anna#5681

Email: editorwn.anna@gmail.com

(Checking my Eric Filler Gmail account recently, I got pretty much the same message only for Eric Filler and referencing my old sci-fi story Waking Prometheus.  It used a different editor name, though it was pretty much the same text.  That was about two months ago or a month after the Wattpad one.)

I go to their Facebook page and of course there's hundreds of other people who got the same message, only with a different name of the "editor."  On the surface it seems like pretty much the same deal as that "Ringdom" site.  There's no mention of royalties in this email but I bet if I had followed it up, it would be as meager--if not more so--than Ringdom.  I did go to their website and look up the page for authors.  Other than a stipend of $200 a month if you publish at least 1500 words a day (every day, no exceptions, which is basically NanoWriMo every month) there didn't seem to be anything specific on there.  Maybe I should do an undercover expose, though that's really more Writer Beware's forte.  And they do mention Webnovel and Ringdom's parents STARY & Dreame in this blog entry from October, so I guess it just took a couple of months to get to me.  There's also a 2018 blog entry from another site about this sort of thing.  

Like me, what they seem to say is it's not really an out-an-out scam.  It's more just taking advantage of gullible people.  Like a lot of other things the hook is more exposure than any serious money.  It probably works a lot better on Wattpad where you have a lot more newbs.  Maybe the Ringdom person thought that since Chance of a Lifetime was published back in 2013 I didn't really have anything else going on and thus would be more susceptible to this pitch.  But the Eric Filler stuff I do is probably going to make a lot more at the 70% I get from Amazon (and however the KDP Select thing works) than I'd get at 6-8% from some site I've never heard of.

The $200/month thing on Webnovel it's harder to do the math on.  I'm not sure that an Eric Filler book would make that much in a month.  But the good thing is that I can be flexible and release 2-3 books that aren't 45-50,000 words and that altogether might be $200/month.  And I set the pace, so I can do 5,000 words one day and 0 words another day.  Though a lot of the sales I get are still on the backlist, all that old stuff still on Amazon.  But it's probably a moot point since to get that $200/month you have to jump through a bunch of hoops and what are the odds they'll actually pay up?

Whether these are really scams or not, I think the best approach is to be skeptical and assume that when it comes to writing, no one legit is ever going to approach you out of the blue.  Especially in both of these instances it was pretty obvious they were just cutting and pasting, changing a name or title here or there to shotgun these messages out to hundreds or thousands of users.  That's how junk mail works, not legitimate businesses.

Anyway, if you get something like this, be wary.