Maps and miscellanies
A couple of days ago, I came across Frappr while doing some web browsing and decided to join up myself 🙂 So I created a group for this site and put up up a map on the sidebar. Of course, it doesn’t seem to work too well since I can’t get the world beyond America to show up! Maybe there is no world beyond America? :p I honestly have no idea what is going on with Frappr but then again, my Net connection has been rather slow lately and so the map not showing correctly might be just a symptom of this overall issue.
Moving on, I constantly run into an interesting phenomena – the paranoia of authors 🙂 Now, given how many scammers seem to be out there and the variety of ingenious ways they seem to find to part poor, naive would-be authors from their money, you can’t really blame the authors for being imbued with a healthy sense of suspicion. But on the other hand, there can be such a thing as too much of anything 🙂
The problem is when instead of being simply wary, people start going down the "guilty until proven innocent" track. There is at least one writers’ forum that I’m part of where a publisher only has to come in and post that they are looking for submissions before the inquisition starts (and it’s not Spanish :p) You’d get a bunch of posts about how the said publisher does not have any sales or that they haven’t published anything recently or what not. Again, I can understand caution but every business has to start somewhere, right? A start up business is not going to have any publications to its credit. Does that automatically make it suspect? I for one, do not think so.
However, this is not to say that you should not proceed with caution in any dealings. Of course, this doesn’t apply just to writers but if you’re a writer, I guess you should be especially careful. If it seems too good to be true, it usually is :p If they start asking you for money, do some checking – no matter how trivial the amount or how reasonable the request. But, do not go around in fear all your life and do not stop submitting just because there are a lot of crooks out there 🙂