James Frey & the Young Adult Fiction Factory

Want to get into YA writing? More importantly, do you want to write things that are meaningful for you & possibly the reader? Well, then don't sign up with James Frey or his company Full Fathom Five.

Everyone's heard of James Frey via his now infamous "biography" that never happened. Now Frey is back in the media & just like last time it's not for anything good. Recently Frey has come under fire for hiring hopeful authors in search of a break, then giving them one of the worst gigs ever.

In what is quite possibly his sleaziest move yet, Frey hires these authors (most of whom might be unaware of what they're getting themselves into), pays them a pittance to churn out books- books they don't even have any rights to. I'm not talking about some newbie coming on to help write the new Fear Street book or something along these lines. Nope, this is about some newbie coming on & writing their own original stories & characters, then losing all right to said stories & characters because under the agreement it belongs to James Frey's company.

I'm going to quote NY Magazine on this:

"Veteran publishing attorney Conrad Rippy said he had never seen anything like it:

It’s an agreement that says, “You’re going to write for me. I’m going to own it. I may or may not give you credit. If there is more than one book in the series, you are on the hook to write those too, for the exact same terms, but I don’t have to use you. In exchange for this, I’m going to pay you 40 percent of some amount you can’t verify — there’s no audit provision — and after the deduction of a whole bunch of expenses.”"

I can only hope that no new authors sign onto this company.

The Alphascript books & Wikipedia Scam

Who doesn't like Wikipedia? Sure, sometimes you'll get people who update it with incorrect information on accident or on purpose, but generally it's a great place to go for some quick & easy information on just about any topic you'd like to know about. It's free, it's easy, & most importantly... it's free.

That's what makes the Alphascript books so horrible.

VDM Publishing is the force behind the Alphascript books, taking pages from Wikipedia & putting them into incredibly books that are not only poorly translated into book format but are also obscenely priced. Would you believe that the lowest price for one of these books is about $40? That's the lowest price, mind you. The average price is actually around $50-60, with some books ranging into the $100s. If they only charging $5-10 for the book then I probably wouldn't be as outraged, but with prices these high it's literally robbery.

All for a book that literally contains information you could grab for free off of Wikipedia. The company claims that they are able to sell these books because they're considered "free use" & that they are perfectly within their legal bounds to charge whatever they want.

Critics are already quick to point out that VDM doesn't label the books to reflect where they got the content from. Indeed, many of the amazon entries I looked at said nothing about them gaining all their info from Wikipedia. VDM's reply?

"It is pointed out in every Alphascript book that contents are Wikipedia articles. Do we now have to write in Amazon-books: “Attention! Books contains Wikipedia!”? Then other publishing houses would have to point out in their books: “Attention! Book contains nonsense!”, or: “Attention! Book has only sex-scenario!”

That's all fine & well, but if you only put it inside of the book or in a place where people can't see it until their purchase arrives & not on the amazon description spot or in the title itself, isn't that fraud in some way?

To some degree a bit of "Caveat Emptor" should be applicable, but in this case I can't help but think that the unaware consumer needs to be protected.