Scambuster Recognized for Good Works and The Email No Writer Wants to Ever Receive

Victoria Strauss wins SFWA service award for her work with Writer’s Beware. Writer’s Beware is a scam busting website dedicated to helping writers avoid the many literary frauds swirling about the industry just waiting to suck in unwary writers. Strauss, with fellow scambuster AC Crispin, have been putting down literary scams for the past ten years.

Says Strauss about the award:

“I’m thrilled and honored to receive this wonderful award (though by rights it belongs equally to Ann Crispin, Writer Beware co-founder and co-conspirator, without whom Writer Beware wouldn’t exist–or be nearly so much fun). Ten years ago, when WB was just getting started, I could never have imagined how much we would accomplish and how far we’d come,” Strauss said. “Beginning as a two-person committee and a modest subsection of the SFWA website, we’re now a major Internet resource that has warned thousands of writers about schemes and scams, and has helped to put literary scammers out of business and into jail.

“I’m deeply grateful to SFWA for its unflagging support, and for its commitment to the importance of educating writers about the scams, schemes, and pitfalls that make the publishing world a dangerous place,” she said. “Thank you, and here’s to ten more years (at least) of scam-busting!” (link)

Read more over at her blog or read the press release for yourself.

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A few days ago, Tess Gerritsen blogged about an email she received from a reader expressing disappointment at the fact that she does not write medial thrillers any more. Essentially, the reader enjoyed her books in that genre and decided to stop buying her books because she was now writing crime drama.

While the email is painful to read, it does raise an interesting question. How do we balance our artistic aspirations with reader expectations? And should we even try? While some writers, such as John Grisham, find that writing on the same subject over and over again works for them, other writers, such as myself, are like drunken prom dates and flirt shamelessly with any genre that catches our eye.

Ms. Gerritsen explains that she had become bored with the medical melodrama plots and wished to move onto something else more interesting. She also offered up the ever practical business reason that the genre has finally lost its steam causing her book sales to stall. While it is certainly a romantic thought that writers should write what is in our hearts, the reality is that if we want to sell books so we can have something more interesting than macaroni and cheese to eat, we need to remain cognizant of what is selling and sometimes reinvent our writing as necessary.

While I have a great respect for readers, I think our only obligation as writers is to tell a good story to the best of our ability. Ultimately, we have to remain true to ourselves as well as our business goals. It is unfortunate that our evolution as artists sometimes cost us readers but at the end of the day we have to live with ourselves and we should strive to be happy with the face that looks back at us from the mirror.

What do you think? Have you ever stopped reading a writer because they switched gears and began writing something different that what you were used to?

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Borders pick the 2008 Original Voices Award winners.

According to the press release:

[…] Original Voices Awards recognize fresh, compelling and ambitious written works from new and emerging talents of 2008 in the categories of fiction, non-fiction, young adult/independent reader and children’s picture books.

This years winners include The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway, The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World by Eric Weiner, I am Apache by Tanya Landman and Those Darn Squirrels by Adam Rubin and Daniel Salmieri.

The winners were selected by a group of Borders employees in December via an online voting process. Each winner received $5000 will be featured in the company’s brick and mortar stores nationwide.