You know that you need a literary agent to gain access to the halls of publishing. Did you know that your agent is good for a hand-out as well?
Faye Bender, the sucker who fell for Margaret Seltzer's literary scam, apparently is a soft touch. The woman's a talented agent and she's been in the trenches for a time, but anything outside of literary pursuits is a new world. The agent got her cut of the royalties, and then turned around and gave some of it back to Ms. Seltzer, and it was all another scam.
As part of her elaborate scheme, Margaret Seltzer not only passed a novel off as a memoir, she also claimed to have established a charitable foundation that was meant to help the poor and underprivileged that she wrote of. Poor Ms. Seltzer was poor indeed and couldn't afford to pay for server space. In steps her agent, Faye Bender, with wallet wide open.
The site promoted Ms. Seltzer's book, but as it turns out, there was actually no charitable foundation in existence. What Ms. Bender did was to pay for some of her client's publicity.
And what of the other organizations that were listed on the website? Strange how it turned out that no one involved in those charitable groups had ever heard of Ms. Seltzer or her foundation.
Trying to land an agent? Close out your query letter with a promise not to come begging. The commission that they earn will be theirs to keep in its entirety, and you'll cover the cost of your own webspace.
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