Scribe Book Company / The Literati Agency (Ang DePriest)

And for the record, every one of P&E's criteria has evolved out of a need to specifically identify business practices that do not have a writer's best interests at heart. We fully understand and expect businesses to make a profit by selling work from writers either to publishers or to retailers, but writers should benefit as well.

Adepriest said:

We will not reveal this information HERE in THIS FORUM to YOU.

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Name them. Here. To me. Title, author, publisher, date.

There is no possible reason why you should not do so. None. Not for an honest person. Not for a real agent.

James D. McDonald, Fibbing means lying. This is the second time you haven't been CLEAR about what you're really saying. I have a feeling you'd end up in our low 98.2%. In fact, you should send along your little book query to us (under a fake name, of course) and just see where you fall in the math. I think you're overcompensating for something.

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Then let me be totally, totally clear about something, Angela. I believe you are LYING about your sales. I believe that you have MADE NO SALES AT ALL. When you say you have made six sales YOU ARE LYING.

Is that clear enough for you?

For the record, I also believe that your story about "interns" posting here in your defense is a LIE. I believe that brianswinters76 was Dan and SeeJaneWrite was you, Angela, personally. Is that totally clear to you? Do I need to spell this out further or do you understand now what I'm "really saying"?

In my opinion you, Angela, are a LIAR.

In addition to being an ineffective agent, of course.

Don't feel as an agent that you should keep sales a secret, it really isn't necessary. I'm not sure who gave you that information, but it was wrong and as you can see here sparks intense feelings of mistrust. As evidence I would like to link you to my agent's website, where they have a nice list of authors, and if you click on each author's name you will see the books they have sold for them. If you work your way through the "news" section, you will even see mention of how much some of the deals went for: www.darleyanderson.com

Adepriest said:

hmmm. I'm not sure exactly what you're saying here, Jim. Could you be a little more clear? Stop beating around the bush!

Frankly, I find your manner to be downright sexy.

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Y'know, when I google Literati Agency, this thread now comes up before your website. You might want to have a think about how, as a professional who represents authors, you are portraying yourself.

Now, as you said you genuinely wanted to distinguish yourself as an agent from ineffective and scam agents, and wanted to know how to do this, you can list your sales.

Adepriest - if you're disinclined to respond to either, James, Dave or Scott - are you prepared to respond to any of the points raised in my post?

MM

(ooh and me, I like to be responded to too!)

Adepriest said:

I don't understand!!! I wrote a big LONG response to each of your questions and hit the post button, but it's not here! ohmygod, if i have to retype all that...

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I suspect you hit Preview, rather than post. We've all done that.

It might be easier, instead of writing really long posts, to reply to each individual post you wish to respond to, in a short post. It makes the context much clearer, and you might find it easier.

James D. Macdonald said:

For the record, I also believe that your story about "interns" posting here in your defense is a LIE. I believe that brianswinters76 was Dan and SeeJaneWrite was you, Angela, personally. Is that totally clear to you? Do I need to spell this out further or do you understand now what I'm "really saying"?

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Oh, right. I forgot about that. Let me add that to my list:

8. Using Sockpuppets to defend your company.

I can't show the links because they've been deleted, but whether they were yourselves (Dan and Angela) or really interns, sockpuppetry reflects badly on the Literati Agency.

I also got a PM from Angela, in which she offered to give me the information on her sales and put me in contact with her clients to hear their views, but on the condition that I not share it with the board. I told her that since I was not making my own agent search yet, I didn't want to waste her clients' time.

Angela, the people here are not interested in hurting your clients or making fun of them in some way. The purpose of this portion of AW is for writers to share information so that they can know in advance which agents it will be worthwhile for them to submit to. I can't speak for anyone else, but when I start shopping my book around, I have no intention of submitting first and verifying the agent's professionalism later. Agents with no verifiable sales will be crossed off my list first thing. If, as you say, you don't need more business, then this won't bother you. But then you can't ask to be taken as seriously as an agent with a proven track record.

Adepriest said:

oh CRAP!!! How do you guys DO this without wanting to just slit your wrists???? I spent so much time on that response! And they were in blurbs right after every question...and now it's just gone. i've looked everywhere. ARGH!!!!

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What I try to do with long post is just before I submit, I select (highlight) the entire thing and then use Ctrl-C to copy it to the clipboard. Then if something funny happens I can simply paste it back in.

Adepriest said:

Can we post PICTURES on this site? Because Brian and Bry are standing here laughing and want me to take a picture of them with sock puppets on their hands to post. Tell you what, I'm going to take a picture of them and put it on our Literati site this afternoon. You can go there and see my naughty little interns. But then you'll probably think I just pulled strangers off the street and made them pose. Ah well. Interesting term, sockpuppets. I'd never heard it until yesterday. Very clever. I admit I am guilty of that. Once I posed as someone else when I worked at Nelson and we were going to do a book on dating and they needed someone to go onto Match.com and try and get dates. Long story, not very funny. But anyway, I was a sockpuppet for a day and didn't even know it.

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Well I'm glad that both you and they are amused by behavior that has made the Literati Agency look unprofessional if not an outright scam. Yes, very amusing.

Roger J Carlson said:

Well I'm glad that both you and they are amused by behavior that has made your company look unprofessional if not an outright scam. Yes, very amusing.

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We're not amused by our appearance of unprofessionalism. I've posted a notice in the kitchen that the floggings will begin promptly at noon today. Don't worry, we'll beat them into respectful submission.




In all seriousness, I think we're about done here. I intend to come back and answer Mori's questions. They were good ones and I have answers, so I'll come back and do that. But not until this weekend probably as I HAVE to get some work done.

And I'll come back and tell you who my authors are (you already know the publishers) if they tell me it's okay to do so. But this is taking so much of my time, and it's been a very interesting experience but I really can't dedicate any more time to it. Thanks everyone who offered helpful advice to me. We appreciate it and aren't offended in the least by the notion that we're in the dark about a lot of things. We admit it! And we'll try to get with the program so people don't just assume the worst about us. Ang

98.2+2.8=101.0

I see this as an honest math mistake, and can even see how it was made.

Adepriest said:

And I'll come back and tell you who my authors are (you already know the publishers) if they tell me it's okay to do so.

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All we have is a list of publishers. We don't know what books were placed with them. I could list publishers I'd been in contact with. It would be meaningless, of course, because there's no context. Naming the books and the authors is the context needed.

That's it. That's all.

Angela may want us to believe that she is "having fun" and "jousting," but, I assure you, I am not.

You stop thinking that someone who dresses up as a scammer is cute and funny the first time you see a writer bet his house on a scam agent's lies--and lose his house.

[UPDATED TO ADD] Here's another question that Angela can refuse to answer when she returns this weekend in order to flounce:

You went on and on (and on and on...) about your Scribe Book Company. When a ministry or organization publishes a book through Scribe who owns the ISBN?

I always get a kick out of people going back and deleting all their posts. I think its the surest way to tell when someone was blowing smoke up a certain body part.

Also, does she really think we are going to believe that an agent who is "in the dark about a lot of things" has interns? Well, on second thought, maybe so. The biggest quality for a scam-artist: Charisma.

(PS This is Havlen on my wife's account. My video card decided to blow up a few days ago. I'm pretty sure it was that Libros thread that pushed it over the edge.)

magnolia42 - I think that the Libros thread pushed a lot of things over the edge. Although I do miss my daily dose ...

magnolia42 said:

I always get a kick out of people going back and deleting all their posts. I think its the surest way to tell when someone was blowing smoke up a certain body part.

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It is a shame that Angela DePriest won't stand behind her words on behalf of the Literati Agency.

Roger J Carlson said:

It is a shame that Angela DePriest won't stand behind her words on behalf of the Literati Agency.

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Don't worry, Roger. I thought she might, so I saved them all. Including the sockpuppet posts.

I'm not surprised the Libros thread blew up your video card, there was a lot of action happening in that thread. Hope you can find a decent replacement soon.

James D. Macdonald said:

Don't worry, Roger. I thought she might, so I saved them all. Including the sockpuppet posts.

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Oh good.

Is there something going on with moon phases? This is the second time in a week that we've had sockpuppets, evasions, a meltdown, and then the rapid deletion of posts.

Well, she may have deleted posts, but Google knows they were there and this thread is still ranked higher than her website.

Regards,
Scott

Gosh. Sleep till 11:30 am, decide to have a lazy, Internet-free afternoon, and look what you miss. (I have a good excuse for my malingering. I was up all night coughing.)

- Victoria

I should have looked up Scribe before. A vanity press that targets ministries:

http://www.scribe.moonfruit.com/

I don't have a problem with the Scribe side of things. I can see tons of reasons why religious groups might need a publishing service. It's a perfectly valid business model. If I ran a religious group I might use them.

As to the Literati side, waiting until an offer has been made is too late to tell me who they've dealt with. So, as I said, I've crossed them off my list.

Dave.C.Robinson said:

I don't have a problem with the Scribe side of things. I can see tons of reasons why religious groups might need a publishing service. It's a perfectly valid business model. If I ran a religious group I might use them.

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I don't have a problem with vanity presses either, if they are up front and honest about what they are. I just hadn't realised what Scribe was.