Two Posts Together: A Scam?

POST ONE:

First-Time Writer Winner (And Loser!)

First time author, 93, saves friends from care homes with book advance

Lorna Page has bought a five bedroom house for £310,000 after securing a significant advance for her thriller.

Now she plans to move in a number of friends, but faces the dilemma of deciding which ones to accept, after receiving "dozens" of offers.

The independent nonagenarian widow said she simply wanted to help her friends enjoy the last few years of their lives in a sociable environment.

She has pledged to use all of her money from the proceeds of A Dangerous Weakness to assist her friends.

Mrs Page wrote the book in her one bedroom Surrey flat but has since swapped it for the spacious house in the pretty village of Weare Giffard, near her birthplace of Bideford, north Devon.

And get this:

Released by AuthorHouse publishers last month, A Dangerous Weakness follows a woman who becomes involved in a bitter power struggle after receiving an apparently innocent invitation by an old school friend to spend Christmas at her Swiss lodge.

Mrs Page wrote the book three years ago but made no attempt to get it published until her daughter-in-law found the manuscript and convinced her to send it to a publishing house.

She said: "I should have done it before but it got put away in a suitcase and forgotten about until my daughter-in-law found it and said it should be published."

Mrs Page said she had written throughout her life, but that A Dangerous Weakness was her first published novel.

"I've always written. I started as soon as I could hold a pencil - fairy stories, poetry, short stories, magazine articles. It seems I've been writing for a hundred years."

Emphasis added by me.

Sharp woman with a sharp wit too.

But really, what an enormous lost opportunity this is!

This is getting huge international play yet all I can think of are all the lost sales!

I immediately went to the Amazon Kindle Store, eReader, and the eBook Store from Sony -- and the book is not there!

How many people reading that item immediately thought, "I've got to read that?" How many of them will even remember the book tomorrow?

What could have easily generated six-figure impulse buys for an ebook ... has been wasted!

Now do you see why I say the future of writers must be in their own hands?

POST TWO:

First-Time Author Article Is Suspect

I've just sent this email to Telegraph.co.uk:

I noted this article yesterday --

First time author, 93, saves friends from care homes with book advance

and posted about it in my blog --

First-Time Writer Winner (And Loser!)

A Commenter wondered how this was possible. Because, you see, AuthorHouse is a *self-publishing* company. Self-publishers do *not* offer book advances.

As far as my research tells me, there is only *one* AuthorHouse, and it is indeed self-publishing.

AuthorHouse press release

AuthorHouse UK

I would appreciate it if you could provide clarification of this article.

I should have known all of it was too damned good to be true.

I have a suspicion we've been had by some slick PR agency.

The last laugh is ours, however: We were unable to buy the book on an impulse!