>A real agency is highly unlikely to email or phone you out of the blue with an offer of representation or a claim that a traditional publisher is interested in your work (real agents don’t pre-shop manuscripts for authors they don’t represent).
>A real agency will not require you to pay anything or buy anything as a condition of representation or publication. Other than the agent’s commission, there should never be a cost associated with rights acquisition.
highly unlikely is politespeak for never going to happen unless your self published work is making tens of thousands of sales already.
But generally yes, an agent is not going to contact you randomly.
When I was a naïve young person we did something similar, paying a bit for our track to be on a CD. I've no illusions now, but I still joke I'm a published musician.
And there are still plenty of ways to become an author if you want. I have a guilty pleasure of LitRPG books, which are generally terrible and riddled with problem authors, but there's a cadre of writers who are making good money.
They write in a serialized format like Dickens used to. Chapter by chapter, release it for free on RoyalRoad, get traction. Then they package a book up for Kindle Unlimited, take the old chapters off RR apart from some taster chapters, and start a Patreon for advanced access to new chapters.
There's one series which is absolute trash, Defiance of the Fall, where he's admitted he's dragging the story out as he's making so much money.
As such it is actually easy to catch out the scammer.
These fake agencies obviously give no advance, then push you to buy services related to supposed publishing of your book. 5k this, 10k for that, we're almost ready, just another 15k for xyz and we'll totally pay you that 350k for you book!
It seems like the only way to really combat this is through closed / semi-closed trusted networks, but those tend to become dominated by personalities and difficult for newcomers to break into. The reduced trust in "outside" voices then leads to echo chambers and groupthink. I think we're already starting to see some of this in the kinds of books being put out by the big publishing houses; I don't have hard numbers (and maybe I'm just getting old and cynical) but a lot of recent titles feel extremely generic.
There's a subplot in Neil Stephenson's Fall (or Dodge in Hell) where media and other networks are so saturated with false, meaningless, clickbaity, or otherwise negative-value content that they become either less than worthless, or require paid "filters" to extract actual value. I'm getting a sense of being close to that point already and I don't know what the right move is from here to reduce the fracturing of my wider social circles.
This is the only way. The cost of spinning up a new identity on the web (with supporting documents, pictures, etc) is near zero now. There's only 3 or 4 things to really vet people, and those can be faked with more effort.
The only real way to vet someone nowadays is IRL, and that requires non-trivial effort but provides most guarantees you'd want in new participants in an online community.
> I'm getting a sense of being close to that point already and I don't know what the right move is from here to reduce the fracturing of my wider social circles.
I have this feeling too. My guess is that social circles will be less fluid and dynamic. Traditional centers of trust will become more important.
It pains me that this feels true as someone chronically online and used to find great use from the internet, but online-only has more failure modes now. There's still ways to do it though.
Now that the internet is available to the entire world, including basically anyone with a pulse, that feature is entirely gone.
What online trust? Internet has always been a prominent source for the most scamy content. You should never trust anything blindly, that is today as valid as it was 30 years ago.
> It seems like the only way to really combat this is through closed / semi-closed trusted networks,
Those are open to other levels of scam and abuse. This is not a problem of being open or closed, but whether one has the ability to evaluate their business-partners. And in that regard, open communication has proved itself to be a reliable source of information and to root out scams.
Probably not all the latest fakes, not any longer.
I am Damon Green, a leading literary agent...
"solicitation is one of the first and most common signs of a scam these days"
This is true about most scams these days. So much so that I have been advising non-technical friends and family to stop directly responding to any communication you did not initiate. Instead ask yourself, "how would I go about addressing or confirming this with the supposed source if I hadn't received a message about it?" Also helps with avoiding the encouragement of marketers.