The Combined Book
Exhibit has been taking its traveling bookshelf, packed with hopeful authors'
books, to trade events and book fairs around the world for 85 years. But while
it may have started as a vehicle for genuine publishers and authors to showcase
their wares at far-flung events, today it is notorious for enabling a very
particular kind of author scam.

If an author approaches the Combined Book Exhibit directly via its website, they can display their ebook or print book at prestigious events like the London Book Fair or BookExpo America for $325. This is a considerable fee when you consider what the author gets in return, especially if you have seen these tired, unloved bookcases at industry events. The idea that an agent or editor or movie producer would peruse these shelves, let alone actually acquire something from them, is risible.

Package deals are also
flogged to authors. For example, to have your print and ebook edition displayed
in the New Title Showcase at the London Book Fair and BookExpo America next
year costs the considerable sum of $900. And then something called the 2020
International Package will take your hopefully sturdy paperback to the London
Book Fair, BookExpo America, Beijing Book Fair, Frankfurt Book Fair, Sharjah
Book Fair, and the Guadalajara Book Fair, at a cost of $1400 or $1650 if you
want to include the ebook also.

Needless to say, this is
quite a lot of money for some rather questionable return. And when you sign up
for one of the smaller packages you are quite strongly pushed towards the more
expensive ones – indeed, the individual shows are hidden away behind a button.
Even if you do discover it, and select the 2019 Frankfurt Book Fair, for
example, at a cost of $400, additional services are pushed: Ads in Exhibit
Catalogues for $150-$350, Autographing slots for $695. All of which the author
will struggle to get any kind of return on whatsoever.

Of course, the
Combined Book Exhibit has been hawking these questionable products with the
full-throated support of the publishing industry. It has endless partnerships
and is pretty much protected from any criticism.

However, some criticism
has pierced that bubble. One of the Combined Book Exhibit's most controversial
practices doesn't just involve hawking overpriced services of questionable quality,
but reselling those services to exploitative vanity presses who then go on to
add an incredible mark-up on top of these already high prices. Of course, these
vanity presses tend to adopt the hard-sell, making outrageous promises
regarding what these services can achieve.

Writer Beware has written multiple times about the plague of vanity presses coming from the Philippines right now, mostly inspired by Author Solutions, often directly set up by Author Solutions alumni. There are so many of these companies now that Victoria Strauss needed two separate posts to detail them all (Part 1, Part 2).

The key lesson these vanity presses learned from Author Solutions was that you can adopt an instant veneer of respectability by partnering with well-known companies at the heart of the traditional publishing business. Author Solutions infamously did this with HarperCollins/Thomas Nelson, Harlequin, Writers Digest, Hay House, Simon & Schuster, Lulu, Barnes & Noble - even the bloody Authors Guild - before netting itself the big kahuna: getting purchased by Penguin. (All that really happened right? It wasn't just a crazy dream?)

The Author Solutions copycats since found a much easier way to get that fig-leaf of legitimacy: just purchase packages from Combined Book Exhibit for the purposes of re-selling, and then offer services to authors promising to "take their book to the London Book Fair."

These vanity press
copycats are now cold-calling authors, often rerouting their number via the
USA, and deploying the language skills they learned on the job at Author
Solutions, under Penguin's tutelage.

The situation has gotten so bad that Combined Book Exhibit themselves have issued a warning on their own site about these scams. And, really, this was a huge surprise to me because, a few years ago, when I asked the Combined Book Exhibit about their policies surrounding the reselling of their packages to companies applying huge mark-ups, they responded by… blocking me on Twitter.

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