Saturday, June 15, 2019

Creepy, Snoopy, Moribund... And All In The Best Possible Taste


Extrapolated from an alert on the Yahoogroup "AuthorsAgainstEBookTheft":

For authors who were published by Mundania.com, it has something in common with the Monty Python parrot. It is no more.

The website has an announcement:
PUBLIC NOTICE:
ALL PUBLICATION CONTRACTS MADE WITH MUNDANIA PRESS LLC, PHAZE BOOKS, HARD SHELL WORD FACTORY, AWE-STRUCK BOOKS, AND CELERITAS LIMITED LLC FOR EBOOKS, PRINT, AND AUDIO BOOKS ARE IMMEDIATELY CANCELLED AND FULL PUBLICATION RIGHTS ARE RETURNED FOR ALL BOOKS TO ALL AUTHORS AS OF MARCH 27, 2019.

The smart move would be to visit http://www.mundania.com/ and obtain a screen shot in case this is the only proof of return of rights that is available.

Note: Margaret L. Carter has pointed out that she received a full and proper return of rights directly from Mundania. Apologies if the above note was in any way inaccurate.

FIVE SCAMS FOR SENIORS
For Americans who might or might not have someone in the household nearing or older than sixty, beware of unexpected, unsolicited phone calls from persons claiming to be from Medicare. They are not. They quite possibly found your/your loved one's contact information and age on a site such as Been-Verified (which is not a reliable site, and which may well have complete and utter elderly strangers listed as living at your home with you... and their system provides no way for you to correct this error), and what the callers want is
a) to record you saying, "Yes?"  (Never say Yes to a stranger.)
b) to get your personal information and secret(ish) numbers.

Or perhaps some files were badly consolidated and some creepy snoopy sites got bad information from the Microsoft data breach.
https://blog.malwarebytes.com/cybercrime/2019/05/mysterious-database-exposed-personal-information-of-80-million-us-households/?utm_source=double-opt-in&utm_medium=email-internal-b2c&utm_campaign=EM-B2C-2019-June1-newsletter&utm_content=mysterious-database

Look here for scam warnings.
https://www.aarp.org/health/medicare-insurance/info-2018/open-enrollment-scam.html

OK. That is not writing or copyright related, but even writers get older. Moreover, authors are obliged by the nature of their business to put out more information on back matter and on public sites than most people.

Writers, be like The Queen of England. Keep your real birthday private, and celebrate an "official" birthday for social media purposes that is not your truthful birth date.

Finally, for anyone who is interested in SUPER (voting) POWERS that affect the big social media platforms, the trichordist has an eye-opening expose by Chris Castle on how supervoting works and why Zuckerberg (for one) has nothing to fear from shareholders.
https://thetrichordist.com/2019/06/06/guest-post-musictechsolve-betting-on-the-house-issues-that-house-judiciary-should-investigate-against-google-end-supervoting-shares-for-publicly-traded-companies/

One reason why Mark Zuckerberg maybe should be reined in is his alleged interest in monetizing other people's menstrual periods.

All the best,
Rowena Cherry 

2 comments:

  1. I got a detailed e-mail from Mundania when they closed, explicitly stating that rights to all books were reverted. I was surprised and dismayed to hear that some authors didn't get one.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you for clarifying, Margaret. I will amend the article.

    ReplyDelete