More on The Wrong Agenda
So, The Write Agenda fired back recently, just not through their own website. No, this time they tried continuing their case on a rip-off site. If they are who many people believe they are, they should be familiar with the place, having had their names mentioned there so many times. However, this tactic stinks of stupid to me, since they are taking a person who charges NOTHING for the service she provides to task on a site about rip-offs, which by definition means the aggrieved party lost money to whomever they are complaining about, right? This chain of reasoning only works if you're one of the people Writer Beware exposes as a rip-off. Because these are the only people who lose money to Writer Beware, by being deprived of the cash flow they worked sooooo hard to get from authors who don't know that REAL publishers don't charge writers a penny.
To be fair, TWA posted a lot of letters that they claim come from law enforcement agencies in Utah. They claim these letter state that no complaints about American Book Publishing exist.
SO, I started looking a little more closely at the “evidence” that The (snickers) Write Agenda posted on their website to “disprove” the statement in Writer Beware’s site stating that they had been the subject of a police investigation. This is the problem with slapping stuff up where writers can see it. We know how to find holes in a plot, and many of us write stories with mysteries in them. We can see a crappy investigation from six chapters away.
After reviewing the "source material" that TWA presented, I note several telling facts. Many of the responses they receive don't simply tell them there are no investigations of ABP. Mostly, they tell them "you're looking in the wrong place". Some tell them that they need to look in Murray, Utah, or that they need to contact the Utah Consumer Protection Division. Two replies tell them this agency is the one to contact, but there are NO letters to them from that agency. I have to wonder “Why not?” According to the material Victoria presents, these investigations were started around 2002, if I'm taking the dates on the blogs right, and I believe that ABP moved at some point. I wonder if TWA asked about current investigations, as opposed to previous investigations. In one case, the reply indicates that they asked specifically for “incident reports” for the address of ABP, which only shows if police were sent there, not if there was an investigation. Furthermore, they don't follow up on the information that they are given, specifically to check with the Utah Consumer Protection Division. This really disproves squat, especially since they were given a lead (twice) that they did not follow. I also note that not only are the names blacked out, so are the dates. But what strikes me as less than thorough about several of these letters is that they state that the request was made through the FOIA, but that they really needed to file a GRAMA (Government Records Access Management Act). So, this “noisy investigation” went to all the wrong places, filed all the wrong forms, or asked the wrong questions, and calls a lack of results based on a flawed set of inquiries as “proof”. Given that they are unwilling to show unredacted source material, the material that they give is impossible to vet, so I can't even trust that their "source material" is, in fact, source material. Secondary to that, said material appears in only ONE place: TWA's website, which I regard as highly suspicious as a matter of course, given who they are attacking. Now, if it comes down to “he said, she said”, Writer Beware wins hands down, EVERY time, over someone who is stridently defending a fee-charging “publisher.”
Even IF the original posting that Victoria based her statements on were to be proven false somehow, the worst case scenario is that she trusted what someone said at face value. She showed her sources. From the beginning. TWA has not addressed the veracity of said sources, only continued to act as if they don’t exist. BUT...I also note this. If Cheryl Nunn, or one of her many aliases, were THAT upset by what was posted, and there was NO basis for the statement...why hasn't SHE taken action on this? If these statements are false and therefore defamatory, why has C Lee Nunn not taken Writer Beware to the cleaners before this? The continued silence from the supposedly offended parties is deafening. The continued rants by TWA are clearly the kind of smokescreen they accuse Victoria of to focus attention on one thing that they want people to look at, instead of the whole picture, which shows a fee charging pseudo-publisher known as American Publishing, run by C Lee Nunn, a CPA who at one point had her license suspended in California. Yeah, credibility issues abound here. Just not in the places TWA wants you to think they do.
To be fair, TWA posted a lot of letters that they claim come from law enforcement agencies in Utah. They claim these letter state that no complaints about American Book Publishing exist.
SO, I started looking a little more closely at the “evidence” that The (snickers) Write Agenda posted on their website to “disprove” the statement in Writer Beware’s site stating that they had been the subject of a police investigation. This is the problem with slapping stuff up where writers can see it. We know how to find holes in a plot, and many of us write stories with mysteries in them. We can see a crappy investigation from six chapters away.
After reviewing the "source material" that TWA presented, I note several telling facts. Many of the responses they receive don't simply tell them there are no investigations of ABP. Mostly, they tell them "you're looking in the wrong place". Some tell them that they need to look in Murray, Utah, or that they need to contact the Utah Consumer Protection Division. Two replies tell them this agency is the one to contact, but there are NO letters to them from that agency. I have to wonder “Why not?” According to the material Victoria presents, these investigations were started around 2002, if I'm taking the dates on the blogs right, and I believe that ABP moved at some point. I wonder if TWA asked about current investigations, as opposed to previous investigations. In one case, the reply indicates that they asked specifically for “incident reports” for the address of ABP, which only shows if police were sent there, not if there was an investigation. Furthermore, they don't follow up on the information that they are given, specifically to check with the Utah Consumer Protection Division. This really disproves squat, especially since they were given a lead (twice) that they did not follow. I also note that not only are the names blacked out, so are the dates. But what strikes me as less than thorough about several of these letters is that they state that the request was made through the FOIA, but that they really needed to file a GRAMA (Government Records Access Management Act). So, this “noisy investigation” went to all the wrong places, filed all the wrong forms, or asked the wrong questions, and calls a lack of results based on a flawed set of inquiries as “proof”. Given that they are unwilling to show unredacted source material, the material that they give is impossible to vet, so I can't even trust that their "source material" is, in fact, source material. Secondary to that, said material appears in only ONE place: TWA's website, which I regard as highly suspicious as a matter of course, given who they are attacking. Now, if it comes down to “he said, she said”, Writer Beware wins hands down, EVERY time, over someone who is stridently defending a fee-charging “publisher.”
Even IF the original posting that Victoria based her statements on were to be proven false somehow, the worst case scenario is that she trusted what someone said at face value. She showed her sources. From the beginning. TWA has not addressed the veracity of said sources, only continued to act as if they don’t exist. BUT...I also note this. If Cheryl Nunn, or one of her many aliases, were THAT upset by what was posted, and there was NO basis for the statement...why hasn't SHE taken action on this? If these statements are false and therefore defamatory, why has C Lee Nunn not taken Writer Beware to the cleaners before this? The continued silence from the supposedly offended parties is deafening. The continued rants by TWA are clearly the kind of smokescreen they accuse Victoria of to focus attention on one thing that they want people to look at, instead of the whole picture, which shows a fee charging pseudo-publisher known as American Publishing, run by C Lee Nunn, a CPA who at one point had her license suspended in California. Yeah, credibility issues abound here. Just not in the places TWA wants you to think they do.
