Inverarity is not a Scottish village

Hey This is hard for me because I have never done anything like this.. but I have a huge crush on you. I have never been able to tell you for reasons which you would quickly identify as obvious if you knew who this was. I'm really attracted to you and I think you would be wanting to get with

I don't think so.

I've been getting over a dozen of these spam posts per day for the last couple of days. The number of bot LJ accounts seems to be rising. Very aggravating.

Also...

Does anyone know what's up with all the socks posting links to a YouTube video about a CIA plot to kill the Prime Minister of Portugal in 1980? It must be Spam Your Conspiracy Day or something.

An anonymous commenter commented on one of the AQATSA cover posts with "Remember, this is art for art's sake."

I was not sure whether it was a spammer or a legitimate commenter, since it didn't make much sense, and resembled the comments bots usually leave on random entries, but it was somewhat related to the post. Since LJ screened it automatically, I just deleted it.

Then the same comment got posted again a few days later, along with a comment about "technical issues."

So, anonymous commenter: if you're a real person and that was meant to be a real comment, my apologies for deleting it both times, but this is why I ask anons to sign their posts with a username or something. Especially if you are going to leave cryptic one-line comments that look suspiciously like spam. Nowadays my delete finger is getting twitchier, as I move closer towards disabling anonymous comments altogether.

ETA: Also, LiveJournal's anti-spam measures seem to be automatically screening comments from anons with increasing frequency, so be aware that if you post anonymously, it might not be visible to anyone else until I notice it was screened and unscreen it.

Deleted in comments to another post:

Subject: The Lord of the Rings
Tolkien's masterpiece turned out to be the most read work of literature in the 20th century in English. It's a unique accomplishment which really cannot be put into any category. That's what great literature is.

Please visit my blog at www (dot) a n g e l a f o u r n i e r (dot) blogspot.com and leave a comment. Thanks!

The above blog (remove spaces and such that I added in the quote) appears to be a platform to pimp a book (which I won't link to but it's linked on every post in his blog): something called "Angela 1" which appears to be the sort of preachy moralistic YA book that would gather dust on the shelves of Christian bookstores if it was even good enough to be published by small Christian presses.

This book, however, is vanity published by Strategic Publishing Group, which is affiliated with the AEG Publishing Group.

AEG is similar to several other enterprises such as Publish America, which pretend to be legitimate publishers and "accept" submissions from prospective authors. They go to great lengths pretending that they are not vanity presses and that they can actually put your book in bookstores, that you will be paid in royalties just like a real author, etc. The reality is that their entire business model depends on getting the author to buy copies of his or her own books from them (because nobody else is going to).

See Writer Beware or the SFWA's ALERTS FOR WRITERS for more. Or Google "Strategic Publishing Group" or "PublishAmerica" + "scam."

These companies (and many similar ones) operate under a number of different names. And you'll find all their books available on Amazon. So this is one downside to the new ease with which would-be authors can bypass traditional gatekeepers, as I have mentioned before: not all publishers are created equal. Some are just fronts for vanity presses.

Note that vanity presses are not automatically fraudulent or disreputable. One that is up-front about its business model is just offering a legitimate service. But those like Strategic Publishing Group and Publish America are notorious for tricking naive would-be authors into believing they are being published by a "real" publisher and that their books will appear on the shelves at Borders, etc. In reality, the chances of a regular bookstore carrying anything from one of these "publishers" are approximately zero, and no one else in the publishing industry will consider a book published by them to be a publishing credit; if you query an agent and say you've been previously published by PublishAmerica or AEG, you will almost certainly be laughed at (and rejected).

ETA: Originally I was quite a bit more inflammatory and made specific references to the author, because I fucking hate spammers like you wouldn't believe, and his post struck me as pure spam. After thinking about it and rereading his blog and cooling off a bit, I suppose it is possible that he really did think he was making a legitimate contribution to the discussion, though I think it was still mostly just linkspamming. So I've toned down my response somewhat. But the general comments about vanity presses remain.

I've been puzzled the last couple of days seeing random comments from brand new LJ accounts (with no posts) on my LJ and elsewhere. Below are a couple of examples:

no? wonder hes always so d*mn grouchy!!
SilverBerenznoff23

0:05-0:10 soo funny but that still is sad....R.I.P? snape :(
rosefan12

Obviously, this is spam, but since there were no links (that I could see), I couldn't figure out what the point was. It took viewing the actual HTML source to find it. They've cleverly embedded a long list of links to Russian porn sites in their profile in a way that's invisible in your browser, but not to search engines.

So, if you see comments like this appearing on your LJ, I recommend you simply delete them (and check all the various options to ban the user and report spam).