Every now and then I get bored and check out promotion books. Usually its regular users, all commenting about their books hoping to get some growth.

But on occasion, I'll see a comment by a person offering to recommend other platforms or offer publishing deals. They're usually something along the lines of this: 

Sorry if the screenshots are crusty/hard to read, Wattpad lowers image quality.

These comments are usually all some variation of a copy-paste thing, but these are actually real users who often have stuff on their accounts, they're not bots. So that's also why I blurred their usernames. Sometimes they directly message people first, some of my friends have been approached about deals too.

Anyway, I'm a Curious George of a bitch and I like to message these people pretending to be interested and go along with it, just to get details about what they're offering. So I decided to message this person saying "hey, I saw your comment and I'm interested in learning more about these other writing platforms." This isn't a new interaction that I just had, its a bit old now but I'm showing it as an example of how these people work.

No, these are not good publishing deals at all. Especially given how funky the sites are; those numbers are possible maybe but you wouldn't actually get them. Readict says $10k but a company representative actually said it ranges from $300 up to $10k, you're more likely to get the 300 bucks and a $100 bonus instead. But, to someone who just writes on wattpad and doesn't know anything about writing contracts, seeing an opportunity to make money on your little story is a very appealing deal.

I decided to google Fictum just to see for myself and found this article:

Fictum/Fizzo is owned by Bytedance, the same company that owns TikTok. This is pretty interesting to me.

The article even mentions these shitty contract scams have become established on Wattpad. The article also goes over points in the contract and talks about how bad/shady it is. So if you're interested in reading the whole thing, it's an article by Writer Beware, just google Fictum/Fizzo and you'll see it.

But back to the person I was talking to. They told me a bit more, saying that if I decide I want to sign a contract with fictum, I just need to let them know and they'll help me with it/give further details.

They mentioned how they themselves were about to sign a contract with Readict, Readict is a legit website. Their contracts are better than Fictum's but there are still issues. Quoted from another article by Writer Beware that mentions Readict: "Authors have no right of termination. Readict can edit at will, and if the writer fails to turn in a complete work, can hire someone else to complete it. There's also a waiver of class action rights." That's not the only concern with Readict's contracts, just one of them.

And the person also told me, "For fictum, I am hoping to move up from referring authors to an actual editor."

Then I just asked them straight up about recruiting people. I wanted to see if they'd say anything or just ghost me like people have done before:

By the way, after this message, I brought up how these recruiters are usually scammers so that's why I'm weary but said to them that I know they're not a scammer/the platforms they're promoting aren't scams (obviously I lied to them).

This person went on about how there are definitely frauds out there claiming they're working for a platform when they're not, so it's good to be cautious. And then started talking about how books get stolen to change subjects...

Honey, you yourself are promoting a company with a 5-year long contract that possibly auto-renews without your say, silences you, doesn't have to give you performance data if they don't want to, is written in unclear, vague language that doesn't explain things, and has you literally waive away your moral rights. (Having your moral rights taken means your work can be published anywhere the company decides without your name, or even under someone else's name if they want to.)

But you wanna talk about how others are the frauds and thieves...

Either this person is lying to me, or they truly are clueless and just told to go do something without instruction on how. But, as I said, this person told me that if I'm interested in a contract, I should talk to them and that they're hoping to move up to an editor position.

Maybe they aren't told not to go on other sites and comment in user-based promotion/f4f books, but that to me sounds like someone who works for the company but is trying to come off as a regular old author just trying to help others out with their potential. Nobody just goes around offering to tell everyone about monetary contracts for random, small sites for no reason.

Going back to the article screenshot, the article brings up that two companies were deputized to recruit for Webnovel. This would maybe explain why the person I spoke to mentions two different sites that are owned by two different companies but both are still shady. Some sort of third company hired to recruit for the sites? Probably something like that. It'd make sense for how these small sites are able to get so many authors to sign contracts seemingly out of nowhere.

What these people are doing is known as Poaching and wattpad has it in their Community Standards section under their policies page.

I don't see poaching as often as I did last year but I still see it once in a while. As the last part of Wattpad's statement says, if you see any comments offering to DM people info on these amazing writing contracts they just have to tell people about out of the kindness of their heart, report it. Maybe even reply to it to let other users know it's a scam in case it takes a minute for wattpad to remove it.

That's all I have for this rant. I just wanted to show people these scammers because I haven't seen anyone on Wattpad talk about it.

If you're interested in writing contracts/e-publishing, do your research to learn what's good and what's bad. There's many scams in the writing industry in general, not just on Wattpad or small websites. Choose your platforms wisely and don't just go for one because it looks super easy.