There is a site called epubpdfbook dot com. It's a pirate site that is pretending to be a retailer. It claims to sell everything for $1.99 or so. But once you enter your credit card info, it won't allow you to download anything. You have to wait for somebody on their side to email you the book.

That's a huge red flag. Any legit e-commerce site should have it set up so that order fulfillment is automatic. There are many economical service providers that do the credit card processing and digital order fulfillment.

My guess? This site is basically a credit card phishing site. So please beware of this. And if there's a site that has deals too good to be true, check to make sure it's legit first. There are so many scammers and hackers that try to steal data.

I had to comment on the deal that Simon & Schuster Archway Publishing is offering to authors. No matter how S&S tries its best to package it as “self-publishing” it is a vanity publishing venture, designed specifically to make profit by taking money from authors, not selling books to readers.

I've created a handy cheat sheet / chart below for you. You can see that S&S's Archway Publishing offers the worst of the both traditional publishing and self-publishing: You'll pay for everything; you'll have no control over anything; and you'll have to split your profit with the publisher.

Do not sign up for it. There's no reason to pay someone $2,000-$25,000 to format and upload your book on Kindle. (Since S&S plans to outsource everything for Archway Publishing, you won't get the kind of editing and cover art that S&S's traditional publishing program offers.)

Furthermore, you do not need to use service providers like S&S's Archway publishing to get noticed by a traditional publisher if that is one of your goals. They are already watching Amazon's Top 100 list. The self-published novelists who got snapped up by traditional publishers did not use vanity publishers.