Actually, they need the judge to see *something* like that, to prove that the defendants said something defamatory about the plaintiff. Which it certainly does prove.

Unfortunately for Fletcher, in order to recover in the lawsuit, it has to be FALSE and defamatory, which I gather was his problem.

If his house and lifestyle were paid for by commissions on the deals he's made for his clients, he'd not only have more than four bitty deals to his credit, but some of his clients would have to be well-known authors.

In other news, I recentlly saw where Fletcher was boasting to Publishers Weekly that his publishing branch (which he insists isn't a vanity operation) has published over 1,000 authors and sold 50,000 books, which of course comes out to an average of fifty sales per title. Want to know how pathetic that is? Publish America, which is unquestionably a vanity publishing operation, sells an average of 72-73 copies per title.

Is it just me, or is this completely circular? I ask because I'm not used to seeing one-sentence instances of circular reasoning. Most practitioners stick a few sentences in between the "Assuming X" part and the "So therefore X" part.

("Putting peanut butter on your kitten will protect him from goblins by insuring that such kitten is protected from goblins in the future.")

I hope he ends up writing you large checks.

At some point, doesn't it become a bit like kicking a corpse to keep posting harangues about it?

Granted, he apparently is still holding out to some marks that he'll win this lawsuit, which may make it more like kicking a zombie, Still, there's something about this latest post that just feels wrong. (While still being entertaining)

I can't quite put my finger on it, but it feels a bit like when we're telling war stories at work about unqualified candidates - it's okay to a point, but at some point it slips from mocking hillariously wrong answers to mocking the candidates themselves, and that's decidedly not ok. I won't claim that this situation is at all analogous, but I'm beginning to get a similarly uneasy feeling to the one I get when those conversations turn awry.

No.

This man is still out there, and still, today, defrauding authors.

Mocking Bobby Fletcher, himself, personally, is not just "okay." It's an admirable thing to do.

Nor is this the last post I plan to make about Bouncing Bobby. My last post will be when I report how much prison time he gets.

This man launched a frivolous lawsuit against me, for the purpose of harassment. He should be able to take a couple--or even a half-dozen--blog posts.

As opposed to "wherefore for the following reasons?"

Hint to whoever wrote that: "wherefore" and "for the foregoing reasons" both mean the same thing. You come across as though either you don't understand what you're writing or you think the judge won't understand it. I'm sure you didn't want to imply the latter...

And I say, "Didn't you see the warnings about Scammer Y?"

And the new author says, "Yes, but they were all from a year ago, so I figured that he must have cleaned up his act or he wouldn't be in business any more!"

Do you realize that you're telling a victim of attempted censorship (that being what all SLAPP lawsuits are) to stop talking about the subject?

That's very different from pointing out flaws in an unsolicitied manuscript or job application (or love not): a person or company can simply ignore those. They aren't being forced to hire lawyers to protect their right to tell the truth about a thief or other criminal.

More generally, I'd say it's up to someone who has been attacked to decide how much they want to say, and your and my decision is whether we want to engage in the conversation. In person or otherwise one-on-one, that may mean saying "I'm sorry, I find this stressful" or politely changing the subject if you think you've heard it all and expressed sympathy already. On something like Making Light, if you find a subject uninteresting, go read the next thing. That this is, in fact, Jim's blog rather than yours or mine is relevant here: but the key point is that, I hope without realizing it, you're siding with a bully and thief and against his victims.

As an aside, people may be interested in hearing a little more about the action that lead to Fletcher's securities fraud conviction. Fletcher was one of three directors of byteaudio.com at the time this was happening, and when the SEC press release states that byteaudio "maintained [its] own sales force to attract investors", that appears to have been Fletcher's role in the company.

[1]: To save people googling themselves: the top two Making Light links are currently parts 1 and 3 of this series, and show up in 2nd and 3rd places respectively. The 1st place is a writers.net discussion ("Robert M. Fletcher - EXPOSED!") The fourth is the unregistered securities order Jim linked to above; the fifth is a document from the same site that has Fletcher's name in the title but does not concern him. Sixth comes the absolutewrite discussion on LAG; next is a "zoominfo" page about Fletcher (a collection of articles scraped from various web sites that describe his business, in terms varying from "not recommended" to "[ST Literary Agency] is only the latest incarnation is what appears to be an ongoing string of cash-cow FRAUDS") Then we have Writer Beware, a page that seems to be scraped from Making Light's RSS feed, and finally an irrelevant page that isn't about Fletcher at all.

Just saying.

Meanwhile, Jim's put in years of work at AW to help aspiring writers understand why Fletcher and his ilk are pushing scams. In a lot of cases, the writers have already been defrauded, sometimes by more than one scammer.

It gets very, very frustrating.

Jim has earned this wrath, and Fletcher has earned the kicking.

If James ever wants to write a post about Fletcher for my blog, I'd be very glad to play host to him. Fletcher attracts writers from the UK too, and there's not nearly enough awareness about publishing scams over here.

Call it a big fanzine.

But it is a more honest way of feeding the desire that the vanity publisher exploits.

Vanity publishing provides a false seeming. It's like a photo-realistic painting of a diner. No matter how much it looks like a diner from out front you still can't get a cup of coffee there.