Authors Beware of This Scam Macmillian Website

Yesterday, Victoria Strauss on BlueSky sounded the alarm about a fake website pretending to be the real MacMillan Publishers. The site, which can be found at macmillanpublisher.co, is a near-perfect clone of the real Macmillan Publishers (note the S) website, which can be found here.

The exact nature of the scam is unknown for this specific site. However, most similar sites work by luring authors to “submit” their work only to offer paid services that provide no real benefit. These “services” can often cost thousands of dollars and are, if anything at all, no better than self-publishing.

To be clear, this site is far from alone. Macmillan’s real site has a Publishing Fraud Alert page that warns authors about many industry scams. The site also lists 18 domains that have impersonated them but stresses that the list isn’t complete.

Case in point: This current site is not on the list.

So, it’s safe to say that the site is not unique and far from the only one. However, it still provides an interesting opportunity to analyze the site, figure out how it works and, hopefully, find some warning indicators that others can look for.

Analyzing the Site

According to the site’s domain record, it was registered on January 17, 2024, using GoDaddy. As of this writing, the domain is 190 days old. However, the site is much more recent, as the Wayback Machine reports that, in April, it was just a redirect.

The site is hosted on Contabo in Germany. A reverse IP check finds three other sites share the IP address, amazonpropublishers.co, amzpublishinglibrary.co.uk and wileypublisher.com. All of those sites are also duplicates of other publisher websites.

Clearly, our scammers aren’t JUST focusing on Macmillan.

Judging from the dates on the fake site (and comparing them to the Wayback Machine versions of the real site), it appears the phony site pulled its data from the original on or around July 4th, 2024. The scammers have not updated the fake site since then.

Though the site is an extremely close clone, a side-by-side examination finds many differences. First, the headers of the sites are very different. The actual site has the logo and a search engine, while the fake one has the logo and a “submit online” button.

The real Macmillan site also has more categories, and the drop-down menu works differently. The real site also has much more content, with the fake site listing just eight author events compared to 18,000 on the original site.

Finally, the footers of the two sites are entirely different, with different colors, links and even a different address.

However, as I discovered, the phone number does work. I called it and spoke with a man who claimed to be from Macmillan. However, when I pressed him on that point, he purported to be from a company that works with “all publishers” and denied that the site was trying to confuse people.

He declined to give any contact information (other than a fake email address) and refused to answer any questions about the operation.

How to Spot a Fake Publisher

Overall, the site is a bizarre mix of amazingly thorough and ridiculously lazy. On the one hand, they meticulously copied the front page of the actual Macmillan website, including using authentic images and painstakingly recreating elements from it.

On the other hand, that clone is only an inch deep. The site falls apart if you click any link on the home page. For example, the social media buttons don’t work if you click on them.

But the goal isn’t to fool someone thoroughly examining the site. The goal is to fool someone not critically analyzing the page, likely out of excitement or hope.

To that end, the best defense against these scams is to be aware of them. If you know these scams exist and are extremely common, you’ll learn to be cautious when visiting publisher websites.

That said, authors can take away other lessons from this, including:

• Be Wary of Sites That Allow Unsolicited Submissions: Major publishers, in general, do not accept unsolicited submissions. Doing so is a serious legal risk and can lead to lawsuits. If a major publisher seems to be accepting unsolicited books, that is a major red flag.
• Don’t Click Links in Emails: This is good guidance in general. As this site shows, URLs are easy to manipulate. Clicking links, in particular in emails or direct messages, is risky. Either type it directly or search for it yourself.
• Click Around the Website: Don’t just look at the home page and trust the site is authentic. Click a few links. Make sure that they work and that they look professional. Scam sites usually look good on the surface but are only skin-deep.
• Lookup the Site’s History: Use a tool like DomainTools Whois Lookup to check the domain’s history. If it’s relatively recent, hosted in an odd country or has minimal history, those are red flags.
• When in Doubt, Get Confirmation: Publishers like Macmillan offer ways to verify if a communication is authentic. If there’s no formal way, reach out through known legitimate channels to find out.

All in all, if something feels too good to be true, it probably is. Sadly, countless scammers are waiting to exploit hopeful authors, and awareness is the best, if not only, protection against them.

Bottom Line

In the end, there’s not much I, nor anyone else, can do with this site other than spread awareness. This is Macmillan’s intellectual property being misused.

I will contact Contabo and GoDaddy shortly after publication. However, I have little leverage since I am not the rightsholder or their representative.

Publishers need to be more aggressive about these kinds of sites. There are tools to monitor domain registrations and ways to spot these sites as they come online. They could put a big dent in these kinds of scams with more aggressive enforcement of their intellectual property.

However, even if that were the case, such sites would still slip through, and such scams would still exist. As such, it’s crucial for authors to be aware of them and to guard against them.

No one is immune to scams. Even the best, brightest and most cautious can get taken. So, it is crucial to always be on guard, especially when dealing with something as important as your book.