The TL;DR on this is always, always, always dig deep into any organization offering publishing services and do your due diligence. There are many ways to spend a lot of money and receive little value. Here’s the result of my digging into one of those services.
I’m part of several writers groups on a variety of social media sites. Earlier today, A fellow going by the name of “John Stokes” posted a link on one of these sites to waitlistr.com, saying something along the lines of “Apply to get on the waiting list for high quality Canadian book production services”. The image attached to the post referred to Agora Publishing.
A wait list? No reputable publisher I know of has a “wait list”, especially not one offering self-publishing support. They might have a slush pile, but not a wait list. This aroused my suspicions. It sounds like that well-worn marketing technique “false scarcity”. Better get on that wait list quick, or it will be years before they get to you! Right. Let’s check that out!
I left a comment saying that authors might want to check references before spending any time and/or money on this, and “John” deleted the post. Bad move, “John”. Now I’m curious!
First, as always, I check with Victoria Strauss’ Writer Beware blog at https://writerbeware.blog/ and https://writerbeware.com. There’s nothing there, but there was a Twitter post from her indicating that there have been complaints. You’ll have to find that yourself, since I’m no longer linking to sites that support fascism, and Strauss hasn’t made it to Mastodon yet.
Next, I thought I’d look up Agora myself. What we get is a nice looking home page, but most of the links on that page just replicate the same information. There’s no evident content beyond that. Here’s what the home page looks like:
Looks okay, I guess. Save for the fact that the address is a PO box in a shopping mall and it’s an awfully thin site for 23 years of publishing. I figured I’d see where it’s hosted, so I did a quick IP address lookup and got 165.140.159.91, which appears to be a VPS at Scala Hosting. Noted.
Next, I wondered what all these sites that were “talking about Agora Publishing” actually had to say. None of the images actually link to websites, and I’d never heard of any of these publications, so that requires a little searching.
First up, the Toronto Business Journal found at tobj.ca, which we can find at (drum roll) 165.140.159.91:
There it is, in the footer: developed by agorapublishing.com. Well, that’s an independent, objective source, isn’t it? For an extra bonus check the sidebar which features some COVID-19 conspiracy theory garbage and (surprise, surprise) self-publishing services through Agora. There’s more cross-links there too if you want to really dig into the mind of this person.
On to the “Canadian Business Daily”. That site doesn’t come up, but there’s a YouTube channel of that name that links to agoracosmopolitan.com at, you guessed it, 165.140.159.91! Here we find… well it’s not a business journal, that’s for sure. All I can say is if I were an incel trolling for women to “neg”, I’d build a site that looked a lot like this one.
If you can stand to scroll down, you can find insightful business articles like “Are demonic clones now running the world?” Seriously.
Moving on, we have “Le Canadian” https://www.lecanadian.com/ (yes, also at 165.140.159.91):
This is pretty much the same whacked out content as the other sites, still featuring dating events in the past. There’s no explicit mention of Agora, but the contact page lists “National Co-Managing Editor: John Stokes”. So, another independent journalistic source there. Is this starting to smell the same for you? I bet it is!
Next up we have “The Ottawa Star”, a non-responsive site, if I managed to find the right one. And finally, the glowing, independent review that would be found at “Toronto Capitalistocracy” [wut? LOL], if the site could ever be located. I found nothing referencing this ludicrously named site.
I was going to dig into “John Stokes” a little more, but I got blocked real quick. That’s great defence of my remarks there, bro. Nothing to hide, eh?
But there are ways around being blocked. I’m not planning to dig any deeper, but here’s the source for his profile image:
He’s cropped it, of course, but it’s good to know that “John” makes a good “Man in Blue Longs Sleeves Smiling at the Camera while Sitting on an Office Chair”. (Credit to Yan Krukau, who I imagine has never met the person behind the “John Stokes” name. https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-man-in-blue-longs-sleeves-smiling-at-the-camera-while-sitting-on-an-office-chair-7792769/). Needless to say, I won’t be convinced that a “John Stokes” exists until I see some official documentation.
Now, should you be masochistic enough to find some of the books available from Agora, be prepared for lots more conspiracy theory and the like. I’ll spare you what else I’ve learned.
It is probably redundant to say this, but if you’re looking for help self-publishing, Agora is not an option I’d recommend.
Update: A friend did a reverse lookup on the phone number and found Xcheaters-Reviews.com Magazine Publishing Montreal, QC. That site is dead now, but a LinkedIn page describes it as “Xcheaters-Reviews.com is an an eclectic lifestyles oriented magazine which includes investigative analysis and sightings reports on UFO and alien sightings.”, which sounds consistent with these other sites. Meanwhile there is an (also defunct) xcheaters-bistro.com, which was located at the same mall, same “BP” (which seems to be an attempt at “box postale”, or “bag postale”, except in French it’s CP “Case Postale”). Here’s a capture from the Facebook page:
Same phone number too! None of this seems to be based on the name xcheaters.com, which looks like a sleazy “casual dating” site based in Cyprus. I can’t see anything to say that they’re related, but opening a bistro based on the name of a sleazy dating site is curious, to say the least. Especially with all the dating-related content on those “business” sites. Possibly it’s just an outdated attempt to get some search traffic and route it through an affiliate link, or maybe it’s just deranged. It’s hard to tell.
Easily one of the most irritating things about WordPress is the continuous attempts to up-sell in the dashboard. Here’s how to get rid of them.
It’s one thing to have a gentle hint, like Updraft Plus saying “hey you can get more features with the pro version” and a dismiss function that makes the reminder go away for a year. It’s more irritating to have something that pops on every login, and even more irritating to see something show up every time you are on the dashboard.
I can tolerate most of these. Sometimes they’re irritating enough that I just switch plugins, especially when they try pushing related plugins you don’t give a damn about. This is one reason why there’s no Yoast on my sites. The SEO Framework is just as capable, a lot less pedantic, and it doesn’t nag. Yet.
But what to do when there’s no alternative and the plugin is persistently nagging? Use your ad blocker to make it go away! Since it has just recently pissed me off, I’m going to use WPCode Lite, an otherwise useful plugin as the prime example. With a recent update, this plugin has elected to add a widget to the post edit page with the title “WPCode Page Scripts”. Cool! That’s a welcome minor convenience. Click on the widget though and what do you get?
Page Scripts is a Pro Feature
That’s nice, but for me it’s not worth subscribing. How do I dismiss this? Surprise, surprise, I can’t. Well, F*ck you, WPCode! I’ll do it myself. Now this takes a little knowledge of HTML and custom AdBlock Plus rules, but the general process goes like this:
Right click on the widget and choose inspect. This will highlight the general area in the code you want.
Look for the highest level element that uniquely identifies your target widget. In my case, inspect took me to a div with the id “advanced-sortables”. We don’t want that. There are a bunch of useful elements on the page that are enclosed by that. Drill down a bit and we find another div with the id “wpcode-metabox-snippets”. That’s the one!
Click on your AdBlock icon.
Click on the gear to get to settings.
Select the advanced tab from the left.
Scroll down to “Your Custom Filters”.
In the box below “My Filter List”, enter this rule, substituting your domain for mine:
ambitonline.com###wpcode-metabox-snippets
You can also leave off the domain if you have multiple sites, but in my experience more specific rules help prevent long periods of “WTF” until your realize that the ad blocker is doing something you didn’t expect.
I’m picking on WPCode here because the arrogance of this has really ticked me off, but you can apply the same method to most other notices like this. At some point, plugin developers will take defensive measures to make this even more difficult and then we’ll have a discussion about writing user scripts in TamperMonkey and it’s kin.
I’ve got this old, slightly torn and patched 100 dollar bill up on a desk shelf where I can see it. A few months back we found it between some papers and I didn’t have the slightest recollection of how I got it.
But now it’s coming back to me. I think a friend and business partner gave it to me to acknowledge the work I was putting into our project. I hope that externally I was suitably grateful, appreciative, and said “that’s not necessary”, all of which would have been true.
The project, and the acknowledgement, came at a time when my extended period of “mild to moderate” depression was well into “moderate”, but likely before I truly realized what was going on. I might have put all I had into that project, but what I had wasn’t much. My effort yielded a bunch of prototypes and some ambitious code that never saw completion. I might have been doing my best at the time, but I was all too aware that my best was a fraction of what I had been capable of in the past.
My internal dialogue compounded my funk. Was I now just too old to write good code? Was the passion I’d had since I was a kid just done with me? If so what next? I certainly didn’t think my efforts were worth much, certainly not $100. After launch and the first sales, now that’s worth a pat on the back and a nice dinner! Thrashing at a solution with nothing of production quality… not so much. No matter how sincere the effort, effort without results is difficult to distinguish from no effort at all.
No, this was an undeserved reward. Another testament to my failure to perform, something else to highlight the pervasive feeling that I had: I was afloat on a large body of still water in a deep fog, with a pair of good oars but no idea of where I was, where I was going, how far it might be, or in which direction I might proceed to find anything. There I sat, adrift. I might row from time to time, but it was never clear if the effort was pointless or not, if my limited transit was changing anything or just Brownian exploration. I am sure I stuffed that $100 someplace where I knew the chances I’d run across it again were slim, where it couldn’t remind me how adrift I was.
That was almost 20 years ago now. I had no way of knowing that I’d be in that ugly fog for more than 15 years, although with thankfully few bouts of moderate during its course.
Now I sit here, three or so years clear of the battle. [There is no way for me to say “there, that’s when I beat depression!” I just gain increasing confidence that it’s not coming back anytime soon.] I look at this old bill, not even knowing if it’s still a negotiable instrument, wondering if I should try to deposit it, frame it as a reminder that sooner or later if I simply persist it is possible to be free, or just slip it between a few papers and see if I rediscover it on a much later purge.
Whatever I do, there is no way to describe how I feel knowing that I am looking at this ugly beast in the proverbial rear view mirror.
As we recover from yet another mass killing we hear a lot of smart people saying that the rise of hate is driven by a fear of loss of power. But they don’t clearly identify where that fear comes from.
At the same time, even though we might not be aware of it most of us already know where it comes from on a visceral level. We worry about our debt load, about what kind of world our children and grandchildren will grow up in, about the environment, about our jobs, our pensions, and ironically about the rise of hate.
Humans are a competitive species. Our political systems are a gossamer barrier between modern civilization and tribalism. It’s far too easy to transfer our anxieties into an identification of some “other” that we can blame for our worries. It is a dangerously small step from resentment to hatred, and from there to violence.
What few seem to notice, or at least to explicitly identify, is the correlation between the confidence of the middle class and the strength of social liberalism. If most people think the future will be bright and there will be more than enough prosperity to go around, suddenly we’re a lot less concerned about differences in race, religion, gender, and so on.
It is a cruel irony that this social conservatism has a affinity for autocratic politicians, precisely the type that are going to ensure that the wealth gap increases. The real way to alleviate social anxiety is to vote for a party that will actually work to redistribute wealth. Instead of gravitating towards populists the anxious middle class should be gravitating to socialism.
If I were a conspiracy theorist, I’d assert that the Illuminati (or whoever) are manipulating society to achieve this result, but I just can’t see that. I think it’s just our base human nature. We all have a responsibility to fight these instincts, for nothing good can come from the alternative.
The video below has been around for a few years. It’s a great clip. The issue I have with it is that I think it supports people who already understand the scientific process, but it fails to fully explain the distinction between the casual and scientific uses of “theory”.
There is a critical distinction between a theory and a Scientific Theory. For example, I have a theory that a significant proportion of people react to headlines without digging into the content behind that headline.
Theory vs Hypothesis
Colloquially, that’s a theory. Scientifically, it’s a Hypothesis. If I do a study to test this Hypothesis and I get data that confirms it, then it’s a Valid Hypothesis. It’s still not a Theory. [Note that if I indeed were to do such a study and publish it, it’s likely to be reported as “Study Proves People Only Read Headlines”. That headline is bullshit. Which is why just reading headlines is dangerous.]
Now if a bunch of other people also do studies and get the same result, then it’s on its way to becoming a Theory. That’s where Evolutionary Theory is now. There are hundreds of thousands of experiments that not only prove that evolution is a fact, there are millions that depend on it being a fact.
Science is Just Our Best Guess at Fact
Now it is true that sometimes science gets it wrong. Especially in life sciences. The attack on dietary fat that we’ve seen for the past 40 years or so is a prime example, but that’s starting to be corrected with new research. This is how the scientific method works. Science is still done by people, and people can get things wrong. Frequently science self-corrects fairly quickly, but sometimes it takes quite some time. When it’s wrong the contradictions eventually get exposed, and those contradictions lead to more focused research. Eventually the right answer emerges, even if it means contradicting previous conclusions. Evolutionary Theory has been around for over 150 years, and nobody has managed to invalidate it yet… and I’m sure many have tried. That’s the point the video makes well: there’s an overwhelming body of work that proves evolution is real. This proof is well beyond reasonable doubt.
So when you here the word “theory”, ask yourself which meaning the person is using. Is it “I have a theory that someone steals one of each pair of my socks” theory, or is it “Gravitational Theory says that gravitational attraction is proportional to the square of the distance between two massive bodies” theory. It’s a pretty important distinction.
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