Barbara Bauer Literary Agency, Inc: the scam, and the biggest mistake of her career

Literary Agent Barbara Bauer is a scammer, a moron, and an all-around very bad person. She is also on the SFWA's official list of the 20 worst literary agents.

This is my response to an urgent call to arms across the net and blogosphere regarding Barbara Bauer, Ph.D. the literary agent and the (very temporary) downing of AbsoluteWrite.com.

Read more of why she's a scammer here.

(This is the second time I've talked about Ms. Bauer. Read the first post here.)

As it turns out, AW was taken down late yesterday not because of technical issues, but because their host, JC-Hosting received a phone call from our friend Barbara Bauer who spouted off some B.S. about a post on AW that included her email address, and she was getting spam. (Her email address, for those who like details, is cannoliq@msn.com) Here, let me quote from Making Light:

Mind, the message that quoted Bauer's e-mail address had some time ago been amended to remove that address. Furthermore, Barbara Bauer posts that exact same email address on her own website.

Stephanie had no more sense than to panic and shut down AW on an hour's notice. I'm given to understand that some of AW's message base was lost. For the record, AW was hosted at:

JC-Hosting
TotalWeb International Net Consulting
4037 Navaho Trail
Nashville TN 37211

Toll Free: (877) 411-7891
Phone: (615) 469-7533
Fax: (615) 250-2430

Stephanie's been known to post as “Moonshadow” at Absolute Write. The wonderful fact, for certain values of wonderful, is that Stephanie is one of PublishAmerica's authors. Some people are just not smart enough to be allowed to run loose on the Internet.

(eta note: It's Moondancer, not shadow. And it looks like she never was a PA author. She did, however, just decide to re-start a writers' resource community. Hmmmmm)

(Moondancer, you screwed up. I think your company is going to get some very bad PR over this, especially when the larger blogs start talking about your reaction. What you've done is set a very bad precedent. You may think you were put in an impossible situation, but you weren't. You were just sold a line of B.S. Lisa Spangenberg, aka Digital Medievalist said it best in the comments over at Making Light.)

For several years now, the forums on AbsoluteWrite.com, run by writer Jenna Glatzer, have been home to thousands of writers, and it is one of the largest writer-based communities on the internet. Every day, hundreds of people look to the Absolute Write forums for help and advice on many issues, including on subjects like scams. Barbara Bauer is a scammer, and the Absolute Write forum posting about her (down right now) pops up as #2 on the Google search about her.

Writersweekly.com, another forum, pops up high on the search. You can read what Barbra Bauer attempted to do to that one here.

Ms. Bauer is basically marauding through cyberspace, doing everything in her power to silence any and every entity that has anything bad to say about her. In this case, she happened to get lucky. Unfortunately for her, that swing of the club is about to fall back and smash her on the nose.

This is what I would like you to do. Whether you're a writer or not, please post on your blog about Barbara Bauer.

BarbaraBauer