Editor vs. Predator

My Adventure with a Nefarious Company

The internet is the perfect breeding ground for predators. I consider myself to be fairly savvy when it comes to phishing, scams, and all the ways that unscrupulous people try to part writers from their money.

But it can be a challenge to separate the genuine businesses from the predators. Case in point, this year I had an experience with a company I considered to be legit. Alas, it was not to be. Here’s what happened.

The Inciting Incident

Back in November of 2025, A friend of mine, a fellow writer and coach, turned me on to an opportunity. A company he was contracting for was actively looking for experienced editors to mentor their writing students. He had been involved with them for years, first as a writing student and then as a mentor, and he thought this would be right up my alley.

I reached out to the company, and learned they were starting up a brand new paid training program for mentors in January of 2026. They were going to implement a marketing push to increase their enrollment, and wanted to have 100 new mentors signed on by the end of the year in order to serve these new students. They specifically wanted folks like me who were trained coaches running their own businesses who already knew how to interact with new writers and provide encouragement and feedback. The training would be focused on their specific methodology and instructional program.

The idea was, I would complete the training, serve as an apprentice for two months with 2 or 3 students and a company coach to look over my shoulder to make sure I was applying their methodology correctly. After that time I could take on as many students as I wanted. Pay would be a flat amount per student, paid monthly.

I thought this was a great opportunity to help other writers, without having to find them through my own marketing efforts. I paid for the training and entered the first cohort of new mentors. Because I already have a deep knowledge of story and narrative mechanics, I sailed through the training, becoming the first of the new mentors to graduate at the end of March. The next student cohort was slated start in May.

I onboarded with the company, gaining access to all their tools and archives of material. They sent me some swag, including a branded mug and a t-shirt. I met my fellow mentors and the coach who would be working with me through my apprenticeship. Interestingly, everyone I met was a fellow contractor. The company appeared to only have a handful of actual employees.

Welcome to the gig economy, I thought.

Rising Tension

After a couple of weeks, I was assigned my two students. I was so excited to begin this next phase in my coaching business. However, I still didn’t have a contract with the company. I asked several people about this and was told that only the CEO could sign contracts, and he was on vacation until April 19.

OK, I thought. Whatever. Although it seemed strange that no one could send me the contract for me to review and sign except the CEO. In my own business, I utilize a contract app and it only takes a few minutes to plug in the details of a new client and then forward the contract to them. But different companies have different operating procedures.

Per company instructions, I sent welcome emails to my students and requested writing samples to analyze before the instructional session began. One student replied immediately and I spent some time reading his sample and sketching out a plan for him. The other student did not respond.

On April 17, I, along with all the other mentors, received a strange message. It was from the owner of the company, requesting that all of us complete a competency evaluation. The verbiage of the message alternated between calling this task an “experiment,” an “evaluation,” and “additional training.” The message from the company owner was that this task was required. If we did not complete the evaluation document, he would take that to be our resignation from the company. What’s more, we would be required to complete a similar exercise every week for the foreseeable future. The only weeks that were exempted were Christmas, Thanksgiving, and the 4th of July.

The task consisted of reading almost 50 pages of instructions and supporting material and filling out a 34-page form with hundreds of fields. We were to evaluate a scene using a particular methodology which was detailed in the supporting material. The methodology was completely different than the training I had just taken, and paid thousands of dollars for.

The mentors were called to a meeting with three of the most experienced mentors who had already completed this task as a pilot. Their news was dismal. The analysis had taken them many hours to complete. One person took 12 hours. One took 18. And because we were specifically paid by the student, we wouldn’t be paid for this additional labor.

Alarm bells were ringing in my head. I still didn’t have a contract. I already had some time sunk into this program. Now I was being asked to do this further task, or be fired before I had even had a chance to work.

April 19th came and still no contract. The scene analysis was due on the 22nd. I still really wanted to do this work. I wanted to be able to mentor new writers. So I did my best to complete the analysis. The supporting material and instructions were labyrinthine and verbose. The 34-page form was clumsy and didn’t always work the way it was supposed to. The rubric was not what I had been trained on. I worked on the form for 8 hours then turned it in, incomplete. And because I had not been officially contracted to work, I sent the company an invoice for my time.

This invoice was meant to be a statement that I valued my own time and was a professional, not an employee who could be dictated to at will. It was a way to establish some boundaries within a chaotic situation. I protested to the people I could—my former instructor, the mentor director, and my apprenticeship coach. But everyone was a contractor. Everyone was dismayed by the new assignment, and no one knew what was happening, why we had to do this, or what was going on. Everyone was bewildered and angry.

I received my results on Friday, two days after the due date. It was obviously being evaluated by a non-human program. There was zero nuance in interpreting the answers. If you misspelled something, or missed a single word, the answer was marked wrong. Why were they doing this? What purpose did it serve? All the mentors were failing, and no one had fully completed the task (except one dogged individual who spent 18 hours at it).

As a former architect, most of my professional life has been spent working with contractors, being a contractor, and working side-by-side with other contractors. I knew this wasn’t right. Contractors are not employees. You can’t just dictate arbitrary terms to contracted labor. My job was supposed to be mentoring students, not filling out forms for some trumped-up task.

I sent emails to the CEO, expressing my concern. I thought maybe he didn’t really know what was going on, that he didn’t realize the company might be breaking Department of Labor laws about what was appropriate for contracted labor. I received no answer.

The Crisis Point

And then we got another assignment. The same kind of thing: a granular analysis of a scene using this cumbersome new rubric. The same comply-or-die rhetoric. And the ironic thing was, although the methodology was so complex and granular, it was impossible to truly evaluate the scene within its parameters. I could see at a glance that the scene wasn’t working because the protagonist wasn’t consistent in her stated goal; that the object of desire changed midway through; that there were logical inconsistencies in the unfolding of the action. But none of that was part of the fill-in-the-blank format of the form.

Despite my own and others’ outrage, no one in management seemed to be walking this back. No one in management seemed to understand that this whole process was possibly in conflict with contract law. Management’s only response was to double down, to become more aggressive, and to deride the abilities of the staff who had been mentoring their students.

The Climax

I decided not to donate any more of my time to a company who seemed to be nefarious and acting in bad faith.

In my opinion, this is not how you teach people to write. Writing is not engineering, or accounting. It’s not filling out forms. It’s giving voice to the subconscious and the soul. There are rules and methods, and agreed on best-practices, but this new rubric was ridiculous.

I chose not to turn in the second analysis. Instead, I wrote another email to the CEO expressing my concerns in firmer terms. Time was ticking—the new students were to begin in a week, and I wanted to have the contract and legal issues resolved before starting work with my students.

The CEO responded by saying I had not accepted a contract with the company.

I was flabbergasted. I had never received a contract to reject or accept. Up to this time I had been working in good faith, expending effort on preparing for my students and completing the company’s required evaluation. But all my accesses were revoked, my students were reassigned, and I was no longer a mentor at the company.

I was not alone. Another new mentor had also been evicted, after raising the same concerns that I had. Many established mentors quit in protest over the requirement to perform uncompensated labor, and the general hostility and aggression being exhibited by the owner and the CEO.

The Resolution

I wish I could say there was a satisfactory resolution, but there isn’t. The company sent out an email saying they were cancelling the new mentor training, and that no new mentors would be sought in the future. Yet they were still onboarding students, and assigning them to work under the owner and the CEO, as well as taking the students left behind by the departing mentors.

I don’t believe that two men can handle the weekly assignments of all these students plus run the company. Not without the help of AI. And the students were (and are) paying $1200/month to work with individual mentors on their writing. This is not what they were promised.

And now I will reveal the name of the company and the men who run it. The company is Story Grid. The men in charge are Shawn Coyne and Tim Grahl (CEO).

Caveat emptor: let the buyer beware.

A Final Note

There are no shortcuts to creative success. There is no magic bullet. There is only the work.

My passion is writing, and helping other authors reach their dreams. To any writers out there who want a personalized, structured approach to writing or revising their book, look me up at https://plotandpen.com. If your work is out of my wheelhouse, I will recommend other editors or coaches who would be a better fit.