Mystery Bookstores Solve Scam

by Kevin Howell, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 3/29/2007

When the owner of the Seattle Mystery Bookshop was recently scammed by a vanity publishing house, he set out to solve the fraud himself.

J.B. Dickey recently took a phone order for The Shortcut: 20 Stories to Get You from Here to There (Author Identity Press, $17.95 978-14243-2797-3 ). He took the customer's name and credit card information before placing an order through Ingram. Both turned out to be phony—something Dickey didn't find out until after the two non-returnable copies arrived.

"Our normal procedure is that we feel a credit card is a failsafe," said Dickey. "We don't charge the sale until it's ready to send out. Except this time we found out all the information we were given was fraudulent."

Dickey swallowed the feeling of being duped and launched a warning on the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association listserv, saying, "I hate like hell committing my buffoonery to the world-at-large, but if it stops someone else from making my mistake, good. If it can expose the mean-spirited jackasses behind this scam, all the better."

The posting got some comments from other booksellers in several different states who'd gotten stuck with the same book. In fact, the customer ordering the book had used the same fake name, Michael Evers.

Evers, it turns out, is the name of the main character in a suspense novel called The Palace of Wisdom: A Rock and Roll Fable by Kevin A. Fabiano, printed by another in-demand publisher, PublishAmerica. Fabiano, whose Web site http://kevinfabiano.com says he's a New York lawyer, is also one of the contributing authors to The Shortcut.

Back in November 2006, Victoria Strauss investigated complaints about Author Identity Press on her Writer Beware blog. She devoted an entire entry on November 20, 2006, questioning the vanity press's credibility and attempted to track down just who was behind this vanity press, whose own Web site http://authoridentity.com offers writers no names and no way to reach the potential publisher other than via e-mail.

"I hope this warning reaches other bookstores," said Dickey. "Anyone being contacted about ordering this book should *69 the call to get their real phone number and let them know we're onto them."