MAY 14, TUESDAY

SCAMMING

This is the second time someone has approached me about publishing Kathe‘s story, To Think That The Same Sun Shines Over All Of Us. It is her life story and a beautiful, well written and moving story. I knew she had written it and when she died I decided to self publish it on Blurb and to give it to her friends. It is still available on Blurb.com. I just came back from a pilgrimage to Winsen, Germany, the town where the story takes place.

But I was immediately suspicious when yesterday a young woman called out of the blue from South Bend, Indiana, saying she was very interested in publishing it. The woman said she was a literary agent, but didn’t sound like one. She had an accent that sounded south of the border and she pronounced Kathe’s name wrong. I told her I was doubtful that her offer was legitimate but said she could send me written information if she wanted to. But instead she went ahead with her offer. She said first the book would have to have my permission to be put on some official list of books to make sure it wasn’t pirated in some way. The publishers could do it for me for $10,000 but she could do it for $1500. She added, the publishers were offering $150,000 in payment for publishing Kathe’s story. She didn’t say anything about the story and how it had moved her.

I told her that I didn’t believe her but that she could send me written information. The line went dead. I think she hung up.

But as soon as she hung up, probably moving on to the next in a list of Blurb’s self published books, and a new phone call, a new author, I became at first saddened and then angry. First of all, hers is a thankless task, trying to con person after person into paying $1500 to get their self published book put on a list to be published with a promise of $150,000 reward. How tiring it must to be to pretend to be a literary agent lying all day long in call after call. I doubt if she would get any of the $1500 money she conned people out of.

But then I thought of the pain that the scam could and probably was causing people. It is not only the pain of being conned out of $1500. It is the even greater pain that someone who has written a book and hopes it will be noticed and sell must feel when they believe that someone is truly interested in publishing what they have written. The scam then becomes very cruel as the person discovers that the person is lying when they pretend to like the book and realizes that the supposed literary agent has probably not even read their book. Being lied to about something so deeply personal would be very painful, with the loss of $1500 intensifying the pain. It is something that the author would be so hurt by that they would never mention it to anyone even while it kept eating away at them.

And finally, Kathe’s story was so well written and so heartfelt and so touching to anyone who might read it, that her story being used in this way as a scam to manipulate Kathe’s emotions if she were alive and had answered the phone, or my emotions when I did answer, seems unbelieveably cruel and painful.

Right now, after writing this I imagine that the young woman with a Spanish accent is raising the hopes of a second or third person and will keep doing this all day until someone, believing that someone likes the book they worked so hard on enough to pay $150,000 for it, says yes, sign me up, here is my check for $1500.

How could someone be so cruel?