Where Do You Draw the Line?

A curious incident has been coming to light over the past couple of weeks involving a scammer who ripped off what statistics from book distributor Ingram suggest to have been hundreds of bookstores across the country. The perpetrator appears to have been (or, at least, been involved with) a company called Author Identity Publishing, which past research has suggested to be a vanity press.

The structure of the operation is that someone calling himself Michael Evers (which would subsequently be revealed as a pseudonym) would order a couple copies of a book of short stories called The Shortcut from a bookstore, which would get the non-returnable copies from Ingram. "Michael Evers" would never pick them up, the idea being to effectively force bookstores to stock copies.

This tactic is nothing new. Another disreputable vanity press, PublishAmerica, has advocated it to its authors in the past. However, AIP's case went a step further.

It would soon become clear to bookstore owners that Michael Evers wasn't coming (based on comments I've heard, this kind of behavior happens to booksellers all the time). They'd try to charge his credit card information and discover that it, along with his name and phone number, was fake.

As of right now, there hasn't been anything in the way of a lawsuit, but Ingram has made The Shortcut returnable and just about every bookseller in North America has something in the way of a "do not order" flag on it.

This is yet another reason I'm not fond of guerrilla marketing. One man's nifty, under-the-radar marketing tactic is another man's wire fraud (or vandalism, or, I don't know, indecent exposure; at any rate, something you shouldn't be doing).

Whatever you're going to do, this is a field where you need to know the law. If you're not sure about something, for dog's sake, look into it. The crux of this story is that I'm sure Michael Evers (who research indicates is probably Kevin Fabiano, one of the book's contributors) thought this was just a neat little trick to get his book on the shelves, not something malicious or illegal (in a way that could merit a federal investigation, if Ingram's sales numbers mean what I think they mean).

There really should be courses on industry legal matters required for college programs in entertainment fields. I've met a discouraging number of industry professionals who don't understand that trademark and copyright aren't the same thing. As it is, however, we'll have to do it ourselves. All I can say for the time being is, when faced with "innovative ideas" in any field, always keep this story in mind.