‘Our Goal Is to Get Their Money’: Inside a Firm Charged With Scamming Writers for Millions

Kevin Dettler knows he shouldn’t have taken the call. But he was flattered. Dettler, 71, is a successful farmer in Doland, South Dakota (pop. 189), where he grows corn and soybeans. Until 2014 he also owned a restaurant called Trophy’s Steakhouse in Maricopa County, Arizona, where he and his wife spend winters. A passionate hunter, Dettler had adorned the restaurant with a bevy of taxidermied prizes: elk, bison, bears. By his 60s, he came to believe he had a book’s worth of great yarns to share. “Whenever I told my hunting stories, people always commented that I should write a book,” he says. In 2012 he self-published one about his quest for the North American Super Slam, an elite big-game award, and sold it at Trophy’s. He called it Hunting: You’ve Got to Be Kidding!

The term “self-publishing” is something of a misnomer, because it often involves the use of a company in the multibillion-dollar field of author services. The main thing author services companies do is print self-published books on demand for a fee. In this model, many author services “agents” also sell writers their firms’ editing, marketing and the like. When they’re giving writers the hard sell, they might frame this process as an empowering way to circumvent traditional gatekeepers, but critics say the author services industry is plagued by predatory sales practices and fraud. “Almost by definition, people in that space have been bad actors, because they are posing as publishers and pretending to be something they aren’t,” says Orna Ross, director of the Alliance of Independent Authors, an advocacy group.