There was more: \u201cTo further support the launch and regional engagement of your work, Hachette will fully sponsor a complimentary book signing event with you as our honoured guest.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sponsorship would include a round-trip airfare (with accommodation) to New Zealand, full venue arrangements, event marketing and media engagement, official press releases and in-store promotions and merchandising. The signing event would take place at Tauranga\u2019s Mercury Arena Suites, \u201coffering corporate hospitality and panoramic views\u201d.<\/p>\n
Mehrer says news of the deal came via a representative of a vanity publishing company she had paid to help her prepare Box of Dreams \u2013 the book she completed after her youngest son\u2019s suicide \u2013 for print-on-demand platforms.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe said he had a very interesting offer for me. This publishing company was interested in my book, and interested in doing a book signing \u2013 I would travel there … and that he was going to have someone call me.\u201d<\/p>\n
The second phone call, says Mehrer, \u201cwas kind of \u2018you have to let us know right away, these things aren\u2019t going to wait\u2019. I kept asking, \u2018you\u2019re talking about paying me, right?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Speaking to the New Zealand Herald from Tennessee, Mehrer is sharp and likeable. She loves that, as she is preparing for an evening wine in her time zone, a reporter from Auckland is drinking a morning coffee. And she\u2019s grateful that, when she was ultimately asked to pay almost $23,000 to have physical copies of her book printed, instinct told her to go direct to Hachette Aotearoa New Zealand.<\/p>\n
Mehrer quickly learned the offer she was looking at had not originated from Hachette. <\/p>\n
There would be no round trip to Tauranga. The publishing company did not employ anyone called Sophia Langford \u2013 in fact, the \u201cdirector of international acquisitions\u201d did not even exist as a job title. (When the Herald googled Langford\u2019s name, the top 10 results included a convict transported from England to Australia in 1794. Her crime was listed as \u201chighway robbery\u201d.)<\/p>\n
\u201cIt just didn\u2019t feel right,\u201d says Mehrer, recalling the conversations she had before two PDF documents landed in her inbox in June.<\/p>\n
They came from vanity publishing company The Book Professionals, \u201cpresented as though it was sent on behalf of Hachette, with \u2018Hachette Australia & New Zealand\u2019 in the subject line\u201d.<\/p>\n
The PDF signed by Sophia Langford, titled \u201cHachetter [sic] Offer\u201d, was watermarked and letterheaded \u201cHachette Book Group\u201d; its footnote field contained the copyright \u201c2025 Hachette Aotearoa New Zealand\u201d.<\/p>\n
The second PDF was a contract agreement between Mehrer and The Book Professionals \u2013 the firm she says she\u2019d paid around US$9000 ($15,700) to get Box of Dreams ready for print-on-demand platforms.<\/p>\n
The book had been a work in progress for some time. But when Mehrer\u2019s 22-year-old son took his own life in 2023, \u201cI decided that I was going to finish this book that I just hadn\u2019t been able to before\u201d.<\/p>\n
In Box of Dreams, a central character considers suicide.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt ends on a note of her healing. That really was just to honour my son and to \u2013 oh, hopefully if people read it \u2013 to bring some awareness … to highlight that when it looks like the end, it\u2019s not necessarily the end. There\u2019s something on the other side of that, if you can just hang on a little bit longer.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mehrer says she put \u201cblood, sweat and tears\u201d into the story. When the alleged offer from Hachette landed, \u201cat first I was like, oh my gosh, somebody noticed \u2013 and then, as I read into it, I found that yeah, if it\u2019s too good to be true, as we\u2019ve said for decades, it typically is\u201d.<\/p>\n
She says after confirming there was no legitimate deal on the table, she took another call from The Book Publishers.<\/p>\n
\u201cI said I reached out to this company [Hachette] and they came back to me and said very frankly that this is not how they solicit books, this is not how it goes and they have no record of this offer … <\/p>\n
\u201cHe said oh, no, it\u2019s not directly through them, we have people that work with them … I said I didn\u2019t want to hear it anymore. And I did tell him I had contacted local law enforcement.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mehrer says while The Book Professionals did deliver a product she is selling via print-on-demand platforms, \u201cI will not use a company like this again\u201d.<\/p>\n
She advises authors who want to self-publish to research guidelines that are readily available on the likes of Amazon and, if there are areas they are not confident in, consider using individual experts specific to those fields \u2013 editing, manuscript development, or photography, for example.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are so many vanity publishers out there, that the moment you start inquiring about it, you\u2019re going to get a tonne of calls … those vanity publishers make it sound like they are going to do everything for you, and your book is the best thing since frozen water. I would say if somebody\u2019s offering a package, I am not likely to pay attention to it. I\u2019m going to search out my own professionals for the items I need.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve learnt a great lesson and hopefully other independent authors can glean something from it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Herald emailed a number of questions to The Book Professionals about its relationship with Hachette Aotearoa New Zealand but, as yet, has received no response.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Hachette (which also operates the Moa Press and Little Moa imprints) has issued a publishing fraud alert on its website.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have seen an alarming rise in scam attempts in which hackers impersonate Hachette Aotearoa New Zealand employees, authors, and agents in an attempt to attain unpublished manuscripts or personal information,\u201d the alert says.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome of these scams are quite sophisticated. The hackers are adept impersonators, comfortable with \u2018editorial\u2019 speak, and may refer to recent events in the industry to legitimise their requests. Hackers can easily simulate staff with impersonated domain emails. Sometimes the difference in a hacker\u2019s email address is so subtle that it is easy to miss.\u201d<\/p>\n
Melanee Winder, managing director, said following the approach from Mehrer, she had contacted Hachette\u2019s offices in Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom to check no legitimate offers had been made. She had also sought advice from the company\u2019s legal counsel in the UK.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd we just said to her [Mehrer], please don\u2019t pay anything … I don\u2019t know if they would have actually printed some books. They might have done. But we weren\u2019t ever going to sell them here … I don\u2019t think they were going to take her money and do nothing, but none of the other stuff would have happened … I mean the tour bit was just kind of crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Winder said the royalty payment offered to Mehrer was \u201cvery high\u201d but, more generally, the documentation she saw \u201cwas just not how book contracts are done\u201d.<\/p>\n
The warning on Hachette Aotearoa New Zealand\u2019s website confirms it would never ask prospective authors for any form of payment (such as a contribution to print costs) as part of an offer of publication, or request bank account information as part of a manuscript submission process.<\/p>\n
It urges anyone who thinks they have been the victim of a scam to contact law enforcement right away.<\/p>\n
Kim Knight is a senior journalist on the New Zealand Herald\u2019s lifestyle desk.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There was more: \u201cTo further support the launch and regional engagement of your work, Hachette will fully sponsor…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":116175,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2840,74,63057,85,13851,82598,2108,3468,18287,8231,17309,37483,71,1964,82597,27246,111,43,139,69,13692,19349,82599,6747,9882,11422,1227,12214,3040,8222,540,6730,80],"class_list":["post-116174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-across","tag-after","tag-airfare","tag-australia","tag-author","tag-bogus","tag-book","tag-deal","tag-distribution","tag-event","tag-exposed","tag-fake","tag-from","tag-guest","tag-hachette","tag-honoured","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-offer","tag-publishing","tag-roundtrip","tag-royalty","tag-spectacular","tag-standards","tag-tauranga","tag-tennessee","tag-us","tag-warned","tag-where","tag-would","tag-zealand"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116174"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116174\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/116175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}