Excerpt from Moira Allen newsletter

Martha Ivery Indicted
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On June 1, the U.S. District Court for the Northen District of
New York ruled that Martha Ivery, president of Press-TIGE
Publishing Company, "willfully and knowingly devised, and
intended to devise, a scheme and artifice to defraud prospective
authors and to obtain their money and property by means of false
and fraudulent pretenses, representations, and promises." The
primary "pretense" was that of accepting fees to publish authors'
books without actually doing so, offering "a variety of excuses
for non-publication for years following the initial payment,
including problems with illustrations, problems with printers,
lost manuscripts, computer viruses, failed computer disks, and
production backlogs due to the large volumne of retail orders
placed through Press-TIGE." In addition to collecting
publication fees directly from authors, Ivery also referred
authors to "Kelly O'Donnell," allegedly a literary agent, who
collected additional fees for representation and book editing --
but who was actually Ivery herself. In 2002, Ivery filed for
bankruptcy, but then "reconstituted Press-TIGE in a new entity,
New Millenium Publishing House, Inc., and continued to solicit
payments from the same prospective authors under the auspices of
the new entity." Ivery was indicted for 17 counts of fraud,
including 15 counts of mail fraud, one count of fraud connected
with an access device (a credit card terminal), and one count of
"making a false oath in a bankruptcy hearing." In his "blawg,"
Scrivener's Error, copyright lawyer C.E. Petit estimates the
losses to authors to be in the range of $500,000 to $800,000.
Read the official indictment at
http://www.authorslawyer.com/iveryindict.html
Scrivener's Error - http://scrivenerserror.blogspot.com/

I have found in my experience that as a new or even not so new author you should try and get a publisher that someone you know used and was happy with. There are so many ways to cheat we aspiring writers out there as the post above this one shows. It happened to me once, well almost and never will again...

Thanks Dannye: Research and word of mouth do help. I will never again use someone who is not highly reccomended by someone I know.

Don't forget you can use the Preditors & Editors http://www.anotherealm.com/prededitors/ and SFWA Writers Beware http://www.sfwa.org/beware/ site to search for a publisher or agent and find out if they're recommended or not.

I found Preditors & Editors very helpful. Having a list of all recent offenses by BookSurge, my POD publisher, I was able to extract specific info on how they resolved all the complaints and did check with the BBB that all had been resolved since Amazon.com bought the company. So many people want to see themselves in print that I'm sure there are twice that many ready to dupe them. Karen

Thanks, Dannye.

Nice to know that you're always looking out for our interests :-)

YF, Sigrid