Off the Top of My Head

Ezine Articles Running the Old Who’s Who Scam

I normally cut through my emails like a Samurai, slashing every bit of Spam as fast as possible. Today, however, I threw one mail from Ezine Articles into the trash then quickly recovered it as something caught my eye. Although it was an obvious form letter, they were making a plea for self help authors which sounded like a perfect match to me. I already write countless articles which have been included everywhere from online to print media and have always been a great marketing technique, especially when it came to sales. So I opened it up and saw they were partnering up with another site which specializes in that area to “publish” an ebook that contained articles from knowledgeable self help authors. The payoff was a bio at the end of your piece and guaranteed distribution of 100,000+. Here is the first part of their pitch

Dear Jason,

This is Chris Knight, the publisher of: http://EzineArticles.com

Would you like one of your articles featured in a self help book that includes articles written by Ken Blanchard, Mark Victor Hansen and Les Brown?

I am working with SelfGrowth.com to find great self improvement authors for a new paperback book. The project is being organized by David Riklan, the founder of http://www.SelfGrowth.com.

Ken Blanchard, Mark Victor Hansen and Les Brown are already in it and dozens of EzineArticles expert authors will also be included!
Isn’t that exciting?  I’ve already told David to count me in as an author!  Then, I asked him if I could invite other people to join us.  He said “Yes!” which is why I’m writing to you today.

This is the third book in a series created by SelfGrowth.com.
The title will be:

“101 Great Ways to Improve Your Life, Volume 3.”

To see details on the first book in the series, go to http://www.SelfGrowth.com/products/greatwaysbook1.html

Briefly, David will include 101 articles or short chapters from 101 experts in the self-improvement industry. Each expert will provide an article teaching people “How to Improve Your Life.”

Would you be interested in submitting an article for this new print book?

Although I will be the first to admit it has the typical overhype of Spam, it is targeted and so far sounds like it could be turned into an opportunity. I was actually considering applying and thought I would scan the rest of the email out of curiosity. Then I found this condition at the bottom of the mail (after paragraphs and paragraphs of hype designed to make you stop reading and just sign up)

The retail price of the book is $14.95. To kick off a strong launch, David is asking each author to purchase at least 100 copies of the book at the author’s rate of a 50% discount off the retail price. The total cost for 100 books is $750. The retail value of the books is $1,495 (100 books sold at 14.95 each)

The purpose of asking all of the authors to purchase books is to guarantee an immediate distribution of at least 10,000 copies.

So now the whole thing becomes clear. This is basically the Who’s Who scam which will bring in around $8,000 without lifting a finger. For those of you not familiar with Who’s Who it was a company in the US that published a book supposedly giving recognition to the top students in the country. Their name would be printed in this book and immortalized for all to recognize their tremendous achievement. All parents had to do was fill out an application for their High School student which would be evaluated and only the best would be accepted. Of course the scam was that everyone was accepted and all parents needed to do is support this great resource by buying one of the books for like $89.95 (The book was just pages and pages of peoples names). I remember one of my friends moms fell for the whole thing. The funny part was the kid was a complete burnout that hardly went to class and was failing out of everything. It was a great source of comedy that he was the supposed “cream of the crop”.

So anyway, congrats on Ezine for adapting the scam. The sad part is they will probably get their 101 authors but I don’t see the book being worth the digital paper it’s printed given their conditions for submission

David is looking for articles roughly between 600-1200 words for each of the chapters plus a short bio at the end.  The article doesn’t need to be new material

I’m not sure who I feel more sorry for, the authors that get scammed or the 6 people that buy the thing only to realize its a collection of crappy articles already available all over the web.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 16th, 2006 at 7:31 am and is filed under Online Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.