The Author Trap: Inside The Scheme Selling Lies to Hopeful Writers
1/15/202636 min
Brent Crane is being chased through a mall in the Philippines. He's on the trail of Page Turner, the company that has been accused of stealing $44 million from hopeful writers in one of the most brazen scams the book publishing world has ever seen.
Chameleon is a production of Campside Media and Audiochuck.
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Clips
Showing 10 of 15Transcript preview
First 90 secondsVictoria Strauss· Guest0:00
[crickets chirping] Campsite Media.
Brent Crane· Guest0:03
Hello?
Josh Dean· Host0:05
What is this?
Speaker 30:06
So what do you want me to say?
Victoria Strauss· Guest0:07
Yeah, what's going on here? Like, why- Oh, it's just, um, Chameleon.
Brandi Churchwell0:11
Chameleon.
Brent Crane· Guest0:11
Chameleon Weekly.
Josh Dean· Host0:12
Oh. [laughs] [phone beeping] Most anyone who's published stories online or in print, and especially anyone who has self-published, has gotten calls or emails like the ones a guy named Kevin Detler started getting a few years back. Kevin, now in his very early 70s, but at that point in his late 60s, is a soybean farmer from South Dakota who loves to hunt. If it walks in North America and can be hunted, Kevin has almost certainly shot it. And if it was magnificent enough, he also probably had it stuffed and mounted and put on display in a restaurant he used to own. It's called, appropriately, Trophies Steakhouse. Truth is, Kevin loved to talk about hunting and stuffing critters so much that he self-published a book in 2012 called Hunting: You've Got to be Kidding, which he describes in his own promotional copy as a humorous and emotional story of his endeavor to achieve what only one hundred and twenty hunters in the world had accomplished.
Speaker 31:14
[dramatic music] In the harsh Arctic wilderness, one man begins on a quest beyond hunting to complete the North American twenty-nine.
Josh Dean· Host1:20
That being a successful kill of all twenty-nine big game species in North America, also known as the Super Slam.