Did This Felon Con The Big 6 Into Publishing Him?

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djf881

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Last month, Mitchell Gross, AKA Mitchell Graham pled guilty to conning his former girlfriend out of over 3 million dollars. He's also the author of a fantasy trilogy published by HarperCollins and a couple of legal thrillers published by Tor/Forge.

In 2002, he secured literary representation and his first book deal by publicizing his grand-prize win in something called the Delmont-Ross writing competition. In several interviews he claimed that he was contacted by 4 agents and 5 publishers the day the prize was announced.

The thing is, the Delmont-Ross contest is fake, as Ann Crispin and Victoria Strauss at Writer Beware have exhaustively established: http://accrispin.blogspot.com/2012/01/delmont-ross-writing-contest-saga-of.html

Writer Beware found fake press releases about the Delmont-Ross, and Graham placed announcements about his winning manuscript in legitimate SF/F genre publications. Graham actually hired well-known sci-fi author Ben Bova to judge the contest, and then gave Bova only one manuscript to consider for the prize.

These days, I can't imagine an author getting agents' attention with a fake contest. Most real contests don't impress even agents, lately in part because there's been such a proliferation of awards. But ten years ago, most agents didn't accept e-queries, information about how to query was not widely available, and contact information for agents often wasn't online, so it was a lot harder to submit. There was much less slush back then, and the quality was better than it is now, because the barriers to entry would have filtered out a lot of the crazy.

It's not at all difficult for me to imagine that an agent or editor's decision about a manuscript would be influenced by a belief that the book had been decisively chosen by a panel of judges in a contest with a significant prize and major corporate sponsors. I think this dude conned HarperCollins into publishing him.
 

happywritermom

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He might have conned his way out of the slush pile, but winning a contest -- real or fake -- wouldn't get him any farther than that unless part of the prize was a contract.

What a loser though.
 

jjdebenedictis

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I think he's a scummy, scuzzy slime-dog who deserves to go to jail for what he did to his girlfriend. He's also a scummy, scuzzy slime-dog (but with no requirement for jail) for what he did to his agent and publisher.

However: he can't con individual readers unless he's plagiarizing another writer's words. He can't build a career on nothing.

So he has to have some genuine talent (barring a pending plagiarism scandal). Then he used nefarious means to generate excitement over his book.

Yeah, he's a dirtbag. At the same time, the words on the page have to stand on their own merits.
 

Jamesaritchie

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If he did con them, good for him. An agent or publisher that doesn't judge a manuscript on its own merit deserves to be conned.
 

djf881

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how were they conned when they got the exact book they paid for?

A good manuscript is all you need to get published, but publishing decisions are not made in a vacuum. In particular, the belief that someone else likes or dislikes a manuscript influences people's assessments of it, and people tend to agree with a perceived consensus.

This is why I discourage writers who are querying from discussing their submissions online, and why agents discourage writers from talking about submissions. To like a manuscript is to disagree with all the people who rejected it. Similarly, a collection of awards can look persuasive, and can also appear to be a powerful platform for marketing the book.

This dude managed to present himself as having won a contest that supposedly had 500 entries, was judged by a panel of established authors and administered by a major bookstore account. That had to factor into the consideration of the book, which is, incidentally, a piece of shit.

Keep in mind that this happened in early 2002. The Internet, for most people, was still dial-up through AOL, Yahoo was bigger than Google, and Mark Zuckerberg was still in high school. There was less information out there, and fewer people looking for it.

This guy went to extraordinary lengths to perpetrate this hoax. He hired legitimate authors to judge his fake contest (which had no entries except his own), and they probably provided quotes for him to use in his press materials. He sent fake press releases to legitimate publications, and got announcements about his award placed in them. I can see how people might take this at face value.

On the other hand, Graham also claimed to be an Olympic athlete and a brain doctor in his author bio, so maybe they should have seen through him.
 

djf881

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If he did con them, good for him. An agent or publisher that doesn't judge a manuscript on its own merit deserves to be conned.

What if he were a nonfiction author who lied about having a PhD in the subject of his book?
 

robjvargas

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What if he were a nonfiction author who lied about having a PhD in the subject of his book?

I'm with Jamesaritchie. It takes... what... a phone call... to verify the degree. These aren't private documents.

Someone managed to convince themselves that the work merited publication, regardless of the means by how it got there.

Putting a name like Ben Bova into the contest had to lend it a good amount of credibility. But part of the process that got these books published is that someone decided to put their name on the work (at least within the publisher). And that sounds like someone failed due diligence, given the low quality of the resulting work.
 

HoneyBadger

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James Frey conned his agent and publishers.

This guy conned his girlfriend. The contest might have opened a door for him, but I doubt his books were unpublishable anyhow, so, no, I don't think he conned the publisher into publishing.
 

IceCreamEmpress

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People are always telling agents they have won contests the agents have never heard of. If it shuffles their submission to the top of the stack, that just means the agent is gullible--it doesn't mean that the agent isn't going to reject the manuscript if it's unpublishable.

I mean, folks, publishing people are cynical people. Nobody published this guy's stuff because he "won" the Wossname Prize; they published it because they thought they could sell copies of it to readers.

There was much less slush back then, and the quality was better than it is now, because the barriers to entry would have filtered out a lot of the crazy.

Ten years ago? Nonsense. Seriously, nonsense. People were delighted to print out and mail horrible, completely unready for publication queries and submissions.
 

djf881

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I'm with Jamesaritchie. It takes... what... a phone call... to verify the degree. These aren't private documents.

Someone managed to convince themselves that the work merited publication, regardless of the means by how it got there.

Putting a name like Ben Bova into the contest had to lend it a good amount of credibility. But part of the process that got these books published is that someone decided to put their name on the work (at least within the publisher). And that sounds like someone failed due diligence, given the low quality of the resulting work.

So, an elaborate fraud is less egregious than a flimsy one? I think what this guy did is no different than someone submitting a fraudulent resume for a job application.

The decision to publish a book is one of economics, as much as one of taste. As much as agents and editors talk about acquisitions in the language of falling in love, the marketing benefit this guy gained through defrauding Bova and the publications that ran his announcements may have outweighed the quality of some other author's manuscript. The apparent endorsement of the "prestigious" panel of Delmont-Ross judges might also have swayed an agent or editor's assessment of the work.

What this guy did was embarrassing for the people who trusted him and unfair for other writers who were trying to submit to the agents and publishers who were the victims of this con.
 

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I have no idea what the situation was like ten years ago, since I wasn't seeking publication then. I can say right now that several big-time agents have told me 'contests don't mean a thing, even when you win.' A legitimate contest win might give a slight edge, but the mms stands on its own.

The fact that HC chose to publish garbage, now or then, is more a reflection on them than on Mr. Gross/Graham's career as a con artist.
 

djf881

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People are always telling agents they have won contests the agents have never heard of. If it shuffles their submission to the top of the stack, that just means the agent is gullible--it doesn't mean that the agent isn't going to reject the manuscript if it's unpublishable.

I mean, folks, publishing people are cynical people. Nobody published this guy's stuff because he "won" the Wossname Prize; they published it because they thought they could sell copies of it to readers.

There's been a proliferation of writing contests with the growth of the Internet. I don't think faking a contest win would work today, because an agent isn't likely to give any weight to even a real win in an obscure contest. But this might have been more persuasive a decade ago.

Ten years ago? Nonsense. Seriously, nonsense. People were delighted to print out and mail horrible, completely unready for publication queries and submissions.

The practical barriers to submitting have fallen remarkably in the last ten years. The physical cost and effort associated with stuffing queries into envelopes deterred a lot of people from submitting before agents started taking e-queries.

It used to be difficult to find out how to contact agents. There were no databases full of contact information. There was no Google Books, and no "search inside" function on Amazon back then, so you couldn't look at acknowledgements to see who represented what. I'm not sure if there was a Publishers Marketplace site back then, but I know there was no AgentQuery or Querytracker. Many agents had no online presence.

You had to go find the big book of agents, and before you could find the big book of agents, you had to know that there was a big book of agents.

Agents saw a lot fewer unsolicited queries back then.
 

IceCreamEmpress

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djf881, if you are comparing your experience working in publishing ten years ago to your experience working in publishing today, all I can say is that our experiences differ.

If you are hypothesizing about what it "must have" been like in publishing ten years ago vs. what it "must be" like in publishing today, my experience suggests that your hypotheses are mistaken.
 

djf881

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djf881, if you are comparing your experience working in publishing ten years ago to your experience working in publishing today, all I can say is that our experiences differ.

If you are hypothesizing about what it "must have" been like in publishing ten years ago vs. what it "must be" like in publishing today, my experience suggests that your hypotheses are mistaken.

I know what it's like today. I know what resources are available today that were not available to authors ten years ago. I know that agents who do not accept queries by e-mail today get far fewer queries than agents who take e-queries.

I know that Google changed the ease at which information can be accessed relative to search engines that preceded it. I know that the publishing industry used to seem inaccessible to outsiders, and that blogs and Twitter have done a lot to change that.

I know that, in the late 1990's, the only resource Nicholas Sparks could find about how to contact agents was a print book that led him to query an agent who had been dead for two years.

Today, agents would not be impressed by a prize from an obscure contest. Maybe agents ten years ago wouldn't have been impressed either. But the whole reason that shitty contests have proliferated is the idea that winning a contest used to be a way to get agents' attention.

Graham claims that the day after his prize was announced, he was contacted by four agents and five publishers, inquiring about the winning manuscript. Graham is a compulsive liar, so it's very possible that this isn't true.

Maybe Graham obtained literary representation through the conventional query process and fabricated the story about agents and publishers breathlessly phoning him after he sent out his bogus press release.

It's also possible that agents would be interested in representing someone who appeared to have won a significant prize in a contest judged by respected authors.
 

IceCreamEmpress

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I know what it's like today, and I know what it was like ten years ago. And ten years before that.

I would be beyond shocked if anyone in publishing gave a cahootie's ass about this guy's fake contest ten years ago. The Internet was working then, too, as were directories of real contests like the ones compiled by Poets and Writers.
 

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Given that his earlier scams had given him millions of dollars to play with, he could arrange a elaborate hoax, including paying honorariums to a variety of real writers to judge a phony contest.

Were his books publishable? There are three categories of novels: Those that are so brilliant that they're going to be snatched up at once, those that are so dreadful that they'll never be published at all, and those that fall in between.

In that great gray area of competent mediocrity, the cutoff between published and not-published can hinge on how hot the market for that genre is right now, whether the author is cheerfully friendly, or whether the book has won a contest.

The gentleman threw a lot of money at this one. I'm pretty sure that the eventual editor did call Ben Bova up on the phone and ask whether the book won this contest. Heck, you send me a couple of thousand bucks and I'll judge the Rootie-Kazootie Kale Contest for you. If the check clears, I probably won't even ask who Rootie Kazootie is.

Also, we know one more thing: The gentleman genuinely is a talented storyteller. Whatever advance he got from his publishers was undoubtedly small potatoes compared to the millions he scammed off at least three other people.

Proof, once again, if anyone needed it, that given low enough scruples and a high enough bank balance, you can do anything ... for a while.
 

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All this Mitchell Gross talk has me totally jonesing for the new Kevin Trudeau release.


While you wait, if you want some interesting (somewhat scandalous) reading, check out links in the WinePress thread in Bewares. I was surprised it hadn't already made headlines all over this site.
 

colealpaugh

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While you wait, if you want some interesting (somewhat scandalous) reading, check out links in the WinePress thread in Bewares. I was surprised it hadn't already made headlines all over this site.

Ha, now I'm considering making up "Titus 2:4-5" t-shirts for my girls soccer team.

Eh, on second thought, nobody would get it ...
 

blacbird

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There are three categories of novels: Those that are so brilliant that they're going to be snatched up at once, those that are so dreadful that they'll never be published at all, and those that fall in between.

In that great gray area of competent mediocrity, the cutoff between published and not-published can hinge on how hot the market for that genre is right now, whether the author is cheerfully friendly, or whether the book has won a contest.

Gee. Does this mean that the manuscript isn't the only thing that matters? In contrast to any number of comments posted at AW that assert precisely that opinion?

caw
 
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