Bestseller Scam | DISCUSSION

which I can book to my name is Kenan welcome back to another video today i am doing a discussion video today i want to have a chat with you about something that happened about a month ago so it was around the end of august start of September and I'm almost sure you would have heard of it if you keep it here to the ground in regards to book related stuff but essentially this is the whole situation with Leni Sarah and her book handbook for mortals and the scandal so to speak of it becoming a number one bestseller I've actually already discussed this in my most recent podcast which I'll link in the description below but after I did that podcast I realized there's so much more information and it just gets so much more weird I just needed to make a video on this because it gets really weird and there's a lot some there's a lot happening there anyway let's get into it a roll the intro this is by no means an expose I mean all of the stuff I'm going to be mentioning has already been mentioned and of course I'm gonna link all of my sources below because there's a lot of research I did on this a lot of information that was uncovered by people's investigations where I think they deserve the credit but I think this may essentially be the only video where all that information is compiled into a all you need to know kind of video and as I said I have already discussed this a bit in the podcast that I'll link below from my podcast the book wars podcast but I didn't really talk specifically about this situation so much I just used it as an example for talking about people scamming the New York Times bestseller list as a whole so it was a quick summary in case you didn't know what happened was out of nowhere this book popped up as the number one bestseller on the New York Times bestseller list seemingly no one had heard of it it was a debut author debut publisher and everyone was just confused no one knew who she was what this book was there seemingly hadn't been any advertisements on a major scale to award it the number one bestseller spot so of course people came to the conclusion that it got that spot through I wouldn't say sinister that shady shady ways and as it turns out it did yeah so to make it on to the New York Times bestseller list you have to sell between 5,000 and 10,000 books in a week and that's just to make it onto the list so this book became number one and that's because they sold 18,000 in a week and this is a book again that no one had really heard of there were no blog posts or press from major book media leading up to this so everyone was confused anyway the best place for me to start with this discussion is to give you a timeline of what happened from the start to the end so right at the very start you have this woman called Lanie Sam who was a manager for a bunch of bands semi popular I mean the most popular of which I think would have been clean White T's you know that song that everyone plays when they first are learning guitar hey there Delila yeah she was a band manager for those guys and a bunch of other bands as well but essentially after that she approached this actor that you may be familiar with I think his name's Thomas P and Nicholas he's really a sea or d-list celebrity and I mean in the 90s he was a bit bigger he was Kevin from American Pie he was also in some other movies that I'm not familiar with I think that kind of American sort of like American classics either way he was big ish in the 90s so Lenny Sam approaches him because he's also a musician and she wanted to put together a band of musicians that are also actors and although that didn't go anywhere she did pitch to Thomas this script she had for a movie handbook for mortals Thomas had some notes but he did like what he saw sir she was recommended to turn it into an actual book series as well so that she could get that kind of why a audience which really is a smart business move there's nothing wrong with that though aiming for kind of like a harry potter situation the issue is that she had no real actual writing experience and she's even set herself that she's not a very good writer so normally what you would do in that situation is get a ghostwriter but she didn't do that anyway I will go further into that a bit later we're just doing the timeline right now so after that after that she wrote the book and this is another bit where it gets weird she wrote the book with specific actors in mind and she wrote the book for the purpose of a movie and that's one way to up a novel is to write it just thinking about how it would be as a movie because then really you're just writing a script in a different format and no one I mean that doesn't ever turn out to be a good book a book that is a book that is written for the purpose of being a script but it's weird because she wrote actors into it like carrot top carrot top was promised a role in the movie so she wrote a character for carrot top into the book it's just weird anyway after that leading up to so she wrote the book Nicholas sorry Thomas gave it to go ahead and they started doing some small promotions for example they were taking so they didn't even have a cover at this point keep in mind that if they didn't have a cover all they had was the plot and the book and that's how they were selling it so they were taking it to things like Wizard World Comic Con which is a very small scale version of Comic Con it's like Comic Con but with celebrities that kind of not really celebrities anymore and I'm not trying the roast Wizard World Comic Con here I mean I would go to that equivalent if they had it here but it's it's just not a large scale thing and she was doing promotion for it on really small platforms like for example a YouTube channel called what was it was that I think it's a three geeks channel or three geeks Network anyway I'll link those guys below but here's the thing about those guys first of all so they got a lot of dislikes on their stuff after all this controversy came out as if they somehow contributed to that situation but they didn't I mean they did the interview with her before the book even came out before the scandal happened so I feel bad for him and the interview was actually really good they have good interview format they kept it entertaining I would recommend checking out their channel because I do actually enjoy their content I only found them through search for this but those guys are actually pretty cool in I feel bad that they've copped some flack over something they had no control over yeah my point is that that's a really small YouTube channel and she was doing promotion through stuff like that so these are really small small platforms anyway after that the book comes out on the 15th of August I believe it was and within that week its number one bestseller it sold 18,000 it immediately copped a lot of backlash because people were rightfully suspicious and because it pushed another book from the number one spot the hey you give which is obviously massive it's being talked about everywhere if you're watching booktube videos you've seen videos on the hey you give and it's an important book as well it's raises important things and people were pissed off that handbook for mortals pushed that out of the way under suspicious circumstances further on from that they started promoting the movie as soon as that happen because they were riding the high of being a number one New York Times bestseller and the thing is they cast themselves as the two main characters Thomas and Thomas and Lenny and from my understanding it was meant to be a book about I mean obviously I haven't read it but she's in her late teens or early 20s the character god it's a pretentious thing to cast yourself in that way I mean that's subjective that's my opinion but that seems kind of douchey I mean this is an OPS's for the book itself I'm not gonna read it out because I'm trying to keep this video timely and it's already probably running a bit long but essentially the if you read the synopsis which you'll obviously find link to below it's fringy even the synopsis itself is crunchy it mentions in the synopsis that there's a love triangle which is obviously something that at this point people are begging to stop and yeah and then last step on that train was that obviously the situation was exposed there were people who did the research and found that it was very suspicious the circumstances and through further research found that the suspicion was well-placed you had people like Phil Stamper and Kaleigh Donaldson who did the research and found that what had happened is all the suspicion at this point is that they used something called result source which in itself is a shady ass website which basically would purchase the books that you put out from distributors that contributed data to the New York Times bestseller lists result sauce would pull small smallish amounts of that book in bulk from several separate places to make it look legit and it's hard to defend that website is not being Shady when after they were exposed as well the website took down their whole landing page and now it's just a contact form yeah not suspicious so these guys got in touch with some of the bookstores that contributed large amounts of data to the New York Times best seller list for handbook for morals and what they were told was that someone in some cases claiming to be a Thomas had called up and bought in bulk and we're talking thousands of books from these bookstores within the first week it's obviously suspicious the initial defense from these guys was that it was legitimate their rise to the number one number one spot was legitimate and of course after the step of denial they moved to making excuses and the excuse initially was that and they had sold 18,000 copies through pre-orders at Wizard World book cons and they were purchasing those books within that week so that they could distribute them to the people that had bought them if you ignore the fact that that seems highly unlikely due to the numbers of people that attend wizard world book cons I mean essentially you're saying that almost 99% of people that attended the wizard world becomes bought the book before there was a cover before there was even something for them to really look at it sounds like but even if you took their word of that the fact that they did that all within the first week specifically checking if those bookstores contribute contributed data to the New York Times bestseller list everyone knows what you were doing the fact is they were busted and after they were busted obviously after the excuse stage Lennie's arm went on to make a few statements and again I'm gonna link everything below she made a few statements that seemed as though she was playing the victim card and blamed the ye a community for what happened now I said in my podcast that I felt bad for her in this situation cuz I wasn't sure if she was aware of this whole thing that was happening and this has ruined her career and all that I don't feel bad for her anymore I read the statements and it's a complete cop-out and in some cases she even claimed the wire community it was toxic for reacting in such a way and of course you're gonna get people that you know go way overboard with their outrage but to put any kind of blame on a community as a whole because you scan the system and you can make excuses but you scammed the system so blame the community and call it toxic is basically just a giant middle finger she tried to play the victim card tried to say that there was an unfair bias as if that's what the outrage was concerning it's got nothing to do with any of the groups that you fall into it's to do with the fact that you did something extremely dishonest anyway I'm letting my personal opinion get a bit too woven into this back to the actual information so as if to make all of this even worse the cover was copied so you look at the cover and then you look at an original heart work from an artist called Gilda mace I hope I said that right but you can see it's copied now the guy who designed the actual cover fair handbook for mortals he did pop a bit of flack but he came out with a statement saying that he was asked to do this cover as a homage to that artwork so I mean first of all that's then accepting that yes they copied it but it's saying that the artist was under the impression that this person was aware that this was happening obviously it turned out they weren't because through investigation when Kayleigh Donaldson she contacted the people who represent that artist and they had no idea about this no one had contacted them to ask permission to rip off that artwork now that poor cover designer has probably had his reputation ruined hopefully he's being honest when he says he was under the impression he probably should have done some investigation of his own before doing a homage he should have made sure but even still he's not the person in charge of doing that you can pause the video to read through some of the responses that Cayley found from the representatives of that artwork but everything I've mentioned is it's happened and it's just unreal to think that this much shady happened with one book and not one person thought this might backfire when all this controversy happened as well one of the bands that Lenny used to manage came out with a tweet that was since deleted that kind of it seems like they weren't surprised she would do something like this which leads me even further to believe that she knew all this was happening but end of the day it's a simple fact that this has not ended well for Lenny saram the book I'm almost positive the movies not gonna happen if it does that would be a very poor pour up his business decision obviously hasn't gone well you can look at the reviews on Amazon it's it's not good I think Lenny is I don't think Lenny intends on having a career in writing but it seems at this point she's ruined her reputation entirely and if she is looking for anything on that front in any form of media she's probably gonna have to take up a different name like I said as you can see this video is already going quite long but there is so much more information involved so I'm gonna link everything below I think it's pretty clear what my opinion is on their side don't like people being does dishonest and like I said in the podcast Lenny's not the only person to have ever done this but they made the poor decision of boosting it up enough to become number one and put them in the spotlight any future handbook for models had any future the movie had I think at this point has been completely torn to I think the named Lenny serum in terms of writing has been torn a and honestly I don't feel bad let me know what you think of the whole situation below if you want to read more into the crazy whirlwind of that's going on with this controversy it's just nuts there's so much so much more weird stuff that happened make sure you check out the podcast because that's where I do most of my discussion type stuff that's why I don't really do a whole lot of discussion videos anymore so that I can save those ideas for the podcast follow me on Twitter if you aren't already that's where I'm most active and you know my other social media links are down there as well thanks so much for watching if you haven't already joined the Wolfpack and subscribe and if you are in the wall pack I'll see you in the next video catch up [Music]

Channel: Page Nomad Writing

Views: 18,320

Rating: 4.9699697 out of 5

Keywords: booktube, writing tips, writing, books, fiction, author, how to write, writertube, writer tube, how, to, authortube, tube, book scandal, book drama, nyt bestseller, lani sarem, handbook for mortals, nyt cheat, new york times bestseller, book discussion, booktube discussion, discussion video, bestseller scam, booktube drama, authortube drama, authors behaving badly, authors doing bad things, bad authors

Id: x81LaBzCrms

Length: 15min 41sec (941 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 09 2017