Hachette Aotearoa New Zealand has issued a publishing fraud alert after US-based author Faith Mehrer was offered a "too good to be true" deal for her self-published book Box of Dreams. Graphic / Paul Slater
By publishing standards, the offer was spectacular: a $27 per book royalty, distribution across New Zealand and Australia, and a roundtrip airfare from Tennessee to Tauranga to an event where the author would be “an honoured guest”.
“It actually felt very flattering,” says Faith Mehrer. “I was like how in the world did somebody in New Zealand recognise this book?”
Mehrer, a 51-year-old self-published author from Tennessee, had just opened an email containing what appeared to be a life-changing offer from Hachette Australia and New Zealand.
According to Sophia Langford, the publishing company’s director of international acquisitions: “We are delighted to formally extend to you an offer to distribute your powerful and timely book, Box of Dreams, through our leading retail and bookstore partners across Australia and New Zealand.”
Mehrer was promised an author royalty of US$15.50 ($27) per book, “resulting in a total royalty value of US$69,750 ($121,482) from this initial distribution commitment”.
There was more: “To further support the launch and regional engagement of your work, Hachette will fully sponsor a complimentary book signing event with you as our honoured guest.”
Sponsorship would include a round-trip airfare (with accommodation) to New Zealand, full venue arrangements, event marketing and media engagement, official press releases and in-store promotions and merchandising. The signing event would take place at Tauranga’s Mercury Arena Suites, “offering corporate hospitality and panoramic views”.
Mehrer says news of the deal came via a representative of a vanity publishing company she had paid to help her prepare Box of Dreams – the book she completed after her youngest son’s suicide – for print-on-demand platforms.
“He said he had a very interesting offer for me. This publishing company was interested in my book, and interested in doing a book signing – I would travel there ... and that he was going to have someone call me.”
The second phone call, says Mehrer, “was kind of ‘you have to let us know right away, these things aren’t going to wait’. I kept asking, ‘you’re talking about paying me, right?’”
Speaking to the New Zealand Herald from Tennessee, Mehrer is sharp and likeable. She loves that, as she is preparing for an evening wine in her time zone, a reporter from Auckland is drinking a morning coffee. And she’s grateful that, when she was ultimately asked to pay almost $23,000 to have physical copies of her book printed, instinct told her to go direct to Hachette Aotearoa New Zealand.
Mehrer quickly learned the offer she was looking at had not originated from Hachette.
There would be no round trip to Tauranga. The publishing company did not employ anyone called Sophia Langford – in fact, the “director of international acquisitions” did not even exist as a job title. (When the Herald googled Langford’s name, the top 10 results included a convict transported from England to Australia in 1794. Her crime was listed as “highway robbery”.)
“It just didn’t feel right,” says Mehrer, recalling the conversations she had before two PDF documents landed in her inbox in June.
They came from vanity publishing company The Book Professionals, “presented as though it was sent on behalf of Hachette, with ‘Hachette Australia & New Zealand’ in the subject line”.
The PDF signed by Sophia Langford, titled “Hachetter [sic] Offer”, was watermarked and letterheaded “Hachette Book Group”; its footnote field contained the copyright “2025 Hachette Aotearoa New Zealand”.
The second PDF was a contract agreement between Mehrer and The Book Professionals – the firm she says she’d paid around US$9000 ($15,700) to get Box of Dreams ready for print-on-demand platforms.
The book had been a work in progress for some time. But when Mehrer’s 22-year-old son took his own life in 2023, “I decided that I was going to finish this book that I just hadn’t been able to before”.
In Box of Dreams, a central character considers suicide.
“It ends on a note of her healing. That really was just to honour my son and to – oh, hopefully if people read it – to bring some awareness ... to highlight that when it looks like the end, it’s not necessarily the end. There’s something on the other side of that, if you can just hang on a little bit longer.”
Mehrer says she put “blood, sweat and tears” into the story. When the alleged offer from Hachette landed, “at first I was like, oh my gosh, somebody noticed – and then, as I read into it, I found that yeah, if it’s too good to be true, as we’ve said for decades, it typically is”.
She says after confirming there was no legitimate deal on the table, she took another call from The Book Publishers.
“I said I reached out to this company [Hachette] and they came back to me and said very frankly that this is not how they solicit books, this is not how it goes and they have no record of this offer ...
“He said oh, no, it’s not directly through them, we have people that work with them ... I said I didn’t want to hear it anymore. And I did tell him I had contacted local law enforcement.”
Mehrer says while The Book Professionals did deliver a product she is selling via print-on-demand platforms, “I will not use a company like this again”.
She advises authors who want to self-publish to research guidelines that are readily available on the likes of Amazon and, if there are areas they are not confident in, consider using individual experts specific to those fields – editing, manuscript development, or photography, for example.
“There are so many vanity publishers out there, that the moment you start inquiring about it, you’re going to get a tonne of calls ... those vanity publishers make it sound like they are going to do everything for you, and your book is the best thing since frozen water. I would say if somebody’s offering a package, I am not likely to pay attention to it. I’m going to search out my own professionals for the items I need.
“I’ve learnt a great lesson and hopefully other independent authors can glean something from it.”
The Herald emailed a number of questions to The Book Professionals about its relationship with Hachette Aotearoa New Zealand but, as yet, has received no response.
Meanwhile, Hachette (which also operates the Moa Press and Little Moa imprints) has issued a publishing fraud alert on its website.
“We have seen an alarming rise in scam attempts in which hackers impersonate Hachette Aotearoa New Zealand employees, authors, and agents in an attempt to attain unpublished manuscripts or personal information,” the alert says.
“Some of these scams are quite sophisticated. The hackers are adept impersonators, comfortable with ‘editorial’ speak, and may refer to recent events in the industry to legitimise their requests. Hackers can easily simulate staff with impersonated domain emails. Sometimes the difference in a hacker’s email address is so subtle that it is easy to miss.”
Melanee Winder, managing director, said following the approach from Mehrer, she had contacted Hachette’s offices in Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom to check no legitimate offers had been made. She had also sought advice from the company’s legal counsel in the UK.
“And we just said to her [Mehrer], please don’t pay anything ... I don’t know if they would have actually printed some books. They might have done. But we weren’t ever going to sell them here ... I don’t think they were going to take her money and do nothing, but none of the other stuff would have happened ... I mean the tour bit was just kind of crazy.”
Winder said the royalty payment offered to Mehrer was “very high” but, more generally, the documentation she saw “was just not how book contracts are done”.
The warning on Hachette Aotearoa New Zealand’s website confirms it would never ask prospective authors for any form of payment (such as a contribution to print costs) as part of an offer of publication, or request bank account information as part of a manuscript submission process.
It urges anyone who thinks they have been the victim of a scam to contact law enforcement right away.
Kim Knight is a senior journalist on the New Zealand Herald’s lifestyle desk.