One of the downsides of being a reasonably well-known author is that scammers love to take advantage of your built-in name recognition to sell their own works. Over the years I have had ALL sorts of problems with scammers putting out books on my exact topic, using MY NAME, and in some cases using covers nearly identical to mine, all to get their hands on ‘quick easy money’.
And here we have yet another example.
Since about 2000 I’ve published 13 Low Carb Diet books and run a popular Low Carb website. I have hundreds of reviews on my books. People looking for diet advice often find me and write to me. Around 2020 I got very interested in the low FODMAP eating plan, which is similar to low carb. I put low-FODMAP on my list of things to write about.
I did not write my book quickly enough.
In 2021, a person decided to publish “The Easiest Low-FODMAP Diet Cookbook 2021” under the name of Lisa Shea.
How do I know this person isn’t a “real” Lisa Shea nutritionist who just happens to have the exact same name as me?
Well, for one, the author NEVER mentions the name Lisa Shea ANYWHERE in the entire book. Not even on the copyright page or title page. There’s no biography. No publisher listed. It says in the intro that the author is a nutritionist. An author who is a nutritionist would ABSOLUTELY have a biography page where they played that credential up. It would be a big part of their sell for the book. Instead, the book itself is wholly generic.
Next, when I run sections of the book through AI checkers, I get warnings that the content is too AI-like:
“You should edit your text until there’s less detectable AI content”.
And we’ll note that 2021 was just when AI was starting. So the author was probably using some sort of rudimentary AI crutch to write this.
The vast majority of this book is made up of low-FODMAP recipes. Some quick google searches had me finding the EXACT SAME RECIPE on the web, same ingredient order, everything, published pre-2021 by random other people. And we are talking about some extremely specific combinations of ingredients for non-standard recipes. So that is always a warning sign.
The book is also full of formatting and typo issues. Look right on the cover:
They let “for” and “IBS” run together to say FORIBS. That’s a fairly obvious issue that SOMEONE would catch if this was an actual serious author. The same typo is on the title page.
How about Chapter 1?
That’s it. That’s the end of the page. “This chapter will cover the” – and that’s it. The next page starts a new section.
Who would have not even checked Chapter One’s first page?
There’s all sorts of formatting and typo issues throughout this book. I’ll just mention a few more. We’ll begin right in the introduction! There’s a random indent half-way through the paragraph. There are phrases like “… the regular stomach upset that I experienced since childhood can be reverse by knowing …” – that “reverse” should be “reversed”.
This is right at the start of the book. And it keeps on having issues like this.
There’s many strange hiccups. Every single recipe has the formatting issue of turning “you’ll” into “you-space-apostrophe-space-ll” and calling your pantry a “store cupboard”. Degree signs aren’t actual degree signs (which are circles) but a super-scripted number zero.
And yes more typos. This one was extra odd because they spelled “filling” wrong (as “filing”) on step 5 but then spelled it properly on step 6.
There’s a four-page table of contents without page numbers. That’s fine because the pages themselves don’t have numbers on them! So the table of contents is fairly useless.
Researching the ISBN for this book – ISBN: 9781008938557 – it is owned by the Lulu self-publishing company. This book isn’t actually available ON Lulu though. So it looks like someone used Lulu to self-publish their book, created X number of copies, and then listed those copies on Amazon in paperback and hardcover format. They listed the publisher simply as “Lisa Shea”. So the actual person / company behind this is wholly hidden.
Fortunately, when I bought my hardcover copy to research this situation, I bought the very last one available for sale. There are now NO new paperback nor hardcover copies of the “Lisa Shea” FODMAP book on the market. The only ones on the used market have now ratcheted up to astronomical prices due to the way the automated pricing mechanisms work. So the chance of someone accidentally buying one and thinking it’s by me is slim to none.
People often ask me, when someone infringes on your identity as an author, can’t you just write Amazon to complain? The challenge is this.
In the cases like with my chair yoga book, where someone was specifically duplicating MY EXACT BOOK topic, title, and author name, I can challenge it, because it is a clear attempt to steal customers from my existing book.
However, there are legitimately other human beings out there with the name Lisa Shea. I can’t prevent them from publishing books. And I hadn’t yet written my low FODMAP book. So this author wasn’t trying to “steal” my low FODMAP content or traffic, because I didn’t have my book out yet. They were just taking advantage of my reputation in this area.
So I just kept putting this issue off in 2021 … 2022 … 2023 … but finally in 2024 a block of time opened up for me to be able to work on a solution. So my solution entails:
1) Get their low FODMAP book off the market somehow. Luckily, this was easy! I only had to buy the last hardcover copy to effectively do that.
2) Write my own low FODMAP book like I’d always wanted to do. Tie it into my Low Carb series so it 100% was clearly labelled and marketed as by being the established Lisa Shea who has written about low carb books for nearly 25 years. That will make it clear to my readers that it’s an authentic book by me.
Maybe it’s just as well that I waited until 2024 to tackle this, so that the “other Lisa Shea” low FODMAP book would ‘take itself off the market’ naturally. And now I can move forward with my writing plans for low FODMAP content.
Ask with any questions! Hopefully you never find yourself in a similar situation with an author trying to in essence ‘ride on your coattails’!