Typically such a ‘publishing’ outfit may also have several revenue-raisers… such as also advertising and publishing ‘your personalized horoscope,’ ‘who’s who in your profession,’ ‘beautiful poets of the world,’ and also ‘we personally review your manuscript.’ All the above contain boilerplate, abjectly redundant, non-specific info you could find in any magazine, any book, heck any free adult ed community classroom that runs for an hour of less.

Used to be you would sign up to ‘help’ a book on gandelman name be pub’d, depending on how many gandelman’s pub said they could find to buy in, would determine price of book. But, oh how wonderful it would be. Turns out there were never enough gandys to make a book price reasonable. So the gandelmans that could afford it, paid $80, $90 and more per book for just about what Joe wrote about above. That practice by ‘pubs’ was called bait and switch and because of hard legal issues, those kinds of pubs turned to other methods… as Joe describes above, which is likely a POD printing… ‘print on demand’ that is only printed one by one book when a person orders it at Amazon

Also, Amazon has attempted over the years to remove “the glowing reveiws’ of certain books, which are posted under the name of a seeming person, but which are actually from the pub company pr person or one-man-band owner of the company itself falsified/disguised as a consumer. Same in comments if an actual real reader/user has left a negative review, sometimes the pub will argue and say what ‘a wonderful book’ this is, but not reveal they are in fact the ‘mind’ behind that book.

If you feel a book is a scam and has been misrepresented, you should always write to Amazon (look at the very bottom of the page of your user account) and tell them so. You may not hear back from Amazon (one of their weak areas of customer service) but you can be assured that the man behind the curtain hears and often will do something about it.

Most authors, indie pub’d or/and pub’d by big six, are completely honest about what is in their books/ audios/ multimedia, etc. Those who pretend through implication that their book about YOUR family will be filled with info about YOUR family, ought not be left to set up others… who may be sincerely buying such a book as an honor gift for elders, or just to know in depth more about their own family.

Just a tip, the free genealogy websites (google just those words) and ancestry.com will give you more info about family all the way to 1910. 1920. 1930 and now 1940 census, plus mormon records which are amazingly complete and have nothing to do with people being mormon, to social security death index, plus birth, death, marriage records, plus military service records, plus immigration records (I saw the ship logs from all my refugee relatives passages, the towns they debarked from, the age they were, their pitiful possessions they had to claim, where exactly they were headed to by name and address… all written in beautiful scripts by the Captain’s office, and all wrinkled and ink splotched. I also saw in the census that many grew up in the 20s and 30s with many borders in the household and what their professions were : butcher, pipefitter, hopsmeister, blade sharpener. ) It’s all there for you, and only takes minutes to find such interesting things.

Thanks Joe and all for writing about this. The history of our families is sacred, scary, horrible, blessed, wondrous story, I think. Well worth knowing.

dr.e

As far as this, “This makes it easy to do a series: you can do …. The Jones Name in History….”

I bet The Jones Name in History is a best seller! Maybe we should buy that since it sells so many copies. I’m always up for a best seller. (Just kidding of course.)

Several years ago I bought a similar “book” named “The name] Family Heritage Book.”

What a disappointment — scam is probably a better word.

It was nothing but 40 or 50 pages of boiler plate stuff on how to research one’sfamily tree, followed by about six or seven pages of names and addresses (probably taken from phone books) of people with same last names.

You are right, “Buyer Beware.”