Thomas Wictor

Before I hired Mike Albee and Lura Dold of Sandpiper Publicity—the two frauds who conned me out of $40,000 by exploiting the suicides of my parents—I didn’t know much about book publicity. Now I know a lot more.

Today I had a long phone conversation with a real publicist, a friend of Scott Thunes. He asked her to get in touch with me. One of the things she said was that publicists no longer use press kits.

When Mike Albee was pretending that he would get me on Coast to Coast AM, here’s one of the e-mails he sent me.

This is more proof that Mike Albee is a fraud. Publicists make e-mail or phone pitches that include an author bio and a description of the book. If the media outlet is interested, you send them the book or talking points. A good set of talking points means that the interviewer doesn’t actually have to have read the book.

Nobody FedExes press packages anymore. It’s all done by e-mail or phone.

I didn’t know that, which is why Mike was able to fleece me for as long as he did. But now you know.

Also, Writer Beware picked up my story. It shows how Albee spams Twitter with his worthless Tweets. I did my own piece on Magnus Publicity, Mike’s other fake company. It’s basically Sandpiper. None of the claims that Mike makes on Magnus are true. He has no experience working at Random House, he’s never had any clients appear on national media outlets, he has no personal media contacts, and he had no database of reviewers.

Mike and Lura pull names out of a hat. They’re also idiots, since they pitched me to a classical music magazine and the head the news department at KFI AM 640, Los Angeles. Ghosts and Ballyhoo is about my career as a music journalist. Neither Mike nor Lura were intelligent enough to pitch me to any music publication except the aforementioned classical magazine.

They pitched me to a woman who runs a Website about diabetes. The word “diabetes” doesn’t appear even once in Ghosts. That woman passed the book onto a guy who has a radio show. He expressed interest, and then that was the last I heard from him. I contacted him twice myself, but he never responded. My experience with In Cold Sweat thirteen years ago taught me that people in the media say all sorts of fun things, but they usually aren’t serious.

No idea why. It could be that they just like fucking with you. That seems to be where we’ve been heading as a culture for a long time.

A long time ago, I used to comment on a Website. Whenever the topic of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan came up, I’d always end up fighting with the same guy, who I thought was a woman. Things got nasty a few times, but then I began complimenting his posts. First we declared a truce, and then when I decided that I didn’t want to comment on that site anymore, I sent the guy a private message apologizing for all the crappy things I’d said to him.

He accepted my apology, and then I offered to send him a copy of Ghosts and Ballyhoo. He gave me his address in Holland, and when the book arrived, he was shocked.

“I thought you were bullshitting me,” he wrote. “You actually sent me your book!”

Yes, I did. His message tells me that the “Hey, let’s do lunch!” phoniness is rampant in the Netherlands too, which is too bad. I like dependable people. Nothing turns me off more than a broken promise.

In fact, since I’m striving to be the most judgmental person in literature, I also want to be the most unforgiving. From this day forward, NO SECOND CHANCES! If you break your word once, you’re dead to me.

Since proofreading is a bitch due to the brain fog, I hired an editor to go over Ghosts and Ballyhoo. I paid him in advance, and then he didn’t do the job. He offered no reason either. So I edited it myself. After the galleys were ready, I told him he could redeem himself by at least proofreading the book. He jumped at the chance, with much gratitude. I never heard from him again.

So I gathered several people from Talkbass and gave each of them a chapter. As backup, I gave the whole book to two other people. Every single volunteer proofreader came through like a boss. The professional editor has a Facebook page with photos of him with his much-younger girlfriend or wife. He’s got a big ol’ smile in every image. His double-screwage of me doesn’t bother him in the least. It was so long ago! Who even remembers?

Last week I tracked down one of Mike Albee’s former employees, Becca Pilkington. She was working in a completely different industry. I asked her to please explain to me how much she knew about Mike’s business. Becca chose to not respond. However, when I checked today, I found that her LinkedIn Profile no longer exists. Dunno what that means. Hopefully nothing bad.

I doubt Becca will sue me for mentioning her, since Sandpiper is a completely fraudulent operation that breaks multiple federal laws. All the feds have to do is look at the Website itself. Not a single thing on it is true. On the other hand, I’ve broken no federal laws. And I have solid evidence of being systematically defrauded over seven months. So we’ll see who wins over a jury.

Last night a member of the local historical society brought over an ancient Bible and map book that Mom had donated. She’d also paid to have the spines and covers repaired. It was very odd seeing these books. Mom began the process of bringing the books back to life, and then she died. The man who came to Tim’s house wanted to show us how beautifully they’d turned out.

He’s an interesting guy. The day Mom died, I phoned him and said, “I have some very sad news. This is the call.”

He knew exactly what I meant and expressed his sympathy. Then he withheld the information until the historical society’s event was over. Some people are still angry at him for not telling them immediately, but he correctly deduced that it was what Mom would’ve wanted. Everyone had a nice time, and when it was over, that was when he let them know that Mom had died.

Good for him. He saw no reason to spoil everybody’s day. I support him 100 percent.

Mom would’ve too. She liked having fun.