A few days ago, I received an invitation from one Jim Held, the organizer of the Union Square Reading Group (USRG), who wanted the group to discuss my 1997 book Innovating with Integrity. Held said he was “drawn to its exploration of ethics in public service” and that “the themes and ideas at the heart of the book could spark meaningful and lively discussion with our group.” He invited me to explore partnering to hold such a discussion.

The Cost of the Partnership

Innovating with Integrity, subtitled How Local Heroes are Transforming American Government is about public sector innovation in the US, and was the precursor to a stream of articles and books I wrote about public sector innovation in the US and elsewhere, and which have attracted considerable attention from my colleagues in public management and political science. I emailed Mr. Held to suggest a call. In his emailed reply, Mr. Held described the partnership more fully. I would provide information about myself and the book, and he would prepare background materials for the discussion, but I would not be party to the discussion. For their efforts, USRG would charge me $200 US. Mr. Held suggested three times of day for the call. When I replied with my preferred time, Mr. Held changed his mind, saying that a call isn’t necessary and we could co-ordinate by email.

I might have ended the interaction when Mr. Held mentioned a fee. There is an adage that when someone you don’t know emails you, asking you to send them money before they perform a service on your behalf, you should regard it as a scam and not reply. I took the next step, however. I was curious about USRG’s business model, assuming it is legitimate. Public sector innovation has been a major topic of my research, and I would be willing to discuss it with a lay group. I looked up Innovating with Integrity; the publisher, Georgetown University Press, charges $59.95 for both the paperback and the ebook, which may explain why its sales have been negligible in recent years. I have written two practitioner-oriented reports about public sector innovation that are in the public domain, published by the non-profit IBM Center for the Business of Government. I thought these reports would interest USRG’s members more than Innovating with Integrity. As the reports pay me no royalties, I was ready to suggest that USRG waive their fee.

Getting Suspicious

But there were several things that weren’t adding up. Mr. Held’s reference to my book was very generic and imprecise, suggesting he hadn’t actually read it. He quickly rescinded his offer of a call. He invited me to provide materials for a discussion, but didn’t invite me to participate in the discussion, for example by Zoom.

I then looked up USRG and found it on Meetup. Based in New York City, it did claim 1500 members, the number Mr. Held used in his email. The next event is scheduled for April 7, which will discuss Isabel Allende’s recent novel The Wind Knows My Name, for which 8 people have signed up. (Did Ms. Allende pay $200 to partner with USRG?) USRG’s previous monthly meetings all discussed fiction, some recent and some classic. All had only a handful of attendees, with the most popular being Camus’ The Stranger, with 14. This did not look like a group that would be especially engaged by Innovating with Integrity or my subsequent free reports.

I have three hypotheses about what is going on.

First, USRG is a Potemkin Village book club, intended to facilitate the scam.

Second, USRG does meet to discuss novels, as its web page suggests, but scamming unsuspecting authors of non-fiction, especially academics, is a side hustle.

Third, USRG does meet to discuss novels, as the web page suggests, but scammers are impersonating it.

Whichever hypothesis is true, paying $200 didn’t seem like a good idea. It turned out that the very day I was trying to engage in a face-to-face conversation with Jim Held, the New York Times book review published an article by Dan Barry, a senior writer there, entitled “Bait and Switch,” and subtitled “Writers are being targeted by scams. This reporter knows the feeling.” One of the scams Barry described is “the book club pining for you to lead an online discussion.”

I researched this matter a bit more. I found authors on Reddit who recounted that they, too, were asked to pay a fee to promote their book at a book club. And I asked ChatGPT about my invitation and it identified the initial letter Jim Held had written, as well as the tactic of not mentioning the fee until second email, as typical of this type of scam.

The Stupidity Account

At the start of the year, set aside in your mind a sum of money – let’s say $1000 – to cover the cost of everyday stupidity, things like getting traffic tickets, fender-bender accidents, dropping and breaking things, and impulsive buying of clothes at a final sale. When you make any of those mistakes, you don’t feel too badly as long as you stay within the stupidity budget. I’m somewhat embarrassed that I engaged with Mr. Held to the extent of two emails but I’m proud that I didn’t have to call on the stupidity account after I paid USRG $200 US for a discussion that will never happen. Yes, I “got” the book club scam, first in the sense of receiving it, and then in the sense of wising up to it.