Scam City: "Ivy Summers" - Scam of the Century
Part of my Scam City series, where I research and expose book marketing scammers who email me.
Received: June 30, 2025
From: 971-298-9500
Transcript:
Hi, Jen. It’s Ivy Summers, and we would like to invite you for a radio interview here at America Tonight with Kate Delaney. So, if you have time, please call me at this number. It’s 971-298-9500. Again, 971-298-9500. Or check your email for more details. Thank you, and have a great day.
Received: June 30, 2025
From: ivy.summers@sevenchapterliterary.com
Subject: Invitation to Join America Tonight with Kate Delaney as a Featured Author(Note: This message has been truncated because, let’s face it, no one wants to read all that. I didn’t.)
Dear Jen,
I hope you're doing well! My name is Ivy Summers. Segment Producer of America Tonight.
We have received a recommendation from Amazon about your book “Perfect Part IV: The Compliant” that it needs to be recognized and we also find your book very interesting. Further, we want to help you to introduce your book in the market so that millions of people will be notified about it.
Radio show is an effective platform to introduce your book to its readers in your most creative way. It’s targeted to the audience with the interest of social issues, sports, self-development, business and inspiration which your book perfectly fits into…
Below are the steps to get you started.
Step One:
Kate will conduct a preliminary interview to all her clients and this is for approx. 20-25 minutes…
Step Two:
Before your interview, your book will be announced all over 210 stations. The show appeals to millions of people and this active audience is on the phones with their opinions! This will be a 2 live read with a total of 2 commercials for promoting the book.
Here are few of popular radio stations where your book will be advertised:
KVOI 1030 the Voice in Tucson Arizona
KKGX 920 am/fm - Palm Springs, California
WGSO 990 am/fm in New Orleans.
Your Interview Will Be Premiered on Multiple Platforms!
We're excited to let you know that your interview will also be premiered on the following platforms: iHeartRadio, Podchaser, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.
This allows us to make your interview accessible to a global audience, reaching listeners in various countries and expanding your visibility even further.
Step Three:
This the most important stage, having you on air to discuss and promote your book…
We highly recommend a recorded interview so we can calibrate the full show before putting it on air and select a time which best fits your schedule.
Step Four:
Seven Chapter Literary will make a digital posting to promote your book and radio interview. We have partnered with media outlets that can reach your radio interview. Aside from that, we highly recommend that you send us your facebook page, website or any landing page for online publicity for your book…
Our Radio Host
Learn more about Kate: https://katedelaneyspeaker.com/home/…
“Opportunities are like surprises. If you wait too long you miss them.- William Arthur”
Looking forward to the possibility of featuring you on the show.
Best,
Ivy Summers
Segment Producer
Toll Free: 971-298-9500
ivy.summers@sevenchapterliterary.com
“Ivy” here is a uniquely annoying scam artist in that not only did she email my personal email address, but she also emailed my work email address and left me a voicemail. I’m a bit ticked off that she was able to find those additional contact methods and chose to use all of them for her scam.
I got the voicemail first and noticed she told me to check my email for more details. I didn’t see the email in my inbox because it was appropriately sent to my spam folder.
Ivy’s email is long and unnecessarily verbose, and I have to admit I didn’t read all of it.
tl;dr
The only thing that really stood out to me was that she chose to talk about part four of Perfect, which is called “The Compliant,” and which she claims Amazon recommended to her.
Only that’s impossible because it’s NOT a standalone book.
Perfect is a four-part novel, and Ivy apparently wants to give me a radio interview about part four only. Don’t you think the listening audience will be a bit confused?
That’s like only talking about the ending of a movie.
“We’re here today with Orson Welles discussing his film, ‘The Last Two Minutes of Citizen Kane.’ In this film, a man named Charles Foster Kane dies, and we see that his last word, ‘Rosebud,’ refers to a sled, but we don’t know why.”
Ivy’s email is far from the most bizarre and confusing part of this scam. Make some tea and sip it slowly, folks, because you’re about to be privy to some weird, wild shit. This one is way bigger than a kid from Nigeria fucking around on the internet.
The story you are about to read is true. The names have not been changed because they're probably fake names anyway.
The Scam
What Ivy is offering appears to be an example of what Writer Beware’s Victoria Strauss calls “vanity interviews.”
Basically how the scam works is this: you fork over a ton of cash (sometimes upwards of 10 grand!) to a fake book marketing company for an interview with some D-list broadcaster or other media personality whom no one’s ever heard of, and you get an interview recording that only appears on some internet radio or TV site, also which no one’s ever heard of.
That’s it.
Neither the fake book marketing company nor the interviewer bother to promote your interview or your book at all, so it’s completely useless.
An unknown author with an unknown interview is still an unknown author.
I could have a recording of Stephen King himself telling me he thinks Perfect is the the most amazing work of fiction he’s ever read and I’m such a good writer that he’s going to quit the business because he’ll never be as good as me, but what good is it if no one knows it exists?
The Players
To help organize this giant mess of information, I’ve identified and profiled the key players below.
Seven Chapter Literary
Alternate Name(s): N/A
Alleged Location: Portland, Oregon
Services: Vanity publishing, junk marketing
Involvement: Sells “radio” interviews with Kate Delaney.
Scam Alerts: This article is the first one. They’re new.
First of all, the name of this company is wrong. It should be “Seven Chapters,” not “Seven Chapter.” Unless “Seven Chapter” is the name of person whose parents were big Seinfeld fans, that shit is plural.
It’s like the scam company version of The Lone Gunmen, only they’re not trying to be ironic.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised when their representative, so-called “Ivy Summers” thinks my violent, profanity-laden dystopian sci-fi novel should be targeted to “the audience with the interest of social issues, sports, self-development, business and inspiration.”
Sports?? Unless overthrowing tyrannical governments is a sport now, Ivy’s confused.
But with the way things are going in the US…who knows?
The phone number on the company website is the same one Ivy used to call me, which brought up zero results in all my reverse phone searches.
But the address appears to be a private home in Portland, Oregon occupied by someone named Alton Spencer…
According to Bizapedia.com, the company registered as an LLC in March of this year (only four months ago), and the “registered agent” on file is one Alton Spencer…
My searches of Alton Spencer found a guy in Portland who’s an independent musician who self-published one book. There’s no information about his connection to Seven Chapter Literary, if any, so that was a dead end.
Seven Chapter Literary’s website domain was registered in January of this year through a Lithuanian web hosting company called HOSTINGER…
Remember that name.
On their Trustpilot page, there’s a different phone number from the one on their website. A search of this number brought up a completely different company name: “Prime Seven Media.”
Prime Seven Media
Alternate Name(s): N/A
Alleged Location: Tomah, Wisconsin
Services: Vanity publishing, junk marketing
Involvement: Sells “TV” interviews with Logan Crawford
Scam Alerts: Writer Beware Overseas Scams List
If the websites for Seven Chapter Literary and Prime Seven Media seem similar, that’s because they contain the exact same content…
Coincidence? I doubt it.
Remember when I told you to remember the name “HOSTINGER?”
Prime Seven Media’s website domain was registered in 2022 through HOSTINGER, the same Lithuanian hosting company as Seven Chapter Literary’s domain…
Curiouser and curiouser…and HOSTINGER-er.
When I googled Prime Seven Media, I found several blog, reddit, and social media posts where people claimed they received a phone call and/or email almost exactly like the one I got from Ivy but offering a TV interview with someone named Logan Crawford…
What I gather from all this is that Prime Seven Media pulled this scam one too many times, and when the heat was on, they re-branded as Seven Chapter Literary and swapped out Logan Crawford for Kate Delaney.
Logan Crawford
Alternate Name(s): N/A
Affiliated with: Prime Seven Media, Spotlight Network
Title: N/A
Alleged Occupation(s): Actor, director, producer, talk show host
Alleged Location: New York, New York
Involvement: Gives “TV” interviews for an average fee of $2,000, sometimes contacts victims to schedule interviews
Logan Crawford appears to be a real actor with an IMDB page and a long list of credits, usually playing a news anchor…
His website claims he’s an Emmy-winning talk show host, but don’t bother trying to verify that. You can’t.
I searched the websites for both the Television Academy and the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS), the two organizations that run the Emmy awards, and I found no results for Logan Crawford.
On one of his two websites, Logan posted a low resolution image of his resume, which mentions a “New York Regional Emmy Award.”
Apparently, NATAS has regional chapters around the country that award their own local Emmys.
It’s legit, but come on, Logan, my dude. You can’t go around calling yourself an “Emmy winner” if you’re actually a “New York Regional Emmy winner.”
But he’s not even a New York Regional Emmy winner.
I searched the NATAS New York chapter’s archives and found ONE mention of Logan Crawford under the 43rd New York Emmy Awards in 1999. He’s listed as one of a team of reporters who worked on a story about the death of John F. Kennedy, Jr., which was nominated for “Outstanding Coverage of a Continuing News Story.”
But they didn’t win. The winner of the “Outstanding Coverage of a Continuing News Story” award for that year was “A Courageous Journey,” not “Death of JFK, Jr.”
Other mentions of Logan’s supposed Emmy mention a show called “Fresh Outlook,” which he claims he hosted.
“Fresh Outlook” appears to have been a talk show that aired in the teens on “Ebru TV,” a basic cable channel that was headquartered in New Jersey and was available in “Manhattan, Washington, D.C., Boston, Chicago, Lehigh Valley and Philadelphia as well as…Globecast World TV,” according to an archive snapshot of their website.
Philadelphia, huh? That’s news to me. Or it’s not news to me because I never heard of it?
Look at this sad photo of their office from 2016…
Oddly enough, Ebru TV is still around, but it only seems to be available in Kenya now. Hm.
I did find a reference to “Fresh Outlook” winning an Emmy in 2014, but the fine print revealed it was a Mid-Atlantic Regional Emmy.
The Mid-Atlantic Emmys are like the New York Emmys but for parts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware, and the ceremony is held here in Philly.
All this time we had Emmys no one told me.
A look at the Mid-Atlantic Emmy archives shows that Ebru TV won a few awards for their discussion/interview programs between 2009 and 2015. But you know what I don’t see in any of the listings? Logan Crawford.
Most importantly, Logan Crawford was NOT the host of “Fresh Outlook.” The series seems to have had a pool of rotating guest hosts over the years, and Logan only hosted a handful of episodes (possibly only two).
I did find that Logan was nominated for Mid-Atlantic Emmys for his work on Ebru TV in 2015 and 2016, but once again, he didn’t win.
I feel like Logan thinks that just because he twice hosted a show that won some regional Emmys for segments hosted by other people, he can call himself an “Emmy winner.”
I wonder if he pulled a muscle making that stretch.
A search for “Logan Crawford interview” brought up the motherlode of scam complaints and warnings…
Almost every result was someone complaining that they were contacted (some by Logan himself) about being interviewed by LC and asked to pay a huge amount of money for the privilege.
The good news is, if you really want an interview with Logan Crawford but don’t want to pay the high price tag of a book marketing scam company, you can hire him on Fiverr for as little as 500 bucks!
Let’s say you got an exclusive interview with Logan Crawford, and you want to show your mom. Where can you watch it? Only on something called the “Spotlight Network.”
wtf is the “Spotlight Network?”
Well, take a look at their website’s metadata summary…
You won’t find that text anywhere on their actual website, but they left it in the metadata, so it comes up when you google them.
Sneaky snakes!
That’s right, party people, the Spotlight Network seems to exist solely for the purpose of airing paid interviews with Logan Crawford.
Kate Delaney
Alternate Name(s): N/A
Affiliated with: America Tonight, Seven Chapter Literary, Great Writers Media, ReadersMagnet, many many more
Title: Host
Alleged Occupation(s): Radio host, motivational speaker, author, branding expert
Alleged Location: Either Tampa or St. Petersburg, Florida, USA
Involvement: Gives “radio” interviews for an average price of $4,500
Kate Delaney appears to be a real person with a real career in broadcasting and a real show called “America Tonight,” not to be confused with America 2 Night, which, as we all know, was hosted by Barth Gimble, not Kate Delaney.
(Isn’t it neat how I can connect just about anything to a sitcom?)
Like Logan Crawford, Kate also claims she won an Emmy, but she actually says what it was for: a “special report on the AIDS epidemic in New Mexico.”
I found no evidence of this Emmy or the alleged AIDS in New Mexico report.
I searched both Emmy websites as well as the New York, Mid-Atlantic, Suncoast (Florida), and Rocky Mountain Southwest (New Mexico) chapters of NATAS and found nothing.
It’s possible she won an Emmy in a different region, but I’m not about to search every single chapter’s website…at least not today.
A google search of Kate’s name brings up several more junk book marketing websites offering interviews with her as part of their bullshit services…
Specifically, I came across several complaints about a company called “Great Writers Media,” who offer interviews with Kate for exorbitant prices but never deliver…
They don’t even give you the useless vanity interview! They just take your money and ghost you!
The absolute weirdest and funniest thing I found while googling Kate Delaney is the number of junk marketing companies citing her name and America Tonight in articles explaining why they’re definitely not scams, as if the name Kate Delaney instantly adds an air of legitimacy…
You know you’re legit when companies who feel the need to announce that they’re not scams use your name as evidence.
All these companies are selling author interviews with Kate Delaney on “America Tonight,” but there are no author interviews on the show’s website. In fact, it seems that all of the episodes cover current events, not books.
Where are the interviews?
Apparently, Kate’s author interviews are NOT on “America Tonight,” as Ivy claimed in her email, but instead are aired on a podcast called “Author’s Corner with Kate Delaney,” and boy is that a dark, dusty corner…
ReadersMagnet
Alternate Name(s): Readers Magnet, Reader’s Magnet
Alleged Location: San Diego, California
Services: Vanity publishing, junk marketing
Involvement: Sells “radio” interviews with Kate Delaney
Scam Alerts: Rip Off Report
ReadersMagnet is a name that kept coming up time and time again in my search for information about Kate Delaney. This company offers interviews with KD, but their main bag seems to be selling spots at book fairs.
I found several complaints from self-published authors who say ReadersMagnet called them out of the blue and offered to sell their books at book fairs, usually in Frankfort, Germany, for between $450 and $750…
This particular author was super psyched to see her book on display at this Frankfort book fair…
Oh, yeah. Totally worth $750.
ReadersMagnet also has livestreams on Facebook where this dude literally just reads book titles and author names out loud and briefly shows the book cover on the screen…
Surely this will sell a million copies!
The really goofy thing about ReadersMagnet is that they seem to go to great lengths to try to convince everyone that they’re NOT a scam, so much so that they’re giving off major scientology vibes (you know, there’s a vast conspiracy on the internet to make them look bad).
I found all of these articles on their website…
Methinks the company doth protest too much.
Would a legitimate company that is definitely not a scam really need to constantly tell the world that they’re not a scam?
Not bloody likely!
The first thing a pyramid scheme tells you is that they’re not a pyramid scheme.
The first thing a cult tells you that they’re not a cult.
The first thing a telemarketer tells you is, “This is not a sales call.”
The first, second, third, and fourth thing ReadersMagnet tells you is that they’re not a scam.
Hey, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, what is it, kids?
A FUCKING DUCK.
Benji Cole
Alternate Name(s): Benjie Cole
Affiliated with: People of Distinction, Al Cole, ReadersMagnet, many many more
Title: Host
Alleged Occupation(s): Actor, filmmaker
Involvement: Gives “radio” interviews
Benji Cole is another name referenced by a lot of totally-not-a-scam companies to prove they’re not scams, including ReadersMagnet.
Benji apparently hosts a radio show called “People of Distinction” with his dad, “Al Cole from CBS Radio,” as Al refers to himself on his website. But most of the junk book marketers I’ve seen only mention Benji and claim that he’s “from CBS Radio.”
(I think I know why no one wants to talk about Al. He’s fucking weird. More on him later.)
They love to use that “CBS Radio” moniker to make their services seem legit. Some scammers will even claim that interviews with Benji are actually aired on CBS Radio, but they’re really just posted to YouTube like all the other vanity interviews.
The truth is neither one of the Coles is from CBS Radio, but that doesn’t stop the scammers from pretending they are.
Al claims on his website that Benji is a Hollywood actor and filmmaker, but I’ve scoured the internet, and I can’t find any evidence at all of him ever being an actor or filmmaker.
Al also claims that Benji once “shared the acting stage” with Tom Hanks, and he provides a photo of Benji and Hanks as evidence…
“Shared the acting stage” could mean just about anything.
Did he act on the same stage Tom Hanks once acted on years before?
Was he in the stage crew of a play starring Tom Hanks?
Did he happen to walk across the stage one day while Tom was rehearsing?
In the photo, Tom’s hoodie bears the logo for “The Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles,” and a google search tells me Tom appeared in an SCLA production of Henry IV in 2018, which explains the “IV” on his hat.
However, I could not find any evidence that Benji Cole appeared in or had anything else to do with that production or any other SCLA production or indeed any theater production ever.
So who is Benji Cole?
As far as I can tell, he’s just some guy with no credentials or experience that would qualify him to interview people. And all these scammers are using his name to prove they’re serious.
Al Cole
Name: Al Cole
Alternate Name(s): Al Cole from CBS Radio
Affiliated with: People of Distinction, Benji Cole, ReadersMagnet, others
Title: N/A
Alleged Occupation(s): Media consultant, communications guru and connector, musician, singer/songwriter, author, radio DJ
Involvement: Gives “radio” interviews with Benji Cole
When I discovered Mr. Al Cole, I was overcome with confusion, amusement, and nausea. Believe me, fellow babies, he is QUITE a character.
First of all, look at this dude…
His website, peopleofdistinction.org, is a fucking trip. I highly recommend checking it out.
You’ll laugh; you’ll cry; it’ll become a part of you.
I searched Al’s website, and the only evidence I found of his association with CBS Radio was a video of him talking to “fans” while DJing for WZLX in Boston. He calls this station a “CBS affiliate.”
I found evidence that he was the overnight DJ on WZLX from around the mid-90s until 2008. In 1992, WZLX was purchased by Infinity Broadcasting, which merged with CBS in 1997. In 2005, when CBS separated from Viacom, they renamed Infinity Broadcasting to “CBS Radio.”
So yes, technically, WZLX was part of CBS Radio for three of the approximately 10 years Al DJed there. That does not make him “Al Cole from CBS Radio.” If anything, he’s “Al Cole from WZLX.”
He never worked directly for CBS Radio. He worked for a Boston radio station that became part of the CBS Radio network toward the end of his career there.
He’s “from CBS radio” like Logan Crawford is an Emmy-winning talk show host.
Yet Al constantly refers to himself as “Al Cole from CBS Radio” as if that’s his full, legal name.
Maybe it is. Who knows with this guy?
All of that is moot anyway because he wasn’t a talk show host, and he didn’t interview people. He was an overnight DJ. Think Venus Flytrap on crack.
So no matter how many times he says “Al from CBS Radio,” it’s never going to lend him any credibility when it comes to interviews.
Al also frequently claims he’s a “New York Times best-selling author,” but there’s no evidence that his name was ever mentioned on the New York Times best-sellers list.
Further research found that his claim is related to a book called Angels Among Us published by Chicken Soup for the Soul. The book contains 101 stories about angels, and Al Cole did indeed contribute story number 86…
And lest you try to claim that it could be another guy named Al Cole, here’s his bio from the back of the book…
Now, I’m sure you’ll agree that contributing one short story to a best-selling anthology does not make one a best-selling author any more than working for a radio station whose parent company merged with CBS makes one “from CBS Radio.”
However, I would be willing to give Al credit for this accomplishment if it wasn’t for one very important fact: Angels Among Us was never a New York Times best-seller.
Al has written several other “books” (and I mean that in the loosest sense of the word) that he gives away for free by email because he says he wants to share “his book wisdom freely with others.” They all seem to have something to do with romance, and they’re mostly aimed at women.
Personally, I wouldn’t touch any one of his ramblings with a 10-foot pole. This guy creeps me out. Just look at the skeevy shit he writes about his assistant on his website…
It’s like he’s pimping her out.
“If you buy my useless crap, you get to leer at my hot assistant!”
I could try to confirm whether or not Veronica here was really a “world class model,” but I have a feeling Veronica has already been humiliated enough. She gets a pass from me.
My favorite thing I found regarding Al Cole from CBS Radio (great, now I’m doing it) is a review of the one book he has for sale on Amazon.
It’s called “The Spirit of Romance,” and the publisher listed for it is “CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform,” which is the former name of Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, or Amazon KDP, the platform all independent authors use to sell their books on Amazon.
Hey, Al, we have the same publisher!
Anyway, I fucking love this review…
They threw it in the trash because they didn’t want anyone else to suffer. That is fucking savage.
Whew!
So now that you know all the players involved in this massive tissue of lies, you’re probably a bit confused.
Don’t worry, I made this handy diagram to clear things up…
Wow, I’ve been working on this so long, I totally forgot why I started it in the first place.
Oh, yeah. Book marketing scammers. I hate these guys.
Yep. Just got that Ivy Summers email and decided to Google it first. This after four straight days of emails from another scammer Rachel R. Huntley -
Book Literary & Marketing Consultant. They're using A.I. to get aggressive and really make it sound like they've actually read your books when they're really having A.I. make up whole stories based on the description on the back of the books.