All Fun and Games

Until Somebody Fakes Their Death

Good morning and welcome to Shelf Life, where I am committed to telling you the wild book-business goings-on and gossip you might not have heard about if you’re not part of said business, as I did, for instance, in A Hard Cover Is Good To Find, Let’s Tok About It, Bad Cat Helicopter. If you liked the latter, which was about writing people behaving badly, you are going to love today’s Shelf Life, which is also about writing people misbehaving in unbelievable and hilarious ways.

I know this is a high-value, high-interest topic because I told my little brother—who could not give a single heck about what’s going on in publishing—and he was entertained.

So there was this author. I don’t mind telling you her name, it was Susan Meachen. The author of a dozen-ish self-published romance novels and center of a moderately active Facebook community called The Ward, where her fans interacted with her (I have no idea how many members of the group there were or are).

I can’t begin to tell you about the indie romance novel community because I’m not part of it. I don’t write romance nor actually read romance—it’s just not my thing. I can’t tell you firsthand what that community is like at all. I can tell you the indie publishing community at large on Twitter is a dramatic group. Anyway, what I understand from watching this story unfold on Twitter and then reading the news about it that came out afterward is that the drama of the indie romance novel community was getting Susan Meachen down and she reached a point where she could not take it anymore.

On September 10, 2020, a family member of Meachen’s posted to The Ward to let her fans know that Susan had died by suicide.

Friends and close peers in the indie romance author community were shaken. A GoFundMe was created on behalf of Susan’s family to raise money for Susan’s final expenses. The family member who had announced Susan’s death continued to post updates and information to the Facebook group, informing members that bullying from others in the community had led Susan to take her own life. The family member announced that they would publish Susan’s final work posthumously and asked readers to support the book to aid Susan’s family, who were struggling with the loss of Susan’s publishing income. A fellow indie romance author offered to provide editing services for the book for free to help the bereaved family. Many authors in the community flogged the book, and other of Susan’s books, hard—again, in order to help the bereaved family with the income situation in the wake of Susan’s death.

Anyway, earlier this month Susan Meachen herself announced that she’s back! Alive and well, was never dead, but needed “a break” from the community for a while and obviously the only way to make that happen was to fake her death.

Now: Who among us has not considered faking our death and starting a new life somewhere else? I contend this is a most relatable fantasy. I think many people have some part or aspect of their life that they wish they could just walk away from, and start afresh somewhere else. Most of  us would not actually do that, because to do so would be completely unhinged.

This really got me thinking about what it means to “fake one’s own death.” It used to be that if you were going to fake your death and really disappear and go somewhere else to start over you needed a lot of documentation to start your new life, you’d have to produce documentation (for your family) to collect your life insurance—I get the sense it was just not that easy to do. You’d have to do a lot of death-related administrivia to be convincing and get money.

Not anymore! Crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe make it easy to hold out the virtual hat for donations from friends and strangers when something tragic befalls you (like an untimely death). In this case, Susan Meachen was not trying to deceive people who knew her in meatspace—that is, “in real life”—only those who knew her online. There was no need to produce documentation about her death. All she had to do was tell people she had died. No obituary? No problem. Who’s to say that “Susan Meachen” is her legal name and not a pen name?

Susan Meachen, now that she’s back, contends she didn’t defraud anyone and didn’t profit from her fake death. She claims that she and her family did not receive “substantial” donations for her final expenses, and that therefore she has done nothing (legally) wrong.

On the other hand, she did, through fraudulent means, cause fellow authors and others in the community to:

• Provide editorial services worth actual money, for free.

• Provide advertising and promotional services worth actual money, for free.

• Purchase her book(s) for charitable reasons.

I mean, a court will sort it out. The court of public opinion has already ruled.

Continuing the story: During the time that Susan Meachen was “dead,” another personality appeared in her Facebook group to take the reigns, one TN Steele. When Meachen’s assistant could no longer continue running the Facebook group, Steele stepped in to take over administration, keep the group running, and post about the late Susan Meachen’s work. I’m sure you would never have guessed that “TN Steele” was another account run by—Susan Meachen. 

Honestly, this last bit causes me to question Meachen’s motives. She claims she needed a break from the community on social but it seems as though she never left; she continued interacting with the community under different names than her own. If she wasn’t actually taking a break from the community as stated, then it kinda does look like monetary gain and promotional services for her books were the outcome of the ruse.

At the end of the day, faking her death was totally unconscionable. She made her fans and friends grieve her death and then profited off their sympathy. That was a horrible thing to do. And the way she returned to “life,” with a glib Facebook post that read, in part, “I am in a good place now and I am hoping to write again. Let the fun begin,” indicates that she has no remorse for what she’s done and sees the moral or criminal aspects as nonexistent or at least nonissues.

I get that people have parts of their lives they want to take a break from. If the part of your life you need a break from is social media, I don’t know how I can say this more plainly but, you can just delete Facebook. You don’t need to fake your death.

On a more serious note, I think it’s a good idea for anyone to take a step back from the writing/author/publishing community for a while if it’s stressing you out. Getting a bunch of rejections for a manuscript you worked hard on takes a bite out of your mental health. Even when you truly feel happy for and proud of your fellow writers, it can be hard to see others achieving success when you haven’t. Querying is hard. Submitting work is hard. People start down the garden path of writing a manuscript thinking the hard part will be writing the manuscript. That is not necessarily the hard part. 

For those who publish independently (self publish), staying active on social media is basically a requirement to sell books. Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok are some of the best promotional outlets for indie books. I get that it’s hard to take a social media break when it feels like the success of your books depends upon your social media presence.

Here’s an idea: 

• NO: I have died and this surviving family member (secretly also me) will now represent me on social.

• YES: I am taking a social media break and this alternative person (secretly also me) will rep me on social for a while.

Do you see how that’s still deceit but it’s, like, deceit-lite? Nobody donated money for a funeral that didn’t happen? Nobody bought your book just to support your loved ones in this hard time? I realize it’s a fine, nuanced difference but you can think of it as the difference between telling a white lie and committing fraud.

Fun related fact about the word commit: Fraud is a crime one commits. Suicide is not a crime and is not something one commits. One might “die by suicide” or “die from suicide” but one does not “commit suicide.”

You can also remain active on social but enact measures to safeguard your mental health, like:

• Muting accounts and topics that are problematic. For instance, on Twitter I have the New York Critique account blocked because of their notable predatory behavior and I’ve got all tweets with the word “fatphobia” in them hidden because nothing good can ever come of reading those.

• Set social media “hours” like a college professor sets office hours. This is your time to check social media, post, interact with folks, retweet, and promote. Outside your social media hours, stay off the apps. 

• Addendum to previous: Turn off notifications from social media apps. Actually do that anyway, whether social media is impacting your mental health or not. You do not urgently need to know that Smith John 123 followed you, liked 12 of your photos, and is trying to send you a DM. That can wait.

• Use a third party application like Hootsuite to manage your social media posting across all your accounts so you can both spend less time making posts and stay out of the applications more.

I know that a large part of what authors do on Twitter is hobnob with one another and try to drum up “engagement” so you can’t totally stay outside the application and maintain the same level of success you’d have if you were in there engaging with people all day every day—but you can find a balance. You leave time to write, right? Cut back where you can if the author community social media black hole is dragging you into a gravity well.

After all, you can always reengage with social media later when you’re feeling better. Apparently even if you were dead.

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