I received Hypnosis: The Myths, The Truth and The Techniques ‘compiled by’ Dean Amory as a Christmas present. I wrote a shorter version of this review for Amazon to alert others to this book and author, but Amazon wouldn’t allow my review to be posted. They said it goes against their guidelines, but I have reviewed their guidelines and can’t see how? And I feel it is important for people to know about this book and more importantly about this author.

(Some of the people who have their work in this book: Jeff Sauber, Orkhan Ibad, D. John Anthony, Stephen Walkin PhD, Michael A Robinson RN, Trevor Johnson, Keith Livingston, David Mason, John Sadler, Ron Stubbs, Dr Frank Valente, Stephen and Carol Lankton, Kaiden Fox)

I have an extensive hypnotherapy book collection of over 600 books and have authored over 30 books myself. I had this book on my Amazon wishlist of hypnotherapy books I didn’t yet own. When I received the book, I started reading and saw that it says at the beginning that it is ‘compiled by’ the author and is works available on the internet compiled to make it easier to find these works. I assumed that the author (compiler) would have asked permission from the various contributors and then I saw my name and a link to my very old MySpace account saying that some of the work in the book was mine. My name, and the other authors names, were only mentioned at the beginning, so reading through the book you don’t know (unless you have read it before or are the author) what specifically is which authors work. 

There is nothing inherently wrong with much of the content, the issue is that this ‘compiler’ is stealing the works of others and profiting from it (and from researching the author he appears to still be doing so under various names through Amazon Createspace, Kindle Direct Publishing and Lulu Publishing). He is doing so with many of the books he has available and from doing research he is doing so as other author names as well, presumably following people challenging him over taking their work. On some of the books it says to email him if you have found your work used and are unhappy with this and he will remove what he used of yours and replace it with someone else’s. This essentially means he will replace your stolen work that you have stumbled upon and replace it with someone else’s stolen work until they stumble upon it.

The compiler seems to think that he is allowed to use the work because it has been published on the internet, and so totally misunderstands copyright. Some places, like Wikipedia, allow their work to be used in this way and state on Wikipedia that you can create books of compiled articles from Wikipedia and profit from this and you don’t even have to tell the reader that the book is just compiled Wikipedia articles the person could have read online for free. But other places, like my blog, is of content that belongs to the creator of that content that they are choosing to share on their own website or pages etc, and unless otherwise stated isn’t available for someone to take and use in its entirety.

The compiler isn’t just using extracts to expand on his own concepts or writing and including references like many books do where they may use a sentence, couple of sentences or a paragraph or two in context with what a section of a book and referencing so that people can trace the source, it is just others work copied and pasted into his book with some editing, which in the case of my work in this book has meant that because he clearly doesn’t know or understand the subject himself he has ruined the explanations. An example of this is where I gave an example of saying when presenting “You can find the handouts over by the products on the table at the back of the room” and adding emphasis to ‘by (buy) the products)’. The compiler has gone through the whole section I wrote on that (which is actually an extract from a sales book of mine where I shared some extracts from my book to give people a taste of what was in that book of mine, not so that someone would copy it and put it in their book, and they don’t even say it is an extract from my sales book) and only emphasised the word ‘by’ over and over again, and totally missed the point of what he is posting (I assume he pasted unformated and then tried to guess what words etc were embedded commands). It is cringing to read my own work being made to look so poor and made to not make proper sense.

I have contributed to dozens of books over the years, I also share extracts from my books as blog posts etc, not for people to take my work and publish it in its entirety in their own books. I am frequently happy to contribute to books and had the compiler asked myself and other authors whether we were happy to contribute our blogposts or to write a chapter etc many of us are likely to have said yes. I have written some long blogposts which would probably make good book chapters, and if an author asked and it stated that chapter was by me with a 50 word or so author bio about me and a link to my website I would likely agree to this, but I wouldn’t for this compiler now, because of the fact they have been doing this for years and have likely had this issue raised many times over the years (I have done some research and know that the issue has been raised with them a number of times in relation to different books and suspect that is why they have added their comment to newer books about if you find your work in a book and are unhappy with this, to get in touch and he will remove your work and replace it with someone else’s).

I would recommend not purchasing this book or any other books by this author. I will be trying to find a way to get this person’s books discontinued where they are doing this and hope that they change their approach to books. If you search the internet you can see that they often leave good reviews for their own books under different names, so I don’t imagine they will change unless Amazon, Lulu and other sites refused to sell their books and refuse to publish their work.