If you travel in SF book circles and you’re 40 or older, you probably know that Underwood-Miller was a small press publisher specializing in SF and fantasy founded by two book dealers (Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller) in San Francisco in 1976. They began work with the first hardcover edition of Jack Vance’s SF classic The Dying Earth. Owing to Underwood’s acquaintanceship with Vance, they continued publishing his work while branching out, first to reprint Conan author Robert E. Howard’s 1957 Arkham House poetry collection Always Comes Evening. In 1979, they started working with Roger Zelazny and Richard Lupoff, and would broaden further to include limited and trade editions by Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, Peter Straub, and Anne McCaffery. They would go on to publish ‘complete’ (though few ‘complete’ collections ever are) story collections of Robert Bloch and Philip K. Dick. They carried on until 1994 before the duo agreed to dissolve the business, leaving a legacy of over 130 titles in multiple editions across 18 years.
And this is where the story would usually end, except for the undead scratching that occurred in in my browser window this morning…
* * *
I write. I send fiction out for consideration, and I self-publish. I do the former because it keeps me writing and refining short fiction, and it occasionally pays an editorial dividend in terms of story improvement, or buys me something nice for my shelves. I self-publish because I can and because at 57 I can either spend the next ten years telling my stories, or trying to find an agent to convince a publisher to distribute my stories for the benefit of me, my agent, and my publisher. As the meme says, ain’t nobody got time for that.
I’m currently vetting printers for the first novel in a series around a private investigator, C.T. Robillard, who lives in a Houston, TX just a little bit in the future from now. It will be my first published novel, so I want it to be a quality product. Finding the right printer entails setting the title up for printing via multiple different print-on-demand outfits and purchasing a print proof. These are of widely variable quality—hence the need to sample company wares. This is made more challenging by rising print costs versus wildly variable quality of output. TL,DR: no one is making an affordable hardcover book of truly high quality in the print-on-demand world. The challenge is now getting a presentable book that doesn't cost $35 in hardcover from a guy no one has heard of (jerks thumb deprecatingly at self), but also doesn’t fall apart after a reading.
Having plumbed the low-end of the publishing spectrum with mixed results, and eyeing with envy the next tier (who are within my price point if they have another sale this year), an ad that happened across my screen grabbed my by the eyeballs and pulled, Tex Avery-style:
UNDERWOOD-MILLER — Best Publishing Services in the US
Um… what?
Not having a finger on the pulse of all publishing everywhere all the time, I supposed for a moment it was possible that Underwood-Miller had returned from the great beyond of specialty publishers. Phantasia Press, which began in 1978 and wound down in 1989, returned to life in 2023 with original publisher Alex Berman back at the wheel, so there was precedent of a sort.
Except Tim Underwood died in 2023. And Chuck Miller pre-deceased him in 2015. And their company was gone even before that. So I followed the URL in the ad to the Underwood-Miller website to see what I could learn.
It was a very quick education, given the animated banner in the middle of their home page. (right)
Cut-rate web design? Check.
Misspelling the alleged company name at least once on the home page? Check.
Stilted text from either AI or an english-as-a-second-language programmer—probably both?
Big gorram Ray Bradbury three-inch-wide Sharpie marker check.
Reviewing the website, the Undead U-M isn’t just a publisher. They offer it all. They’ll print your book! They’ll edit your book! They’ll help you create a cover! They’ll proofread, they’ll brand, they’ll market, they’ll help you publish on Amazon! Hell, they’ll even write your book! No kidding: they have an “Exceptional Range of Ghost Book Writers.” They slice, they dice, they make julienne fires. What they WON’T do is tell you what things cost. Unlike most POD facilitators, who will let you put in some basic stats and get an idea of what the gig will cost you, Undead Underwood-Miller requires a name, an email, and potentially a phone number, even just to chat.
Nope. Nothing possibly shady there.
To be fair: there’s nothing inherently wrong with offering all these services. Lots of companies do. The ones I’ve used do. There’s probably less ghost-writing openly offered, but in the AI age I expect an explosion of ungodly syntax very soon. In fact, a couple minutes with Undead Underwood-Miller website and you can feel the AI shambling at you.
But the killer thing is Undead U-M’s attempt to leverage the name to make you believe they’re the actual real Underwood-Miller (or Under-Wood Miller, depending on where you look on the home page.) This is a fraud they directly perform when you scroll down the page to this:
Those six covers link to Amazon. Five were put out by Underwood-Miller in their time. The Undead U-M has no claim to them; using them as “Few of Our Books” [sic] has one point: to make ignorant eyes pop. Hold on—the same company that published Clive Barker and Peter Straub and Harlan Ellison will also work with ME on MY book?!?! The rub here is that anyone who might recognize the name will take one look at the splash page of this digital fish wrap and walk away, seeking better for their work. Perhaps a FedEx Office.
Insult to injury, Undead U-M might get a small kickback from Amazon if the link results in a sale. (The sixth book, by the by, is a January 2025 publication from Tomeka Jones, a motivational title that checks in at a whopping 57 pages and curiously identifies the publisher not as Undead U-M, but simply as “independently published”, so Ms. Jones isn’t even enjoying the benefit of name recognition that the people who took her ducats in someone else’s name are.)
It’s clearly not Messrs. Underwood and Miller, so who’s rambling around in the storied publisher’s skin, trading on their quality name? The WHOIS lookup has grown largely useless since the advent of anonymous website registration and ‘privacy service’ companies who help hide the identities of site operators. Undead U-M’s site lookup suggests the page owners may be in Iceland (the content of their website certainly leans that way), despite an Albany, NY address on their website (a suite, no less, that a half-dozen different businesses appear to call home based on a net search.) At least scamadviser.com is aware of them. The site gets a score of 31 of 100. You could more quickly burn your money in the backyard; at least you’ll get a grilled hot dog out of the deal.
If you’re going to scam, you need a live person to cast bait and reel in fish. Undead U-M uses one. A chat window pops up wanting to help you almost immediately. So I did what any curious SF fan who may have never met Tim Underwood or Chuck Miller, but who’d go to the mat for their memory on the strength of Harlan Ellison’s Watching alone: I responded to their invitation.
The whole chat is at the bottom of the page. TL,DR: after donning my disguise and seeking someone to print my book (400 hardcover jacketed copies of a 477 page SF novel), I got ‘Harris Blake’ to tell me his company has been “in this business since 1976” and that “we’ve had the privilege of working with some legendary names in the industry”. This tune quickly changes when confronted with my knowledge that U-M was dissolved in 1994—then he says the brand has been “revived and is now back in business, operating legally and actively in the U.S.” (I didn’t have the heart to tell him a business operating legally seldom needs to say it is.) He has no answer for how they came to attain the name, and gets confused when confronted about the display of old U-M titles on their home page (“It was self-published under the authors name.”) A final piece of the chat, where I suggest that it might be fraudulent to represent old Underwood-Miller publications as their own was lost when it led ‘Harris’ to close the chat and lock me out of re-opening a chat window—clearly the mark of people who are in the right.
The bottom line: if you know an indie author who might be inclined to chase Undead U-M because it’s a name they associate with quality, or recognize as a publisher of heavy-hitters in the field, or think the company may have some sort of leg-up in the publishing world, let them know they should give them a wide berth, as with any zombie. Do they do good work? I think it’s immaterial if they do dishonest work, and it doesn’t get any more dishonest than trying to catfish people who are shopping for services with a name they might trust. If Undead U-M was an actual business, they’d have no reason to hide their identity; and if they were a quality outfit, they wouldn’t need to pose as a defunct company that did good work once upon a time just to build themselves up.
And if you know how to reach the estates or heirs of Tim Underwood or Chuck Miller, you may want to let them know their families’ good names are being taken in vain to make a buck.
© 2025 by Doug Lane
