This website, CreationBooksFraud.com, was launched in January of 2012 to expose Creation Books’ civil and criminal mistreatment of its authors. Since that time we have been contacted by a variety of disgruntled former authors in several countries who were swindled by the company, book printers who once worked with the company, and former friends and acquaintances of Creation Books’ proprietor, James Williamson. Each of these individuals contacted us to share the details of their own negative experiences in dealing with Williamson, and out of these disparate sources, a picture of this elusive professional conman has slowly emerged.
James Williamson in 1990, on UK television.
James Williamson was born in Plymouth, England in 1959 as Julian Hallett (he is also referred to in David Cavanagh’s book The Creation Records Story as Julian Halibut). His father died when he was in his early teens, and upon his father’s death Julian was left a decent inheritance, which he lived off of for the next twenty years. At some point during this period Julian Hallett legally changed his name to James Williamson in homage to the guitarist for the American proto-punk band The Stooges (he was also widely known as Ferd or Ferdy, and would later adopt numerous pseudonyms). In the early ‘80s he worked at a record shop in Plymouth called Meat Whiplash, and may have also been a co-owner there.
Williamson moved to London for a period in the early 1980s, and then bought a flat in Brighton, around which time he also started a book mail-order business which he advertised in the small ads of the publication New Music Express. In Brighton Williamson became a hanger-on of the band Primal Scream (vocalist Bobby Gillespie appeared in Williamson's "art film" Crimes Against Pussycat,), and through this insider connection Williamson then got to know Alan McGee who ran the band’s label, Creation Records. Piggybacking on the success of the then-hip Creation imprint, Williamson convinced McGee to allow him to vanity-publish his first book Raism (written using the pen name James Havoc), under his own sub-imprint Creation Books, which Williamson founded as the ostensible publishing arm of McGee’s record label (Williamson appears briefly alongside McGee in the documentary film Upside Down: The Creation Records Story). Through Creation Books, Williamson then vanity-published a couple of books by his then-girlfriend Adele Olivia Gladwell, before going on to publish more salable works and eventually establish Creation Books as a bona fide, albeit “underground,” British publishing house at the end of the 1980s.
For the first ten years—most of the 1990s—the business element of Creation Books was legitimate, with both bills and authors being paid, although the sums provided to the latter were never large. Creation Books’ offices in London’s Leather Lane and Clerkenwell Road are said to have been claustrophobic, over-stuffed little offices with two or three employees, getting by month-to-month; but places of legitimate business nonetheless. During this period Williamson was in collusion with a number of different business partners, however none lasted longer than a couple of years and Williamson appears to have burned most, if not all bridges with his former associates of this era. By the end of the 1990s, of the company’s three main employees, one moved on to pursue a career in mainstream publishing and another is rumored to have ended up in prison on drug charges – thus, at the end of the decade, Creation Books was owned and operated by Williamson alone. Around this time, authors such as Matthew Stokoe, Terrence Sellers, Lisa Falour, and others began to report unpaid royalties, highly suspect accounting, unauthorized sale of foreign language translation rights, and threats of violence when demands were made for payment of royalties.
Around the turn of the millennium Williamson moved from London to New York City, and—with the internet now being the obvious means with which to run such a business—Creation Books became a web-based company; and the major rip-offs began to occur, including many of the authors named on this website (many of whom were never paid any royalties at all). Unable to gain much of a foothold in New York City, after a few short years in The United States, Williamson then moved on to Bangkok, Thailand, sometime around 2004, where he seems to have remained since.
Since relocating to Thailand, James Williamson’s standard practice has been to keep up the façade that Creation Books and its sub-imprints are legitimate businesses based in the United Kingdom and/or United States (as described on the introductory page of this website, and detailed elsewhere.) Over the years Williamson has managed to keep his shell business running—almost entirely online—by;
- printing books on credit and then not paying printers1,
- breaching authors’ contracts and not paying authors royalties,
- illegally selling the rights to foreign translations of authors’ works,
- threatening authors who complain with libel suits and violence,
- using various aliases to give the impression that Creation Books is a legit business with multiple employees in the United Kingdom and United States,
- operating out of P.O. boxes and hiding behind website “whois” DNS concealers like PrivacyProtect.org,
...and other such obfuscating behavior – all while remaining in Thailand and taking in money from the United States and United Kingdom via the internet. In light of such behavior, not only is James Williamson civilly liable to numerous parties for monies owed due to breach of contract, he has also committed criminal fraud, and it is our view that he should be criminally prosecuted for such in either the United Kingdom or United States.
The above was posted in January of 2012. The following update stems from Williamson's activities of May 2014:
James Williamson has posted a rebuttal to this website at "Creation Books History" , on which he states that Creation Books has been dissolved as a company, and is no longer publishing books. He further states that Creation Books' former employees deny any liability for unpaid debts owed by the company. Visitors to this website are invited to visit "Creation Books History" and assess its veracity on their own. It should be noted that the site contains no contact information or physical mailing address at which Williamson can be reached offline, no photographs of Williamson, and no tangible or independently verifiable substantiations of Williamson's assurances that he has engaged in no wrongdoing. It should also be noted that, in addition to threats of legal action, the site claims that all proof of Williamson's claims will be made available in a court of law. We wholeheartedly invite Williamson to reveal his whereabouts, submit to the jurisdiction of the United States legal system, and present any evidence supporting his claims in open court. However, we will not be holding our collective breath.
1It should be pointed out that the monies that authors are owed is little compared to what’s owed to the printing companies unwise enough to extend credit to Williamson and to print books without upfront payment from him. One American printer filed a judgment against Creation Books (fruitlessly, of course), and a British printer is rumored to be out hundreds of thousands of pounds as a result of his scamming.