What Author Doesn’t Like Praise? — AI Scams in My Inbox

by John Byrne Barry

Almost every day, I receive one or more emails praising my most recent book, Pirates of Sausalito: Houseboat Wars Murder Mystery, using flattering language that I might have written myself.

(In fact, I did.)

Here’s one example. 

It’s seductive. Or it was, before I realized it was a scam. 

Here’s another, from a “book club.”

Most of these emails promised some sort of promotional support, sometimes very specific, like “targeted reviewer outreach to 75 to 100 active Goodreads reviewers.”

Though they started out fawning, some segued into some variation on “you’re invisible on the internet and here’s how I can help you.”

Like this.

(There are, in fact, about a dozen-plus interviews of me on YouTube and podcasts, linked to on my website, but that’s beside the point.)

At first, I was curious. I looked up the senders. Most of the time, they didn’t exist. Their names were made up. They promised visibility and sales and reviews, but they had no website. If they were a real human, they were also operating in full witness protection mode. Any successful marketing expert with clients would contact me from their business domain, not from so-and-so-marketing-specialists@gmail.com.

To their credit, rarely did they say they read my book. They said they “came across it” or it “caught my attention.” More often than not, a healthy fraction of the flattering language was scraped from promotional material I wrote. No wonder it was flattering. 

Before I Wised Up

Earlier this year, I responded to one email, allegedly from a Dallas-based book-group leader, who told me my novel, When I Killed My Father: An Assisted-Suicide Family Thriller, had been chosen by her group because of “its emotionally complex premise and the profound ethical and relational questions it raises.” She promised a zoom Q & A, members posting honest reviews on Goodreads, and more.

In my email to her I asked if this was for real — I said I received a lot of AI-written solicitations, often from people who had no presence on the web.

She replied that she was a real human being and her book club was part of Meetup. She followed up with more promises, claimed there were no marketing fees and  — you can guess where this is going — her next response included an “author profile submission form,” and there, in small print, the kicker: VIP registration fee: $125. Not to mention a bank in Delaware and an account holder with a Nigerian name.

Lesson learned. Nothing lost but time.

Book Club, Literary Festivals, and Famous Authors

The emails evolved. Last spring, I received an email from Kate Bolick, an actual author, inviting me to participate in the Newburyport Literary Festival in Massachusetts, an actual literary festival. I was intrigued enough to check. And of course, the sender was not the real Kate Bolick and the participants in the festival had all been selected months earlier. 

Two other variations have shown up recently, invitations to book clubs and personal letters from best-selling authors like Suzanne Collins, Stephen King, and the like. Suzanne Collins’ email included her book Hunger Games in the signature, but could not have been more generic. The sender’s email address gave it away — contact.suzannecollins01@gmail.com.

Some were admittedly clever.

Others were obvious scams like this one that they forgot to finish. (I highlighted the last sentence.)

I have probably received two or three hundred such emails in the past six months. Many raved about books I did not write. Others appeared, at a glance, to be solicitations from traditional media, like BBC Radio and actual movie production companies.

To Complicate Things

Because I’ve been inundated by these scam emails, I am suspicious of any stranger reaching out, but just this past week, I got a legitimate email that I ignored. It was from a TV reporter in San Francisco who’d been assigned a story about the history of Sausalito from World War II to the present, including the houseboat scene. Which I know a lot about. His email address was @cbsnews.com, and there was no flattery or mention of my book, but I was still hesitant and I was traveling, so I didn’t respond until two days later. He emailed back, said he’d already filed the story. Alas.

There are legitimate book marketers, some of which I’ve used — like Fussy Librarian or Bargain Booksy or BookBub. They essentially sell ads, and, for me, I usually earn less than I spend, but they do generate sales and it’s an inexpensive way to reach new readers. 

I’m Not the Only One

At BAIPA. meetings, we’ve discussed these scam solicitations. Many other authors also get them regularly. There’s also a lot about these scams on the Writer Beware website, a project of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association. Writer Beware has been around since 1998, long before these AI scams started, but scams targeting writers, like vanity presses, have been around for even longer. 

Arguably we writers, often solitary creatures who work in obscurity and wish for fame and fortune, are an easy target, especially when we get an email full of hyperbolic praise and promise of greater visibility and sales.  

The solicitations themselves should be suspicious enough — after all, reputable publishers, literary agents, radio stations, literary festivals rarely contact authors — and the flattery is over the top, but what author doesn’t like praise? 

Writer Beware lists a number of giveaways: excessive flattery, language that is clearly lifted from your own book descriptions and reviews, buzzwords like branding and metadata and visibility and optimization, no website, and instead of company email domain like so-and-so@literaryagency.com, the email comes from so-and-so-literary-agency@gmail.com.

Writer Beware’s cautionary post “Return of the Nigerian Prince: A New Twist on Book Marketing Scams” tracks with my experiences. These AI-generated emails often spell out proposed services in great detail, like “updating key words” and “pitching books to top book bloggers” or are vague and fake-friendly like “I’d be delighted to discuss this further with you.”

Here’s a list of dozens of specific scams from Writer Beware: Book Marketing Scams

As is the case with other kinds of scams and spam, most of these operations are built on volume, so even if only a few authors get fooled, the scammers can make money.

And while there are plenty of homegrown scammers, like the Dallas-based book-club leader I corresponded with, most scams are operated by organized crime syndicates in places like Nigeria and and the Philippines, and the people doing the grunt work are often victimized or even enslaved. Though these days, because of AI bots, there are allegedly fewer actual humans behind these scams.

P.S. I missed this when it came out, but here’s a New York Times story from earlier this year that covers some of the same ground: “Hungry for Affirmation, Vulnerable to Scams: As a Writer, I Know the Feeling.”

P.S.S. Let me know in the comments what your experiences with scammers has been.