Fellow authors/writers out there, just a little heads-up.
There’s a new scam going around targeting authors. I’ve gotten about a dozen of these, and they all follow roughly the same format. You will get an email from someone saying they represent some book club or another, and they would like to feature your book in their discussions. Express interest, and they will tell you about some kind of fee to get in (spotlight fee or some such garbage).
This is a scam.
The book clubs themselves are often real, but the person emailing you is not from them. A lot of them seem to be written using AI. Why do I suspect this? Many of these emails have quotation marks in weird spots, like the end of a paragraph. It almost looks like someone typed in a prompt to an AI bot, and copy-pasted the text.
The illusion falls away the second one says they aren’t interested. Then the emails instantly devolve into very broken English with an almost desperate edge to them.
This is just the latest in the long line of scams targeting authors, particularly indie authors. A few months ago, it was people impersonating well-known authors reaching out to ‘connect’ with you. Yeah…that never happens. How I shut those down is by researching the author and their literary agent, and reaching out to the agency.
The ones who responded all said they were scams, and were glad of the screenshots. I know these people will just pop up again in a new place (and who knows…the ones doing the book club scams right now may be the same people), but at I at least want to get it on people’s radar.
Stay safe, fellow authors!
Hilary