Yes, the conference was amazing. Yes, I am still exhausted. Two agents asked for partial manuscripts for Queen’s Night, so we shall see where that goes. I’ve still met my goal of being traditionally published, so this would just be icing on the cupcake.
I also posted a video on the main Melusine’s Endgame page. It’s mainly me poking around with Canva, but I’d say it looks pretty good. It’s just a list of all the books in the series, but I was able to play around with images, color, and font.
On a more amusing note, I love toying with scammers. They infest most of the writing and author groups on Facebook (though some groups are better than others about policing). The fishing posts are pretty easy to spot. Lots of broken English, and they usually start with some generic opening like ‘what’s the hardest thing about writing’ or something like that. Respond, and one of two things will happen. Some will ask you to friend and DM them. Others go straight to messaging you. Nearly all of these people are selling marketing and book trailer/website creation services of some kind. All of them are crap. I’ve had a bunch lately who show me screenshots of some little test they run on my website so they can say ‘it’s not optimized…I can optimize it for *some amount of money.* Yeah, sorry sweetie, I can do that myself. It’s not hard.
But dang, are they persistent. I’ve had a few become downright threatening. You know, saying things like it will be my fault my book didn’t sell because I didn’t hire them. It would be funny if I didn’t know how many people get scammed by these jerks. They prey on those so desperate to be called authors that they don’t think to research who they are talking to and what they really need. Chatting with them for more than a couple minutes reveals that English is not their first language. Some of them even offer to edit my books. Okay, first of all…your English isn’t great, which means you will either do a poor job, or use some AI program to edit, and then charge me for that service. No thanks.
The books trailers they show are…trash. Some are even stolen from other places, or not authorized. When I run across those, I contact the real author and ask if they knew about the trailer. Most of the time, the answer is no. One I was shown was legit, but it was so bad that the original author accepted my offer to make a new one for her, free of charge (I can use the practice on Canva). Another one was not even about the book it claimed to be advertising…I contacted that author too…boy was he mad. I’ve had a bunch demand that I send them my trailers so they can ‘compare’ them with ones they made. Pro tip: don’t do that. That’s an excellent way to get your trailer stolen and used by these folks who will say they are their own.
I’ve been able to get some of them to lose interest by telling them I am traditionally publishing, and there is nothing they can do that my publisher and I can’t do for free. It looks like these types mainly prey on those who self-publish and don’t know any better. Very predatory, but luckily they all follow a similar script. Sometime this week, I will transcribe a particularly amusing multi-day interaction I had with one of these scammers, ‘Grace Williams.’ This chat started pretty standard, then escalated to the point of ‘Grace’ showing me profiles of famous authors who used her services. Long story short, I contacted the agencies of both of the authors in question, and they confirmed the profiles were fraudulent. When confronted with this information, ‘Grace’ first tried to call (yes, call) me, then block me.
Funny thing…ever since this interaction, I haven’t gotten any DMs from scammers. To me, this means one of two things. Either word is out about me and that I will troll these people for my own deranged amusement, or there are actually a comparatively small number of these types and they just have multiple profiles. I’m not sure which is more plausible.
Hilary