That Personalized Email About Loving and Marketing Your Book Is a Scam

I LOVE [YOUR BOOK]! 

HELPING READERS FALL IN LOVE WITH [YOUR BOOK]

FEATURING [YOUR BOOK] WITH THOUSANDS OF BOOK CLUBS

If you’re a published author of any stripe, rank, or experience, you recognize these subject headings. You’ve probably opened the email, too, because it looks real and the sender has a real(ish) name and professional, LinkedIn-posed headshot, and when you opened it, behold! It’s that most beautiful thing: a fan letter. It opens with rhapsodic and specific praise! They describe your themes and characters accurately! The writer was moved, inspired, transported! In fact they were so moved and inspired and transported that all they want in the whole world is to help this book, this magnificent book that is criminally under-appreciated, find more readers. 

You’re careful, of course—you’re not seduced at once. You know that there are scammers out there, but they’re not usually, like, literate. The more you read, the more it seems like they really did read the book. Plus, they’re right; publicity and marketing has been a humiliating death march with little to show for it.

And it’s not like they’re asking for money. All they’re asking—imploring, even—is that you let them feature your book in their book club, which has thousands of members. Or they describe their grief at discovering that such a flawless chef d’oeuvre has but a paltry handful of Goodreads reviews, and so they beg you to let them launch a Goodreads Listopia campaign on your behalf. Sometimes they are “book club placement specialists,” which could be a real job, you don’t know. Or they offer to help you build out a marketing strategy. Sometimes, they are even famous authors such as Elena Ferrante or Colson Whitehead, and to prove it, they link to their Amazon page—and in the case of Ferrante, attach a headshot!

It’s a little out of the blue, but God, they’re just so in love with your book—and look, they’re giving you their real name! And their email address looks real too! They might have a profile picture that looks professional, and even offer you references, with other authors’ names and email addresses! And you know those addresses are real, because they often have “author” in the address, as we all do, and what writer doesn’t want their personal email address broadcast to strangers?

The first time I got one of these, I looked at it for a really long time. It was exciting. It seemed like they’d really read it. I figured it was probably a scam, but, like…what if?

After a dozen more, though, I stopped being excited, and became Mad Enough to Blog It. I put out a request online, and within 24 hours my inbox was metastatic with similar emails. Everyone is getting them, often multiple times per week, at every level of the game. Lately, in fact, the scammers have taken to cold-calling writers on the phone, using AI pretending to be authors offering consulting services.

Taken individually, these scams are unnervingly personalized. Read in bulk (which I don’t recommend) they’re actually kind of reassuring: AI, it turns out, sucks at impersonating professionals—and fans. Or humans in any way. 

So how are they writing such specific and personal notes? Did it read your book? No.

Now obviously I agree with you, “John Kane, Marketing Manager at BookSavvyPR.” But so did the real woman who reviewed my book for the Washington Post, who closed by writing, “Like an excellent meal, the memory of Ashworth’s debut novel will linger after it’s finished.” The LLM that pumps these out just cannibalizes anything on the internet that involves your book—reviews, interviews, Goodreads, whatever—and turns it into a tongue-bath of praise. Read quickly, it’s flattering. Read closely, it’s grotesque: “The system rewards noise, not nuance, and you, my friend, write nuance for breakfast.” What does that even mean? If a real human fan spoke to us the way these bots do, we’d back away slowly holding our keys in our knuckles.

After reviewing another 20 or so of these, sourced from a range of authors (indie and Big Five alike), I found a number of recurring tactics that will help you tell whether an email is fake. 

First, the most common tactic I’ve seen is the offer of the “Amazon visibility audit,” which any one of you could generate for free by asking ChatGPT to do for you. (But you would not do that, because you are not an asshole who uses ChatGPT.) 

Second, if an emoji you meet, promptly delete. The use of emoji across these things is ridiculous. They often pop up in the subject heading, and then proliferate across the rest of the email. Book professionals do not use emoji like this, because they are not thirteen years old. 

Another dead giveaway is any reference to a “private group” or “horde” or “hive” of thousands of book-lovers who will, at the writer’s signal, unleash hell all over Amazon on your behalf. How these people managed to recruit and domesticate such a flock, when every writer I know has spent months fruitlessly importuning their friends and loved ones for reviews, is never explained.

Another thing to know is that there is no such thing as “book curation,” and “working with book clubs” is not a real job. As I was doing a final pass on this article, I got another email, from the “New York City Writers Critique Group.” Their founder and curator, “Christopher Keelty,” claimed to work closely with ten thousand book clubs. 

There does seem to be a small difference in approach, depending on whether they’re trying to scam an indie author or a Big Five one. With indies (hello!), a common tactic is one that the sociopathic incels who foisted AI on the world are likely familiar with: negging.

With Big Five writers, it’s a little more subtle. They don’t play on the low volume of reviews. Instead, they promise a “strategy,” which is an idea that surely never occurred to the author’s actual publicist.

And finally, there’s one tell above all: they offer shit for free.

Look, beloveds. Across the vast, forbidding sweep of the publishing savannah, there is only one creature who ever works for free: the author.

So what’s the point of this scam? How do they get your money? Because this situation called for some light stunt journalism, I went ahead and corresponded with some. “Kimijo” had actually given my book five stars on Goodreads (with a review paraphrasing my back-cover copy), but then again, she has reviewed 192 of them, and given each and every one five stars. 

Kimijo is a “Book manager and authors’ advocate,” neither of which is an actual job. She offers a 4-week campaign for $385 covering “Listopia optimization Goodreads engagement and visibility monitoring.”

“Thomas” of “Silent Book Club NYC” offered me a range of packages, from $219 to $499. Thomas did not totally explain to me how a book can be featured at a “silent” book club, the point of which is to have readers all choose their own books, but he tried.

I corresponded with a few more, but I got bored. If you’re interested in a much more granular analysis of how this works, Anne R. Allen and Jason Sanford have done excellent and thorough dives into this scam, demonstrating persuasively that they originate in Nigeria. (As do, it appears, many prominent MAGA Twitter accounts.) My favorite part is when Sanford asks for references, and they provide him with elenaferrantenovelist@gmail.com. Sanford also found that if you ask for proof that the scammers do in fact govern a whole suzerainty of reviewers, they’ll let you into a Discord—which is populated entirely by bots. This, Sanford points out, is particularly fucked up: “As generative AI becomes easier to use at ever lower costs, scammers will be able to populate entire online communities with AI chatbots.” In Writer Beware, Victoria Strauss found some evidence that scammers will try to access self-pubbed authors’ Kindle Direct Publishing accounts. 

What made this story fascinating to me wasn’t the mechanics, but the intended target. Scamming aspiring authors is a rich tradition. Fake agencies abound. While I was researching this, my friend Sarah Seltzer, who runs Lilith journal, got a scam phone call from someone pretending to be from AWP, which is a level of scam so granular—they know what AWP is, and they know journals have booths, and they know those booths cost money, and they know who runs the journal?—you almost have to respect it. Sometimes, the call is coming from inside the house: the “prestigious” lit journal Narrative is commonly alleged to be a machine for fleecing aspiring writers.¹

Scamming published authors, however, is a new trick. A number of people have expressed wonderment to me: Why go after authors? We have no money. But that’s exactly the thing the scam is exploiting. 

Never before have traditionally published authors been responsible for so many elements of publicity and marketing, and never have they been so comprehensively on their own. Ten years ago, authors were not being told to grovel for pre-orders and online reviews. They were not expected to understand algorithms. To be an author right now is to be charged with a vast array of tasks that do not have the first fucking thing to do with the real work. That’s why outreach from someone who seems to have actually read the book, when most media people we interact with don’t, is so seductive. And they target our biggest anxiety: that our inability to manipulate the internet is holding us back. To publish a book today—even with a Big Five press—requires asking ourselves the question: How much are we willing to spend on our own book? Should we hire a publicist, because even if we’re Big Five, they’re probably not going to give us much of a budget? How about a freelance editor? Are we planning to self-fund a book tour? Buy hand-sale copies? How can we get on an AWP panel? 

In the face of all this, $380 on a Goodreads campaign doesn’t seem implausible. You know what else is $380? Registering for AWP.

So yes. All these book-promotion emails are scams. And because the scammers are right, I do need the damn visibility, permit me to SEO this so that the next time someone gets one of these and googles it, this is the first thing they’ll see:

Is an Amazon visibility audit a scam? YES.

Is Goodreads Listopia a scam? YES.

Is Book Club placement a scam? YES. Scam scam scam scam.

And while we’re on the subject, so are bestseller lists.

But then again, maybe what goes around comes around. Being a writer is the greatest scam of all. Make stuff up and then figure out how to get people to buy it. And the creative-writing-pedagogical complex? Indistinguishable from an MLM. We’re all out here trying to scam our way into a life in this business. These AI bots should know not to cite the scamming magic to us. We were there when it was written.

1. In 2023, according to IRS filings, Narrative paid its employees $294,000. It only has two paid employees, though: its founders, Tom Jenks ($144,000) and Carol Edgarian ($150,000)—who are married. This February, Narrative had a writing contest, with a nonrefundable $27 entry fee, offering a $2,500 prize. No prize was awarded. Narrative charges $26 for all other submissions, and Jenks sells a craft book published in 2015 for—I am not making this up–$225. That’s not including the $3,000 writing workshop Jenks teaches. ︎

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