Flattery will get you ... blocked

As authors we are excited when someone expresses a love of our work. Especially if it's someone in the publishing industry. However, that excitement can sometimes blind an author to what is obvious to others. That these cold contacts are more often than not, a scam. The internet runs rampant with scammers of every kind.

While it's nice to have someone praise your work, you must beware of any sort of cold contact from someone claiming to be an editor, publisher, even the head of a book club. Always take any sort of cold contact email from a suspicious perspective. It's very easy to Google publishing companies, check out the page with their staff, even steal the person's image, create a fake email, and pretend to be them so their email appears legit.

A lot of these scammers will use the same format for their email.

As you can see Marta and Christine went to the same scammer 101 class, their emails are nearly identical. I recieve several of these emails a day. Most follow this format.

The other way scammers will try to get to you is by praising the book they're trying to contact you about. Many will take your blurb and run it through AI to create a glowing review of your book. A book they've never read and probably only saw online on someplace like Amazon. Many of them will mention how "they never contact authors like this but your book stood out". Trying to make it seem as if your work is special to them in some way.

The above is an example of a scammer running my blurb through AI, all their praise of my book is wording from the back cover blurb. Some of the wording has changed slightly, but it mirrors it to the point where I can tell they've never read more than the blurb of the book.

There are also the vauge contacts. This is where the scammer will tell you they came across your book, but they never mention the title or anything at all about it. These scammers troll the internet or scoial meida platforms looking for anyone who has the word author in their username or on their profile.

Elsa here couldn't even put my name in the email. It's an obvious form letter they probably send out to a long list of authors every day with the hope one will bite. They don't even bother making any attempt at flattery, it was straight to the pitch to help the author reach more readers.

Then we have the ones who claim to be head of a book club with X amount of readers all waiting to read your book. Generally book clubs choose a book, the members go buy it, get it from the library, whatever and they read it. They don't contact authors to ask to read the book. If you've ever been a member of a book club, then you know that's not how book clubs work. These scammers make it sound really great, they will help get your book in front of 20, 30, 50 thousand readers in their group. WOW! That's a lot of readers. It you contact them to ask about the "opportunity", you'll get a pitch about how much work it will be and how, though this service is totally free, they're asking for an X amount of money donation per book read. We'll say $5 for the sake of this email to make the math a little easier, which doesn't sound like a lot until you do the math. We'll be conservitive and say they have 20,000 member, even if they claim only 15,000 read your book you're looking at a $75,000 payout. Let's go lower, even if they claim only 1,000 of their readers read your book, that's still a $5,000 payout. Money most indie authors do not have.

Though some will mention a book by title, this one did not. These imaingary book clubs always have a massive amount of readers. Some phenomally large number they beleive you can't ignore and will be eager to share your work with. There's an extremly high possibility there is no club, and if there is, it doesn't have anywhere near the number of memebrs they mention.

This next one tried a different approach ...

At the end they mention how prevelant scams are and encourage the author to "verify their background". Well, here is where the problems arise. Laura Longrigg is a real person who worked for the company mentioned and did retire in 2022. Hard to verify information when the scammers use the identity of a real person. There is no way to verify that you are speaking to the real Laura.

I've seen scammers create eleborate trails to show they are who they say they are. One marketing scammer an author posted about, created fake social media accounts for the authors they claimed to have helped. The author contacted these fake accounts and spoke to who she thought was the authors. Once the author handed over money for the services, all the accounts vnaished. Including the one the scammer used to contact her. There was no recourse left open to her. No way to get her money back.

These scammers know what they're doing. They may convince you to send money via PayPal, but send it as a friend/family transaction, instead of a business transaction, to avoid the fees. If you do that, PayPal won't refund the money. They will not refund payments when the transaction is done under the friends/family tag.

Some of these scammers may ask for X amount of chapters to make certain the manuscript fits what they're looking for. All they need is a single chapter, your blurb, or a logner synonpsis to shove into an AI writer and create a full length novel that will mirror your writing. They slap your name on it, and they profit from it. They will have a fully wirtten AI book out there with your name on it and once readers realize the book is AI, the witch hunt will begin. Many readers are heavily against AI slop, authors have been ostracized for writting a book with full AI. Once that label is attached to your name, it's difficult to get out from under it. Just be cautious about who you hand out information to.

It's good idea to peridocially search marketplaces, like Amazon, for your name just to make certain there are no books floating around with your name, and author information, on it that you didn't write.

The best bet with these emails is to ignore them, as exciting as it would be to have publishers scramble to get you under contract and show off your work to a wider audience, they don't cold contact authors. Most of these companies get so many manuscripts a day, they don't need to go trolling the internet for authors. And book clubs? As I said, that's not how they usually work.

Your response to these emails should be to immediately block the sender, and delete the email. Don't respond. Don't give them any information. Just erase them from your inbox as if they never crept in looking for a hand out. You work hard to create your books, you shouldn't hand it, or your hard earned money over to anyone blindly.