Scam Stupid…

I Actually Get a Laugh Out of a Current Common Scam…

The scam is that you get a letter from some person praising a book you wrote and wondering if you would like to have it featured on their current bookclub/newsletter/website/podcast or whatever.

The letter is always glowing, written by AI, of course, and if you answer it, they give you more hot wind up your ass and tell you they have a fee to get into their sixty zillion readers. Sadly, I know a few beginning writers who have fallen for this stupidity.

So what makes me laugh? The choice of the books the AIs pick to try to entice me. Four days ago they heaped praise on my diverse writing of stories in Strange New Worlds #6. You know, the book that has other people’s stories in it published 20 years or so ago. Tonight I got the offer to get my book Star Trek Voyager to their bookclub. No name of the book I might have written, just Star Trek Voyager, and wow was this AI good at praising my fantastic characters and fast pacing…

Now granted, people who know nothing about me other than I am a writer will ask how my book is going, even though when I am writing normally I will do a dozen or more novels in a year. But I have yet to have this scam get one of my books from my indie life. The AIs pick books I wrote or edited thirty to forty years ago.

What a stupid scam that goes right at the heart of beginning writers’ fears. And new writers, always in a hurry for some shortcut, will fall for the fake praise, and pay money. Just like new writers who are in a hurry will pay money for Facebook and Amazon ads they don’t know how to write.

There are no shortcuts to writing better stories, doing better branding, and writing sales copy that doesn’t suck. It all takes time to learn.