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.
10 Comments
Alex Scott
What amazes me is, even I get them, and I’m nobody.
But lately I’ve noticed a weird subtrend, probably from their reliance on AI. The email will suggest you’re being addressed by a big name author (I got one with the name “Tartt” a few days ago), but then once it gets to the signature, it’s just your name. Just last week, David Bentley Hart was treated to one from… David Bentley Hart. It’s like they forgot whom they’re supposed to be impersonating.
Sheila
Yes, this has been going on for several months now. It’s aimed at the people who don’t know any better, because they’ll fall for it. I haven’t seen as many posts around the web lately, I think people are afraid they’ll be told how stupid it is to believe any of this nonsense. Big name authors don’t have time to be sending self published noobs emails about anything, especially books that don’t even sell. It’s getting tougher to try to do anything these days, and now they put “AI” into it.
Glyn Salisbury
Dean,
I have had several of these over the last few months. What I love about them, they pick out one of my books and everything is about the Book. It’s a shame the AI has always selected a short story.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
I got one that praised my writing in The Magazine of Fantasy & SF volume 6. Which I edited. In the 1990s
Jason M
I’ve gotten a lot of these. The most recent one let me know that my “advance” would cost me only $50K (thus confusing the meaning of an advance). If the title started to take off in sales, they would charge me up to $100K for the additional exposure.
Make it make sense! I don’t even know where to begin with this. It was all AI-generated so maybe the scammer didn’t speak English.
Rob Vagle
I got one the day my Kickstarter launched. It wasn’t about a book club, but about praise after coming across my work. With questions that seemed directly lifted from my Kickstarter story. Then the next day I got an email from the same person “just checking in” and hoping all is well with me. Kind of creepy.
C.E. Petit
I’m feeling left out, nobody is trying to scam me on my 80s and 90s stuff… oh, wait, it’s mostly uncopyrighted material written for Uncle Sam (works of the US government are explicitly excluded from copyright protection — state by state, it’s different; in most foreign countries, the UK in particular, it’s different). Or maybe even the AIs have figured out how to cross-reference against this just-barely-younger thing. Fortunately, they’re leaving the rest of it alone.
I have been getting offers to submit my academic books to [name of vanity-press con artists withheld], and have been sorely tempted to submit a proposal on Literary Cons, Scams, and Traps with two chapters on vanity publishing and its relatives.
dwsmith
I doubt the AIs have figured anything out. I got two more of the scams today, one for a book that is not even mine. Wow…
Emilia
I’m getting the recruiter version of this scam:
-Glowing praise about my work experience. (Written by AI)
-Please apply for job which matches your experience (description probably stolen from real ad or AI)
-BUT to make things go smoother please pay $$$ to colleague, who is an expert on CV’s and applications. (Probably same scammer, different e-mail)
I’ve heard of similar scams with books, so I recognized the pattern of praise + pay my “colleague” to make your book/CV and application better. It’s tiring.
Nissa Harlow
I’ve had e-mails with everything from super-detailed AI slop that basically summarizes my plot with a wall of text to super-vague pleas that start with “Dear Author” and refer to “your book.” Um… which one? (This baffles me. They found my author e-mail somewhere, so they know I write books, and yet they can’t name a single one?)