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We’re all being inundated with spam, unsolicited social media messages, and marketing phone calls from scammers right now. We are receiving DOZENS of forwarded scam emails from authors daily!

Many authors are flummoxed by the extremely accurate book descriptions the scammers are using when contacting authors with (false!) praise about their books.

Q – 

I received an email today from someone calling herself Marilyn E. Smith. The note is very flattering, well-written, and offers to help promote my book but it comes from a generic Gmail address, and gives no (verifiable) business information. No company name, website, location, or a way to contact other than by “reply”.

I did find an Amazon author page linked to Marilyn E. Smith with one book, in a similar genre to mine, but that’s all. I don’t know if the solicitation is legitimate, but I figured that if I’m already more visible online than she is, she’s probably not the marketing strategist for me. Nevertheless, the email was polished and persuasive enough that I wonder if I’m just being too paranoid, and I might be missing out on a legitimate service by not responding. The email is tailored to my book’s content and voice, but could have been assembled automatically. Can A.I. scan a book’s online information and produce a personalized-sounding sales pitch? Is this a thing?

A – 

It’s a scam.If you do ask them for a website, they will either tell you it’s only for their “members” (you have to pay first to get that!), or they will send you a webpage link that’s using a free service (like scammer-page.wix-vibe.com). No legitimate company uses a free site like that.

We’re receiving reports of this exact same scam several times every day now. James M. Walsh, Esq. is currently writing an article for us about the influx of Gmail Email Scammers. Any legitimate company has their own website, and an email address that uses that domain (i.e. angela@writersweekly.com). Any so-called company contacting you from a Gmail email address should be avoided at all costs. Gmail has lost control over the number of scammers using their service. It’s likely well into the millions, if not more. Why would a scammer bother to put up a website when they can hoodwink thousands of authors with false praise that was written using AI?

Yes, they’re absolutely using A.I. to write those pitches! It’s not hard. They pull the book’s description from Amazon, and possibly even the excerpt of a book they found online. They then copy and paste that into an AI program, which instantly creates a convincing description of the book. They can even ask AI specifically to create (false!) praise for your book! Then, they use a search engine to find the author’s contact information. Some scammers, after failing to contact the author directly, will reach out to the author’s relatives online, telling them they MUST have the author contact them (the scammers) RIGHT AWAY! Talk about desperate marketing!!

THE AUTHOR REPLIED:

Wow. Creepy! I’m disappointed it wasn’t real, and really grateful to you. You’ve saved me time & money and prevented shame and embarrassment.

Thank you!

MY REPLY: 

Just doing my job! 🙂 I’m so glad I could help! So many authors do NOT do their research and they’re getting scammed left and right. 🙁

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