Q –

Angela,

How’s business? I’ve been seeing our posts on the group list. Haven’t had time to participate myself. Question. Have you been contacted by the company below about any of your authors’ books? It looks suspicious. I’m not replying until I hear back from our author but I questioned if you’d seen anything like this before.

-Name removed (because it’s a friendly competitor of BookLocker)

A –

Hey, (removed)! Long time no text!!

Yes, in fact, I have been contacted by that same company. They told me the author had contracted with them, and (ha ha ha) asked us for:

1. A transfer or rights from us to them. (As you know, we don’t take rights from our authors. BookLocker authors always retain all rights to all of their files and copyrights. If he’d truly talked to our author, he would know that.)
2. The login info. for our Amazon business account so they can “make changes” to the author’s book page. (I just about peed myself laughing over that!)
3. A full listing of the author’s past sales.
4. Copies of the authors’ production files (the print-ready files for the cover and interior).
5. The username and password the author uses to access her author account in our system.

I was reading the email to Brian and we were cracking up! These scammers sure are getting creative! Good thing you and I have been in the industry long enough to know better. Unfortunately, new companies, or employees at those newer companies, may not know any better. The email was very well-written, and appeared extremely professional. No errors at all.

I contacted the author. She’d never heard of them.

I sent three words back to the scammer: “Nice try, (bleep)!”

😉