I Set a Trap for a Book-Marketing Scammer
I set a trap for a book-marketing scammer (2025)
A traditionally published sci-fi author receives over 50 scam book-marketing pitches in 33 days, all preying on his desperation. He turns the tables by baiting a scammer with a nonexistent book, exposing an AI-powered operation that confuses him with a 16th-century playwright. The piece reveals the economics of publishing that make authors vulnerable and the industry-wide crisis fueling this surge.
Veronica Emmanuel, with her detailed Pinterest strategies and algorithm insights and carefully mapped visibility plans, had confused me with a man who’d been dead for 433 years.
- boznz
Half my spam folder is currently from the same group of people, with similar sales pitches, though one also promised 25 five star Amazon reviews for $200 which is scary if true. The whole blog post just about sums up an indie writers journey, having to become a reluctant marketing person, and fighting the algorithm for recognition; the meme nailed it.
Luckily I came to realise after my first book that writing was not about the sales (though that was the starting goal), but about finally putting all my ideas into a bunch of characters and having them live the life and fantasies I never could in a world I created. I got an email out of the blue this week from somebody who read my free sci-fi novel and liked it, such small things really makes the journey worth it.
- ilamont
A trend that’s leading to more victims is the wave of boomer retirements. Every year there are millions of new 60 and 70 somethings with lots of time on their hands, many of them loaded to the gills and keen to write that novel/memoir/children’s book they’ve been thinking about for years. They are seldom aware of publishing industry requirements, and may be easily swayed by convincing pitches, social media personalities, or YouTube scammers.
- matkoniecz
> In writing this article, Greene used Claude (Anthropic) as a tool for structure, data organization, and feedback.
yeah, it was quite visible in style (in parts that I bothered to read)