I’ve grumbled enough on social media about the rise in AI-generated scam emails that now, more than one of my author friends has sent an email to me, asking whether I think it’s a scam or not. (This is great; please always send these emails to author friends for second opinions, and I’m always happy to be that friend.)

My answer, I’m sorry to say, has always been “yeah, that’s the typical scam pattern”, but I can’t fault anyone for being unsure. I’ve just seen a lot of them, I think because I have a pretty big backlist now.

Most of these emails are pretty slick. They come from Firstname Lastname at a gmail address and have a real-looking signature. Most of the time, everything is spelled correctly and they have enough specific details to seem plausible. Some of them even impersonate real events or book clubs, so searching the name of the organization will seem to confirm that the email is genuine. And they never ask for money right away, so the scam is not apparent in the opening email.

Here’s a bit of one that came in five minutes ago:

I really meant what I said about The Tapestry of Time. It’s such a clever mix of war, myth, and mind-bending history that it practically deserves its own Netflix mini-series. My community of active readers would absolutely love it, and they’re great at leaving genuine, thoughtful reviews that help boost visibility for books like yours.

There are a couple of things there that immediately make my hackles go up, but it’s pretty sneaky and if I’d never seen something like this before, maybe I’d be unsure. Even after I started getting deluged with them and started to note the patterns, there have been one or two that were so borderline that they almost fooled me. One “book club” invitation was so personal and modest in its promises compared to the others that I had decided to at least send a response to probe a bit — but four hours after the initial email, the same account sent a “just following up” email, which clinched it: scam. No human being trying to genuinely book an author for a book club (with no deadline or timeline attached) would send a nudge email four hours later.

It can be useful for authors to know what to look for, so that’s why I thought I’d devote this newsletter to that. I think it’s also useful for anyone who emails authors, as a fan or reader or event organizer, to understand the context authors are now operating in.

What to do when you get a borderline email

Obviously my first piece of advice is: do not send anyone money for any kind of event or promotion if they have solicited you. There are some legitimate exceptions — say, a local book fair invites authors to pay for table space where they can sell books — but if you’re tempted by something like that, check it out thoroughly first and make sure it’s a bona fide event, and that the person and email address you’re dealing with is associated with that event, and they’re asking to be paid in a typical-for-your-region, transparent way. Talk to other authors who have done the event; in my experience, authors are always happy to share info. (That’s how this newsletter began!)

If someone is offering any promotional or marketing services by trawling Amazon listings and then sending you a cold email, you can be extremely sure that even if that person is not a scammer, they’re terrible at their job anyway.

And there is no legitimate book club that will ever charge an author to appear, ever, or ask an author to send money for admin or logistics. That’s just a giant no. Either the book club pays the author, or no money changes hands.

I find the Wikipedia guidelines for spotting AI writing useful — they accord with my experience and the signposts that I notice. Not every email written by AI is a scam, but in this context, it probably is.

There are also the patterns of format particular to these kinds of emails. Most will have at least a few of these characteristics:

• A fawning summary paragraph about your book, designed to make it look like they are familiar with and love your work

• A number designed to impress you (the number of book club members, for example) or something else talking up how they can help your career

• A list of the services or activities on offer

• A request to speak further by phone or email

If you’re not sure, and your author friends are not sure, then ask for further details. If they ask for money, slam the door.

There are three main varieties that land in my inbox, so here’s a breakdown of each — although there’s some overlap between them.

The flattering offer to help you get more book sales

This is the oldest variety of the three, and some of these come from actual humans just trying to make a buck, possibly even by doing the things they say they’ll do. But even in that best-case scenario, it’s money down the drain. As I said above, no one who is actually good at their job will be sending out cold emails like this.

But wait, you might say: this one really has read my book, and is impressed by it, and that’s why they’re contacting me! Nope, sorry.

Here’s one I got two days ago from an “author growth strategist”:

I recently came across Mercutio, and I was genuinely struck by its intricate 13th-century worldbuilding and emotional storytelling. The way you expand Shakespearean lore into an opulent historical tapestry gives it the timeless depth that today’s readers, especially lovers of mythic and literary fantasy are seeking.

Mercutio is not available to read yet anywhere in the world. They’re lying! They’re always lying. This is made easier with ChatGPT and similar tools; they can generate plausible-sounding paragraphs summarizing your book, based on whatever marketing copy is out there.

(The way these scammers used to pretend that an author was special, before AI, was that they’d watch for starred reviews or awards and then send the emails. That’s how I learned my first novel got a starred review in Publishers Weekly — a scammer emailed to say they’d seen the review and would I be interested in their services.)

Services on offer can be anything from “AI generated book trailers” (yeah no thanks) to website SEO or gaming the Amazon algorithm somehow.

The mean offer to help you get more book sales

This is a newer one, and I guess it’s supposed to be edgy? It’s borrowing gross tactics from pick-up artist tactics and other sludge lurking in the cracks of our culture. Like all the others, this one will open with a summary of your book, but it’ll be written in a breezy, slangy way, and usually punctuated with a lot of emojis. Your book, you will be told, is 🔥, and there will be names of characters or details of the setting regurgitated in some way to give the impression that this is all tailored for you. (I got this subject line for an email offering to get more reviews for The Tapestry of Time: “Did the Bayeux tapestry just wink at me or am I losing my mind 🧵👀✨” What does that even mean? No human would write such a thing.)

Then comes the negging: ah, your book has so much potential, but the number of reviews is pathetic. Let’s face it, you’re just not selling. What a shame. (The same game as “You have such a pretty face; you’d be a knockout if you lost weight.”) More emojis, and a “I am giving it to you straight because we’re besties” tone. (These things make my skin crawl.)

The “book club” invitation

This is the one that has really exploded in volume over the last few months. I get several of these a week now, sometimes clusters of three or four per day.

Victoria Strauss has a good rundown on how the scam works, and Jason Sanford also went down the rabbit hole on one of these to see how they operate.

Sometimes these purport to be from a book club that actually does exist, sometimes not. Like the other scams, these invariably begin with an AI-generated sycophantic summary of your book, and then something to impress you about the book club and how it can help your career. One of the giveaways is that they’re really eager to tell you how many people are in the club, and it’s always some huge number, like 2,000 readers or something. (There are book clubs that big, of course, but if, like me, you were not regularly getting invitations to 2,000-reader book clubs before the scam took off, treat it with some skepticism.) Then comes the list of what activities they plan and what’s in it for you, before asking if you are ready to discuss further.

The cost and the burden

Most authors are not going to be fully taken in and scammed for money, most of the time. The reason we are so irritated by all this, beyond the mental energy and time it takes to clear this crap out of our inboxes and investigate the borderline cases, is that it might cause us to miss out on real connections with readers and events, because we are getting into the habit of just reporting and blocking when any invitation comes in. Email filtering programs do catch some of them, but in my experience, at least half of these scam emails slip through the nets, at least as those nets are designed so far.

Also, let’s face it, there can be psychic damage that comes from being bombarded with fake invitations to festivals or big book clubs that would be so cool if they were real, just reminding many of us of the gap between the author career we wish we had, and the one we’ve got. And some of these emails will mock authors for how poorly their books are selling, as a marketing tactic. Even knowing it’s a bot, that can still hit a sore spot.

I’m not sure whether non-authors realize this, but the vast majority of the trad-pub authors I know, even some of the ones you might think of as successful, feel that they’re not selling “enough” (to pay their bills, certainly, and to secure the next book deal, probably) and that their careers are, if not failing, precarious. The whole industry is built on authors feeling anxious about their careers, and scammers take advantage of that. (In fact, there’s something extra depressing about being a target for insulting scams generated by the same technology that’s stealing our work and our livelihoods and making all of this worse.)

I do block, report and delete these on sight now, but I try to devote at least a few seconds to making sure I’m not missing something real. It’s easy to say “just ignore it” but you know, I actually do get invitations to real book clubs, sometimes. Please do invite me to things! Please do send authors kind notes about their books. Until email filters catch up, authors don’t have much choice but to filter their email with their own eyeballs and brains. (Or the eyeballs and brains of their assistants, for those who can afford them.)