Author Scams 👀

Well, it finally happened. After writing and publishing fiction for 7 years, I’ve evidently become “big” enough to be the recipient of one of the infamous author scams! I don’t know whether to gag or be flattered. I’ll settle for a giant eye roll with a side of giggles.

This is the one where they congratulate you on your recent book (while never mentioning it by name), invite you to have your book in their nonexistent book club (easily verifiable by an internet search), then presumably try to get money out of you for some sort of join fee (I’m not about to click through to find out).

Even if I wasn’t a regular reader of Anne Allen’s blog and Writer Beware, this would look fishy to me:

But even if I’d been tempted to believe the above email was legit, that fantasy would likely have evaporated when I received an almost identical email 45 minutes later:

I can only assume these scammers also target creatives in other fields (art, music). The solicitations are all alike: written in such a generic way that they’re likely AI, heavy on flattery, and light on specifics.

Please don’t fall for these. They’re like any other spam email, aiming to take your money and run. The only difference is that these particular scams are tailored to take advantage of writers’ egos. I like to think I’m humble and lack an ego, but that would be a lie.

Joke’s on you, “Dr. Mira Sterling” and “Dr. Noah,” because I don’t even have a book (yet). Ha!

Shout out to Yahoo Mail. It might be the dinosaur of email providers (second only to AOL), but it’s got a spam filter acute enough to correctly flag these bogus emails.