Hello me dears! I’m afraid this evening’s post isn’t exactly a fun one, but it’s something important to be aware of, especially for all my lovely author buddies. You see, we’re discussing . . . SCAMS.

(No, not Spam. That’s canned meat that soldiers hate (though I love fried Spam sandwiches! Yum!) No, no. This is Scams.)

Anyway, this morning I got an email purporting to be from a book club in London with over 1000 members. Apparently my book deserved to be seen by a wider audience, and they wanted to feature me in their Author Spotlight. Featured authors have improved noticeably in visibility and sales after being Spolighted by their club!

Sounds great, right? Not so fast.

I’m a suspicious person, especially after having read articles about this stuff and done research on scams for college. I happen to know that most book clubs don’t just reach out to authors (especially little ol’ indies like me) out of the blue. What’s more, the name of the book club kept changing (is it Shepherds Bush Book Club? Or Shepherds Book Club? Or Karen Shepherds Book Club?), and the message came from a Gmail account – definite red flag.

Bad grammar and misspellings used to be a dead giveaway for scams, but not anymore with the rise of AI. Scammers can now create emails written in natural English with perfect punctuation – sometimes even an engaging, conversational tone, complete with emojis! Yikes! 🫣

I know spammers like to use names of real people and/or organizations (like all those famous authors that keep trying to friend me on Goodreads 😒), so I looked up this supposed book club. Looks like it does indeed exist; there’s a group on Meetup with that name.

What’s more, the email didn’t mention specifically which book they wanted to spotlight – it just said “your book” – and said the person would be willing to “discuss next steps”. Nuh-uh, that’s sketchy. I briefly considered playing their little game to see how long it took to reveal their scammy-ness, but ended up just flagging the message as spam. I got better things to do with my time, like drawing medieval warriors for work and writing about Marines in Vietnam.

(Oh, and I checked the viewer stats for my website. I’d had some recent views from Nigeria, which is where a lot of scams come from. BIG red flag.)

So now y’all know some of what to look out for, if you haven’t had to deal with it already. This article from Writer Beware was quite helpful – the examples she shares in the article mirror perfectly the email I got.

Anyway, that’s my little story. As my family would say: “Beware, beware, there are rats in the air.”

(I have no idea how that line came about, honestly. 😆 Pretty sure though that it has to do with the Ratatouille action figures I got when I was a kid.)