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.)
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Thanks for the caution 😬 The world is dangerous.
Yes it is! 🫣 Stay safe friend. 😊
Thanks so much for this cautionary note! My husband received a recent invitation and If, you drill down towards the end, he’s asking for a $200 – $350 “contribution” to feature your book. I told my husband, likely the amount due will grow, initially ONLY 200 – $350,” BUT because your book is so special, and will require much preparation, design work, and coordination in order to be “not only included, but properly presented, meaningfully discussed, and professionally showcased within a structured literary environment,” it required further expenditures…Run, baby run!
Thanks again!
Yeah, that’s definitely sketchy!
I just got a similar email, and although it’s really well done, with my name and the actual name of my book, and signd by a person, who is real and member of the real Shepherd’s Bush Book Club, there were red flags. 1)sent to aan email account that doesn’t exist, and the senders email being a misspelled version of Shepherd’s Bush Book Club. I would have liked to contact this person on Linkedin, but as I see no reason to spend a fortune on a premium profile, that’s out of bounds. So I did some googling instead and ended here. Thanks for confirming my suspicions…
I had a similar cold-call email today. Again a misspelled email “@sheperdsbushbookclubb.gmail”. Your blog post quickly confirmed my suspicions. I’ve had two similar emails in the past couple of months supposedly from other ‘book clubs’ in the USA and Canada.
This follows a string of emails over the past year from supposed ‘Wikipedia editors’ offering to ‘protect’ me from erroneous published information; Wikipedia itself has pages on this scam.
Thanks for this blog and these comments. I’ve also been approached by a woman called Fabrice, who describes herself as the ‘curator of a reader community that goes beyond conventional book reviews’, asking if I’d like to take part in a Guest Author Featured Spotlight. At first she said ‘no payment required in order for you to participate or be selected as a featured author’. But in a follow-up email she started trying to sell me several Promotional & Event Coordination Packages for $150 or $210. These emails are coming from a related email address: shepardsbushbookclub@gmail.com
But if they really were from a book club based in Shepherds Bush, London, why is the name misspelled in the email address, and why are they asking for payment in US$?! I also did some googling and ended up here.
Yeah, that’s definitely not legit. I forget who runs the real Shepherds Bush club, but it’s not Fabrice.
So glad I found this. Many thanks. It saved me from becoming yet another victim. It looks like this scam is getting a little more sophisticated. It’s not only had the title of my book, but quite a lot of details of its content. But is still making errors — an odd spelling of Shepherd’s and a request for money in US dollars. But I fear the scammers wil also be paying attention to these posts and attempting to eliminate the errors. So, maybe no more Fabrice cocoon. I received a very similar approach, an almost identical pitch from someone claiming to run a book club in Georgie USA.
I’ve gotten a number of similar emails since then – also some offering to “help me reach a larger audience” with promotional materials. It’s very easy for the scammers to just copy your book’s information, including the summary and Amazon ratings, from the Internet. Best practice is just to be suspicious of all cold emails like that, stay up to date from sites like Writer Beware, and do some research before responding to a potential scam. 😉