Successful Fiction Writing = Creating + Organizing + Marketing
I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Organizing. Our topic today is a Public Service Announcement on how to spot the scammers who are currently trying to sell you bogus services . . .
Scammers, Scammers Everywhere
Every week, I get several emails from scammers. Most of them are written by AI but I suppose some might be human-written. It always feels good to hear from them, because they all love one of my novels and say wonderful things about both me and my fiction. We all like getting compliments. But these emails are all scams.
Early on, I replied back to one of these scammers, just to see where his scam was going. After a couple of exchanges, he got to the point. He wanted to have me on some sort of a Zoom call with “thousands of historical fiction fans, hungry for thought-provoking” blah, blah, blah. And there was just a small $85 administrative fee to get things rolling.
I replied back pretending to misunderstand him—as if he were offering me $85 to be on his Zoom call. I said that my time was valuable and I couldn’t appear on his call for less than $250, my usual hourly fee. (I made this up. I am a much cheaper date than that, but I wanted to pull his chain.)
Then we had a number of back-and-forth emails where he kept asking how I would pay the $85, and I kept telling him I’d be fine with him sending the $250 by PayPal or Zelle. At a certain point, I told him I had raised my rates to $500. Eventually, he got tired of this and quit emailing me.
Since then, I’ve got many more scam emails. The offers usually take one of several forms:
- The scammer wants to have me on a Zoom call with those “hungry” readers.
- The scammer wants to help me promote my book by redoing my Amazon Author Central page, my Amazon keywords, and/or my Goodreads page.
- The scammer doesn’t say what they want, but they use the typical language that other scammers use, so it’s clear they are going to want something eventually.
I now simply ignore these. I am on an email list with hundreds of professional novelists, and lately, part of the conversation has been the many scammers they’ve been dealing with. They have noted two other scams that I haven’t come across:
- The scammer says they are an editor at a very well-known publishing company.
- The scammer says they are an agent at a big-shot literary agency.
In both cases, the scam is that they’ll say your book isn’t quite ready, but they have this friend who does book doctoring and can get your book up to snuff. Or they have this friend who does book publicity and can help you promote your previously published books and earn much more money on them.
So how do you sniff out a scam? I’ll show you the red flags that instantly raise my hackles and make me suspect a scam. And I’ll show you the smoking guns that prove you’re dealing with a scammer. Neither the red flags nor the smoking guns will always be there, so you should always be cautious. When something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Red Flags: Probable Scam Ahead
Scammers are lazy, and most of them seem to be using AI to generate their emails. And they all seem to be using the same AI tool, because there are certain phrases that I see over and over in scammy emails. Here are a few of them:
“What caught my attention about __________”. I see this phrase or phrases like it often in scam emails. The sentence goes on to say something very specific about my novel. This makes it sound like they must have read my novel, because the compliments can get very specific.
“What I found especially interesting is __________”. Then they add in yet more detail about my novel. They really lay it on thick. You’d think my novel was a Pulitzer Prize winner, the way they go on about it.
“… an interesting reader conversation…” This sentence fragment is designed to make me think that the scammer is part of lots of reader conversations, and knows people who are simply dying to have reader conversations about my book.
“… curated Goodreads readers…” This makes it sound like the scammer has a Goodreads group that they’re connected to.
“Amazon visibility strategy” The scammer offers to make the book more “visible” on Amazon by doing things that most professional authors already know how to do and have already done. If you don’t know how to do these things, you can use your favorite search engine to learn how to do them yourself at no cost. Or you could pay a “visibility expert” to do it for you, but they won’t do as good of a job as you will, because you know your book and they don’t.
There are many other similar phrases. The common denominator is that they tell you how great your book is, and then they offer a service. They don’t tell you how much it costs. Not yet. That will come after you reply. And once you reply, they’ll probably sell your email address to other scammers.
Smoking Guns: When You Can Prove It’s a Scam
You can know for sure that a scammer is fake when they impersonate a real editor at a real publisher, or a real agent at a real literary agency.
The reason is that they have to give you an email address to reply to. But real editors and real agents have email addresses you can check on their websites. And the scammer can’t receive email at those real email addresses. So they have to find a way to look like the real thing while still receiving email from you at a phony address.
The scammers use a few tricks that you can easily spot.
The first trick is to use an email address that is very similar to a real address, but it has a small typo. If the real editor is named Joe Schmoe and works for a real publisher named (for example) BigPublisher, then the real editor’s real email address would typically be joe.schmoe@bigpublisher.com. The scammer changes the lower-case “l” in bigpublisher.com into a “1” and uses the scam address joe.schmoe@bigpub1isher.com. In some fonts, these look almost identical, and you’d be hard-pressed to notice.
The second trick is to “spoof” a real email address by putting it in the header of the email as the “sender” email. But then the “reply-to” email address is something different. (The “sender” email address is the one that the email claims to be sent from. This is easy to fake. The “reply-to” email address is the one that you will actually send to when you click Reply. These are usually the same address, but not always.) You might not notice after you click the Reply button that the email you’re sending is now going to joe.schmoe.bigpublisher@gmail.com. Which is owned by the scammer.
The third trick is for the scammer to simply to use a Gmail or AOL email address and hope nobody notices. But real editors always work with an official email address provided by their publisher. And so do real agents.
So here’s the smoking gun test to catch these kind of scammers. If you receive an email claiming to be from a real editor or real agent, click the Reply button and look to see what email address your reply would go to if you were to actually send it. (You won’t send it. If this is a scammer, you’ll delete this reply after you see the address of the alleged editor or agent.) Now use your favorite search engine to find out what real email addresses look like for the publisher or agency in question.
As an example, a friend of mine was recently contacted by someone claiming to be an agent at the very well-known literary agency, Curtis Brown. I looked at the Curtis Brown website and saw a Security Notice at the bottom saying that its agents were being impersonated via email. The notice said that all real Curtis Brown agents use email addresses ending in @cbltd.com. This was the smoking gun, because the emails my friend was receiving didn’t match this ending. My friend then used the Curtis Brown website to contact the real agent, who confirmed that she had never tried to contact him.
Note that this kind of smoking gun will not work when the scammer is merely claiming to have a Zoom community of “engaged readers” or is offering an “Amazon visibility” service. Lots of legitimate people use Gmail accounts. In that case, you’ll need some other way to detect their scamminess. People who run real reader communities should not be charging authors a fee. People who offer to help you with promoting your book or making it more visible are probably offering you services you can do better yourself.
Case History of a Scam, With Receipts
My friend Stan Williams is the author of The Moral Premise, a well-known book used by authors and screenwriters. I reviewed it in my Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine in November of 2011, after meeting Stan at a conference.
Stan emailed me recently about an “agent” he’d been talking to. Something seemed scammy, and he wanted my thoughts. I told him my opinion, and pretty quickly he found the smoking gun and proved that the person he’d been talking to was impersonating a real agent.
You can read Stan’s whole account of it on his blog: https://moralpremise.blogspot.com in the post dated October 7, 2026. He identifies 12 red flags along the way.
One bright side of this episode was that I learned Stan had a recent novel, Sabriya’s Hope, that looks interesting. I’m pretty sure I’m in the target audience for this book, so I’m going to read it.
Homework:
- Watch out for red flags.
- Be on the alert for smoking guns.
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