I’ve been getting a lot of e-mails lately full of praise for my books. Unfortunately, they’re not from real people. The scammers have discovered AI and are using it to try to get money out of authors.

It used to be that the low-effort scams were obvious because when someone e-mailed you to tell you how great your book was and how it deserved to find an audience (something they could help with if you paid them), they kept it generic and didn’t mention your book by name or say anything about it. That way, they could send the same e-mail to hundreds of writers.

Now, AI “writes” the e-mail for them, based on information available online (usually from the Amazon listing). You’ll get an e-mail talking about the specific things that are great about your book, then saying it’s a pity it has so few Amazon reviews or so few people know about it. From there, there are three main things that might be offered. They might represent a large group of rabid readers who are eager to spread the word about your book by reviewing it on Amazon (for a suggested “tip” per reader). Or the person writing to you might represent a book club that wants to feature it. Or they might be selling marketing services.

I started getting these for Weaving & Wyverns before the book was even published, so I knew that this group of rabid readers couldn’t have fallen for it. Or there was the D.C. International Affairs Book Club that was interested in featuring Tea and Empathy. I guess they needed a break from all those serious books on international affairs. The writing style in all of them is pure ChatGPT. It’s very salesy language and doesn’t sound at all like what a real reader would write to an author, and the way they praise the books falls into a template. It’s like a Mad Libs, with blanks filled in with specifics for your book.

Even if it hadn’t been pretty obvious that the D.C. International Affairs Book Club was unlikely to read a cozy fantasy, the other clue that this was a scam is that this isn’t how book clubs work. I’ve met with and spoken to a number of book clubs, and I’ve been a member of several book clubs. Most book clubs don’t involve the author at all. They choose a book they want to read and then they discuss it. If they do contact an author to speak to them, they treat it as a favor from the author. They don’t ask for money from the author. Mostly, the contact has come from someone I know who’s in the group, and they invite me to meet with them. Having an author is a special treat for the group. I know there are some big groups that bring in authors, but they pay for the author to come, not the other way around.

The scammers seem to have scraped MeetUp to find book group information, and they’re pretty insidious about it because they even include the link to the MeetUp page to show it’s a real group, and they send the e-mail under the name of the group’s organizer. You have to look to see that the e-mail address is different. The book groups must be hearing from a lot of authors because I saw that several of them now have something on their pages about how they are not contacting authors and if you hear from someone claiming to represent their group, it’s a scam.

There’s another scam going around in which the scammer impersonates a famous author who contacts less famous authors, at first just to discuss publishing and writing and then to sell courses/training/services. Some authors I know have been having fun with this when they know the famous author and write back about the crazy weekend they just had together, which baffles the scammer.

Someone who’s been investigating this has found that if you do bite on the scam, you’ll get an invoice from an entirely different person who’s based in Nigeria, and you don’t end up getting any of the promised services, since they don’t really have anything to do with the famous authors or the book clubs, and if it’s the group of readers eager to review the book, even if they did review, it’s against the terms of service to pay for reviews, so you could lose your Amazon account.

I’m now at the point where any e-mail with a subject line praising my book gets deleted. They present very differently from real fan mail, but there is a chance I’m going to be so skeptical that I miss some real e-mail. If anyone does invite me to their book group, they’ll have to make it really clear up front that they aren’t going to charge me and know that they’re asking me to do a favor and otherwise keep me from assuming it’s a scam.

In entirely unrelated news, the paperback version of Weaving & Wyverns is now for sale. It’s at Amazon for now but the listing should spread through other retailers. Maybe it’ll be a good pick for your book club!