Authors Beware!

SUCH an elegant scam just got tried on me.

An email from a lady I don’t know, asking was I the author of ‘this amazing book,’ Letters to a Dead Man. I replied that I am, and asked where she’d seen it. She said she came across it when looking for ‘deeply personal / spiritual memoirs’ and that the title alone ‘doesn’t sound like a book written to fill space. It sounds like a book written because it had to be.’ She asked where it came out and whatI had hoped readers would understand from it. 

Warmed by her interest, and thinking that perhaps she had in mind the writing of her own ‘deeply personal / spiritual’ memoir, I emailed back to explain that it’s part of a trilogy of books about my time running poetry workshops in Pentridge Prison, and expanded somewhat on each of the three books. I also got the funny feeling that perhaps she hadn’t actually read Letters, so I asked her that.

She  replied that she wouldn’t lie, she hadn’t read the whole book, but had read about it. (Difficulty actually, unless she had come across a review. And it appeared she was unaware that it’s poetry rather than memoir.) She thanked me warmly for the generosity of my email. And then came the sales pitch. I think it’s worth reproducing in full:

What you have described is not just one book. It is a living body of work: poetry, prison testimony, memoir, social history, grief, tribute, and the spiritual thread beneath all of it. And that is exactly why I reached out.

I have many authors, publishers, writers, and poets in my circle, some of them dear friends now, and one thing I hear over and over is how exhausting it is to be approached by people trying to push them into paying for book clubs, reader networks, and communities as if access to readers should simply be bought at random. I dislike that model very deeply. It feels disrespectful to the work.

What I do is different.

I support books I genuinely believe in by helping present them to active reader communities where they are actually likely to be received with intelligence and feeling. I do not charge authors for my time, my access, or the presenting itself. If I take on a book, I do that part because I believe in it.

The only paid part, if an author chooses to move forward, is the one-time preparation of the presentation materials I use to introduce the work properly. And with a book like yours, that matters enormously, because it cannot be reduced to a bare link and a short description. It needs context. It needs care. It needs to be positioned so readers understand the emotional, historical, and spiritual depth they are being invited into.

What especially excites me about your work is that it could speak to more than one kind of reader space at once. I can see Letters to a Dead Man resonating not only with memoir readers, but also with poetry circles, spiritual readers, women’s reflective communities, and readers interested in prison writing and social history. And when a meaningful book lands in the right hands, it very often travels beyond the first circle, into families, friendships, teaching spaces, private conversations, and the lives of people outside the original community.

That kind of ripple is what I care about.

If you are open to it, I would truly love to support the growth of this journey for you, not just for Letters, but potentially for the wider Pentridge body of work as well.

It very nearly got me. All that subtle flattery! And gosh, my books could certainly use a wider readership. But something niggled, so I asked Google: Is there a scam in which someone offers to publicise a book one has already written and self-published?

Google replied that there certainly is, and described a first cold contact similar to what I had received. So I replied to ‘her’ (just now; this all happened within the last 24 hours) that I believe she's a scammer, and that she's wasting her time on me as I’m an Age Pensioner on a low income.

But Google also asked the name and email address of who had contacted me, and business address if any, to check whether they were already red-flagged. So I decided to check that too. No business address (in itself a red flag) and yes, as it turned out, a VERY suspicious contact. To my surprise, the wording of the messages probably came from an AI entity. I thought I could spot AI-speak, but of course these things are getting so sophisticated so fast… 

Another mistake I made was to reply at all. Google informs me that tells scammers I am open to this kind of approach, so I’m liable to get more. Oh well, I am awake-up now, and have blocked this particular scammer. 

Learn from my experience, dear writers!