[your book] here

TL;DR: Authors get served their own special flavour of AI sloop, delivered daily to their inbox.

And I shall now rant at length upon this topic:

For as long as the internet has existed, published writers have received spam claiming that for X dollars the spammer, often claiming to be book blogger, can promote your book, usually by providing positive reviews that will apparently increase the book’s sales (spoiler alert: they won’t).

Then, last year, the scammers began using AI to try and con authors competing in a saturated market.

I nearly got taken in by the first email. It wasn’t riddled with grammatical and spelling mistakes. It claimed it could get my book into a book club which, when I checked, does in fact exist. Most convincingly, it actually named my most recent book (Broken Shadow) and the gushy paragraph about how great the book was actually included details of characters, plotlines and themes. One might almost think a human had read my book, though the fact that all those unique phrases were in bold did rather imply that said details were variable fields populated by the algorithm that had scraped the text – no human reader involved.

Six months on and every day sees a new crop of these scam emails, the vast majority of which don’t even bother to [insert book title here] and instead just refer to ‘your book’ (which one? I’ve written several).

My spam filter catches most of them, and obviously I don’t generally read them, but I sometimes pick out a few for amusement’s sake, and I will say that they certainly cover a broad range of possible ‘services’, such as:

• Offering to make a book trailer that will ‘capture the “1.8-second” scroll-stop’ on tiktok’ (I think I know what they’re talking about)
• Curating a series of Book Insight features on Medium (nope, I don’t know what they’re talking about)
• Promising to ‘make sure your book gets the recognition it deserves’ or ‘raise your book’s visibility’ (without saying how, of course)
• Expanding your book’s reach (again, the how of it tends to be lacking)
• Offering to create a monograph showcasing my life’s work (how very Victorian!)
• Researching literary contests and their submission guidelines so I don’t have to (except, I write SFF and SFF stories don’t win literary contests)
• And the occasional promise of the old-school approach of providing reviews, including one that was handily priced by platform and claimed that ‘My reviews are 100% genuine, and all my followers are organic and engaged.’ (sure they are, hon).

Some also claim that [your book] would be perfect for film adaption, and they have the contacts needed to sell the film rights. It is just possible that someone could approach me directly, rather than going through my agent, with a film rights query so it is just possible that one of these could be genuine, and so I do open them… and then I see the phrase ‘your book’ and I delete them.

As the excellent John Scalzi has recently commented, the proliferation of AI-generated book-promotion scams means he can no longer be a guest at legitimate book clubs, due to not having any way of picking the genuine invites from the tsunami of sloop.

Some of these emails have cheerful follow-ups, presumably sent using the following logic:  ‘Hey, it looks like you either didn’t read, or else saw through, my original AI generated spam, but this scammer isn’t giving up yet, because maybe you’ve inexplicably become more gullible since that first spam email arrived…’

One email that appeared a few weeks ago promised success when I submitted manuscripts to publishers, and though it was far from clear how this would be achieved there was a pleasing whimsical poetry about its opening lines:

‘You hit send. The manuscript is gone.
For a day, there’s relief. Then the silence settles in.’

I half wondered if I was reading a newly-sentient AI’s hidden cry for help or recognition, but I write SF so I may have been reading too much into this.

This email was one with a follow-up, which offered to do an ‘Editorial Review’ (which is what, I wonder, from the perspective of many years’ experience as an actual editor, as well as a writer). The email goes on to say that this Editorial Review is…

‘One permanent placement at the top. Written for your specific reader. Working every single day without you touching it.’

Well, that’s great to know. And they may not be able to name my book but they know who my ‘specific reader’ is (just the one presumably) and that’s more than I do. So yeah, OK, sign me up and let me give you some money.

Or maybe not.