The Scammer's Guide to Writers

THE SCAMS. They’re getting wilder and wilder, and harder and harder to spot up front or even before you hand over the cash, if the scammer is faking a service you’d have to pay for. We’re all getting these endlessly in non-writing life too, the ticket you didn’t get, the recruiter who isn’t one… I had a friend get a VERY real one that looked like it was from her town, about an existing work permit for work they were doing. The tell in that case was that it asked for a wire transfer, and in that town, you wander into town hall, hand them a check and also explain that you really paid that meter but you hit the wrong button for a car on ParkMobile. One important link we mention: https://wheregoes.com, where you can check any link you’re given to see where it really goes—and you should. Here’s Rachael’s episode where she reads you her whole scammy letter, and talks about getting so jaded that she almost didn’t open the email from her publicist telling her she’d hit the list: http://www.howdoyouwrite.net/episodes/i-hit-the-usa-today-bestseller-list-and-a-warning And to sign up for all Rachael’s writerly things (which are EXCELLENT), go to https://rachaelherron.com/write. Transcript Below! KJ Dell’Antonia Kids, I am here today with Rachael and with Sarina. And the reason that I asked Rachael to join us is that on one of the episodes of her podcast, Ink in Your Veins—link in the show notes—she read, in great detail, a letter from a scammer that she almost fell for. And man, I could see why. And right at that exact same moment, Sarina had been forwarding similar stuff, and even since we had that little conversation, the level of opportunities to fall for this stuff has gotten even greater. So this is us recording an episode to help you figure out which of those emails in your inbox are from scammers. You know, spoiler—“all of them”—and how to spot them, how to feel about them, and how not to fall into ye olde traps. So, Rachael, do you want to start? You don’t have to read the entirety of that letter. For that, y’all can go and listen to the episode of Rachael’s podcast. But just tell us a little bit about it. It was so specific. Rachael Herron It sure was that was the —first of all, thanks for having me and the and the thing that really chapped my hide about it, as I said in that podcast, is that we do get, you know, as authors whose—I think that our emails should be out there, right? Readers should be able to get a hold of us and you know, a scouting film, film agent needs to know how to find us to give us lots of money. So our email should be out there. And we’ve always got always gotten scam emails, but this one the very first one I got, and since then, have, like you said, have gotten plenty more. Sorry, let me bring it up here. It was about my book, Eliza’s Home, which is actually, it’s not even a full novel—it’s a novella. And the person who wrote it was named Timmy. Just Timmy, may I point out. But he was the founder of “Lit Flare Book Marketing Agency”. And honestly, “Lit Flare Book Marketing Agency”—that sounds pretty great. I mean, that’s actually a good, good name. I would be surprised if that weren’t a real one. And what he did was, yes, he flattered the book. But more than that, he demonstrated that he understood publishing. He—he called me out in a good way. He complimented me for knowing the industry and for being a hybrid writer. And hybrid writer is not a word that anybody who is not inside baseball uses. You know, hybrid publishing is one thing. Hybrid writers are completely different thing. Hybrid writers are people who both self-publish and traditionally publish. He says, you know, and he knew all of the genres that I wrote, including under a pen name that I use. And he complimented that. He complimented the whole world of this book. He taught—and this is the thing—he talked about some things that I had never thought of. This is post-war fiction. It was basically a prequel novella set after World War II in this small town. And he talked about how you could market this novella to people who enjoy post-war fiction. KJ Dell’Antonia See—all you’re doing here is making me want to fall into this person’s web. Rachael HerronI immediately was struck by, “Well, this has to be—it has to be spam, right? It has to be.” But the more I read it, the more closely I read it, I was like, “This person really understands,” and this is not something that he could have found just by scraping Eliza’s Home and all of the information on Amazon, on the Kindle website, right? It wasn’t available. It wasn’t there. But what I think they’re doing—and correct me if you think I’m wrong—but I think that there’s just some, there’s somebody out there either teaching or disseminating this information on how to scrape everything. They basically went and scraped everything about me as a writer from everywhere, and then pitched it toward this book. And it did sound so good, and he did talk about marketing opportunities that I had not thought about. And I thought, “Oh, this person really must know what they—who—you know, they must really know what they’re doing.” So of course, then, because I have been around a while, I started researching. And I Googled his email—absolutely no hits. I looked up… did he have a website at that point? No, he didn’t have a website. “Lit Flare Book Marketing Agency” did have something online, but it was one of those, you know, temporary free sites that had just been built. So of course, it was bam. But the thing that got me so upset is that it’s going to trick people. He will absolutely have people fall for this. They will have people fall for this. “Have you? Have you? I want to hear about what Sarina’s gotten, and KJ, you must have gotten some of these by now.” Sarina Bowen Yeah. Rachael Herron What are you all seeing? Sarina Bowen So let’s take a step back and just let make sure everybody understands that we’re talking about an email that goes into depth about why your book is great and why it should be read by a wider audience. Rachael Herron Yes. Sarina Bowen And um, I have gotten several of these, and the first one was so horrifically specific to my actual book, except for one huge tell, which is that, um, which is that, um, it was all about, like, here’s the character, and he’s so wonderful, and you’ve got this setup, and it’s so great, and this world that you’ve built is fantastic. And more readers should know about this. It’s a tragedy that they don’t. They were passionate about this idea, and, and, but the thing that was, the problem is they’re like, and it only has two ratings on Goodreads. And the thing is, though, that that book doesn’t—didn’t come out for months. Look, it was a month’s forward in the future publication at that point. So I… Rachael Herron Wow. Sarina Bowen Knew right away that that person like looked like they were paying attention, but wasn’t really paying attention. So, you know, it says, “So my slightly psycho question: do we let Thrown for a Loop keep skating in circles with too few reviews, or do we blast it into the net where it belongs—loud, messy, and impossible to ignore?” And then there’s a string of emojis, like it’s just so over the top. And the thing is that for years, you could spot the low-rent pitches. You know, “I want to improve the SEO of your website,” by their horribleness—like by their bad grammar, by their insufficient detail. But now, what I think is happening, even though I haven’t tested this myself, is there are some AI search engines out where you can provide web links, and all you’d have to do is put a link to the NetGalley listing of this book, put a link to my author bio, and put a link to the Goodreads page for this book. And you could scrape so much information about what the book is about and why people might care. And you could scrape so much information about what the book is about and why people might care. And I think somebody has written a prompt that just, like, makes that email easy to write in, like, 15 seconds. It’s like—remember the olden days when there was no spam? And then people started figuring out, like, “Oh, wait, I could send the same message to a million people inside of one day.” And then that was a, you know, an idea that we had to teach our parents what spam was. Well, this is, like, the version 2.0 of that. It’s just—it’s going to be incredibly easy for people to write you emails where it sounds like they’re passionate and they know what they’re talking about, and they just don’t. KJ Dell’Antonia And it—it kind of hurts. I—you know, Rachael recorded her podcast pretty soon, I think, after getting this. And, you know, they say lovely things, and then it’s just—it’s not even a little bit real. Like, it’s just great, and it almost—it’s almost painful. And I want to point out that this is—so this is one level of this: the wonderful marketing email you are getting that is specific to you that seems like a great person that’s really going to help you out. The person’s not real. The stuff’s not real. None of it’s real. Another level that I know Sarina has seen lately is basically anything that you have that is publicly available can turn into this. So can you talk a little bit about the trademark ones you’re seeing now? Sarina Bowen Ooh, absolutely. I filed a trademark for one of the aspects of my business, which is just, you know, everybody does it—no big deal. And my trademark attorney warned me that the minute we filed, I was going to get junk mail. And it looked so legitimate, because anytime you’re filing anything that is public record—so that’s like a trademark application, that is the filing for your LLC, of your business. If you do that—even just, uh, doing business as an as name—if you file that with your state, you will start to get spam that’s like, “You have to do the following: send in this fee.” And so that’s getting easier. Like, anything that can be automated can be automated to try to trip us up. So writer scams are just going to get bigger and uglier than they have been in the past, and we have to help all of our friends be mindful of this. KJ Dell’Antonia So, Rachael, when you were looking into this to figure out if this person was real, can you walk us through some of the things that… and there is no person. That’s—that’s the frustrating thing. Like, we can’t help but say he and Timmy and—and they—but there’s no, there’s—there’s no, no, there’s no Timmy there. Rachael Herron There’s no Timmy. That is made up. KJ Dell’Antonia It seems so, like, we’re such a small niche, but I guess any niche is big enough now. Rachael Herron We’re such a small niche, and people are desperate enough. If somebody only has one book out, and perhaps they have written alone, and they don’t have a community to help them realize this stuff and to tell them that it’s okay—nobody knows how to sell a book. New York doesn’t know how to sell a book. We’re all just trying to do the best we can. These people don’t know how to sell a book. They think, “Oh, I’ve only, I’ve only sold, you know, 50 copies of my book. I need help. And this person loves my book. I’m going to ask them to help me.” Of course, they have all these complimentary things to say. Since I got that first one, I’ve gotten, you know, dozens and dozens. And—and I really, for a while there, I admitted this on the podcast—that I was having too good a time, maybe playing with them just a little bit. And I would write back—because none of them, it’s bad, it’s not good—but none of them had a website link. So I would write back immediately and say, “Oh, I’ve been looking for someone to help me. Do you have a website, though? I can’t really trust anybody without a website.” And then it would be a few hours, and you could tell that they had thrown a website together. So I really kind of enjoyed that I was making them work quite hard to throw this website together. But here’s the thing that’s scarier about that: they know that we’re talking, and that we’re telling newer writers about this. And now, the ones I’m seeing, they have a website that—usually, you can tell by the URL—is not really professional. It is not “Litflaremarketing.com.” It is a “XYZgen.free.site.litflare.movie” or something, you know. It’s just not a real URL. But they also have LinkedIn profiles now for Timmy and his friends. They have—yeah, they have Instagram that they’re claiming, Facebook’s in order to set this up. So you can go, so you can find that they actually do have… well, it’s not an established presence. You can see that they have a presence, but you can tell that it’s not established, and they are not connected with people, and nobody is recommending them. So you can spend time doing that. I think that there are going to be so many of them, that we used to recommend: Google “Lit Flare Marketing Agency” plus the word “scam.” That was fine when there were a few of them. But when there are going to be dozens of them, more—hundreds of them a day being created—that’s not going to give any results. I think that the hard truth, and—and something that, you know, we need to be talking about more, is that mostly, excellent publicists, excellent marketing people who know what they’re doing and who can help sell some books—because they’ve got a lot of time in the industry—are not going to be reaching out cold. They do not make cold calls. Sarina Bowen That is right. They don’t. Rachael Herron They don’t make cold calls in this industry. Sarina Bowen Right. And even this—even filters down to newsletter advertising for books. Which—by which I mean—BookBub is the most famous one, and authors should feel very confident going to submit for an ad on BookBub. And there are some—there’s another, a second tier: Written Word Media does a nice job. Like, there’s—there’s some places. But I get a lot of emails from those, from people that are trying to appear like that: Hey, we have a network of 5,000 readers, and we want to share. And those people are not soliciting you. They are too busy doing their job. So, yeah. KJ Dell’Antonia Yeah, I think we’re at the point where you have to assume: if it’s in your inbox and you didn’t ask for it, it’s not real.Rachael Herron Yep. And that goes for famous authors writing… KJ Dell’Antonia Oh, that’s right; this was another one that you mentioned. This was… Rachael Herron I haven’t figured out the angle on this one, but I’ve got about five of them now from famous authors, big names, who are reaching out to me to say, “Hey, you know, I discovered your books, and I’m also an author. Would you like to chat?” And I—and I didn’t. I have not known what to do with them, but with Colleen Hoover, I did play too hard. I went over the line, I wrote back to her. She says, she says, “I love connecting with fellow authors and hearing about the stories they’re working on.” And I wrote back, “Are you published?” And she wrote back, “I am a published author. I’d love you to check out my books.” And then I wrote back, “Good for you. How cute that book looks. I wish you the best with that. I do charge $350 an hour for writing coaching, and I charge by the minute, so you owe me $17 so far. How would you like to pay, and when shall we meet on Zoom?” Sarina Bowen That is fantastic! Rachael Herron But this scammer—I love this person so much—because they wrote back. It looks like about 14 minutes later: “I just sent the payment.” KJ Dell’Antonia Oh sure, Oh my god. Rachael Herron And I was like, you are amazing. Like this person is now playing with me just as much. And then it then, you know, we never heard from each other again. But that was, that was amazing. Sarina Bowen Do you know who would love this story? Rachael Herron Who? Sarina Bowen Colleen Hoover, because, because she is not afraid to play with people who mess with her—like she would do the exact same thing. “By the way, you owe me $17.” That—really, she would. You know, you two should meet. Rachael Herron So maybe it was her—she was saying, “I already sent you the money.” But, you know, and—and in terms of her email, it was like, I can just look at it. It was something that would not fool me, but would fool somebody else. Colleen.Colleenhoover@gmail.com—that almost looks… and all spelled correctly. That is, like, the way her name is spelled. That might fool somebody else. But I’ve gotten, I’ve gotten a bunch of these now. But what are they after? What do you think they’re going to do? I don’t know. I don’t know what the friend’s angle is. Sarina Bowen Well…send you a bill, obviously. Rachael Herron But yeah, you know what? KJ Dell’Antonia Colleen Hoover needs a loan—is actually what I… yea, I have no idea. I have no idea what they eventually ask you for. But, umm… Sarina Bowen I love it when I can’t figure out what the scam is. I got one just today or yesterday that was offering to write me a Wikipedia page. And of course, I didn’t engage—I just walked away because I didn’t have time to play with them like you. But I’m like, okay… Rachael Herron Yeah. Sarina Bowen What’s the angle there? Rachael Herron What is the angle there? There was one that I—there was one that I couldn’t figure out, because I also have a Shopify store where I sell some of my self-published books. And I kept getting many, many sales. I mean, I’m still getting these many sales of Eliza’s Gift [Eliza’s Home] this novella, because I think it’s the cheapest one there. Many sales to weird names—“Tomize Yourbrothe”—and three or four a day. Sarina Bowen I know what those are. Rachael Herron And nobody buys this book. Those are—I think they are—somebody fishing credit cards, right? Sarina Bowen Yes, it’s credit fraud. They are trying… Rachael Herron Like, they’re making sure that the credit card works. Sarina Bowen So if you have a Shopify store with a free item in it… Rachael Herron I do! Sarina Bowen Then you could get, then you could get 1000 of those a day. Rachael Herron Oh no! They haven’t tried the… they haven’t tried the free thing. Sarina Bowen And also…Rachael Herron Just the $3.99. Sarina Bowen Empty cart is what I’ve heard people complain about. Like, if—if somebody… this is a known scam. If you are really struggling with it, I know some people you could talk to about it. But they will either try to charge through, and if it bounces, like, you—you still owe Shopify, like, a few cents or something like that. There’s some… Rachael Herron Oh how rude. Sarina Bowen Way in which this is making people’s lives really horrible. Rachael Herron Thank you. I will look in—I will look more into that. So, scammer is going to scam, and it is disappointing. And we have to be talking about it more, I think, which is why I think it’s so awesome that you’re doing this particular show. Sarina Bowen Well, I appreciate your attitude about it. It’s so great. And I do agree with you. It’s just that the hard thing about talking about this is that we are just living in a different world. And it hurts me to acknowledge that. Like, in 2015, every email that came into my inbox deserved a reply—one, because I was a baby author who needed to, you know, engage with everybody who wanted to email me. And then, you know, life got, like, louder and weirder. And now the truth is, we don’t answer every email that comes in—not even the ones that aren’t scammy. We just can’t anymore. So, um, it’s partly because of what has happened to email, and just partly that this business got busier. But, um—but it’s hard to, like, sit here and acknowledge with you guys that, like, yeah, I’m a harder person than I was 10 years ago. I do not have patience for your little, you know, quasi-scam emails, because not everything is a scam. Like, some people are soliciting for, like, badly—bad outcome businesses—and we cannot sort through all that stuff, because our time is valuable. I mean… Rachael Herron And this—this reminds me of something that happened just like that, maybe the next week after I did that show. It was that, you know, when you get these emails, a lot of times they will put the book title in the subject line. So, you know, Abigail’s Shop, Fantastic, can’t wait to… and then you can’t read the whole thing. And one morning, I came, looked at my email, and there were a bunch of them—maybe five or six of them. And at the top it said, The Seven Miracles of Beatrix Holland: USA Today. And that’s my most recent book. And I’m like, oh, these jerks are now spam—and they have been spamming me on this book in particular. But—but I opened it, and it was from my publicist, who was saying, “You’ve hit the USA Today bestseller list.” Sarina Bowen Oh No! Rachael Herron And I opened it with such an attitude, ready to hit spam. Sarina Bowen Ah…yeah. KJ Dell’Antonia Sometimes the good news is real. And also, I guess a nice thing about these is that—unlike, you know—as long as you don’t hit any links, just opening the emails… Rachael Herron Opening the emails cannot hurt you—don’t hit the links. I do. I do hit the links. Yeah, I do hit the links—when they, when they… when carefully. I do live dangerously. And I’m—and I’m doing a lot less of it, because I did also have the realization that the more that I play with them, the more I’m training their email delivery system that this is a good email address to send to. So it’s just better to report spam and block. Report spam and block. It’s just not as much fun. And every day I have a weak day—I just had it the other day—where I was like, I just… oh, this was my newest fun thing. I was just in a mood, and I wrote back, “Really?” And they wrote back excitedly. And then I said, “Yes.” And I would just write one word at a time until they stopped. They knew they weren’t going to get anything else from me, but it was really enjoyable. KJ Dell’Antonia All right, so I want to go through a list of things people—okay—people can do. But first, Sarina has something to add. Sarina Bowen I just want to say that if you ever have an email that’s really confused you, and you’re not sure about that link, there are lots of little websites where you can check a link. Like, WhereGoes.com—you can type in the link you’ve been sent, and it will look at the redirect and tell you where you’re going to end up. Rachael Herron Oh, that’s fab... and it’s called WhereGoes.com? Sarina Bowen Uh huh. But there’s more… Rachael Herron That’s awesome. Yeah, yeah. Sarina Bowen You can Google, where does this link go? And then you’ll be shown… Rachael Herron Right. KJ Dell’Antonia Okay. So that goes on the list. Rachael Herron That is very, very smart.KJ Dell’Antonia So, listen, people, first of all, it’s—it’s spam. It’s fake. I’m sorry. But if you have doubts, look at the email address. If it’s from Colleen Hoover… at Coll—your—what was yours? Rachael Herron Mine was Colleen.Colleenhoover@gmail.com. KJ Dell’Antonia Yeah, so if you see something like Colleen.ColleenHoover or, you know, Colleen.ColleenSnoover@gmail—okay, that’s dubious. Or if it’s from Colleen.ColleenHoover.movie… that’s a red flag. Basically, if it’s a weird sender address, it’s probably wrong. And the same goes for links. If the “Marriott” email is from Marriott.Reservations@guestreservations.com—that’s not real. That’s not actually Marriott. That’s just going to take you somewhere else. Sarina and I were talking this morning about a whole different line of scams, and here’s the rule: if you’re ever tempted to click, don’t—at least not right away. Like Sarina said, you can check it first. Go to a site like WhereGoes.com and paste the link in, or just Google “where does this link go?” to see what pops up. But honestly, the smarter move is to pull yourself out of the email completely. If it’s real—say, “Hi, I’m from PRH and I want this”—then don’t use the link in the message. Just go to the website yourself. Type it in, log in the way you normally do, and see if it’s actually there. It’s the same thing you’d do if you got an email from your bank or your credit card. Don’t click through—go around. Do the thing you know is safe, and then check. And the truth is, most of the time? It won’t be real. Rachael Herron But what for—just let’s take a moment with that too. What if an editor at Penguin Random House heard about you from their best friend, read your book, and they really did want to reach out to you? That editor is going to be savvy enough to know that you can—you can go to the Penguin Random House site, look for that editor, and you can even respond to the person you’re worried is a scammer, saying, “I get so much spam, and I’m going to email you from your work address. Is that okay?” And that editor will say nothing but, “Oh, that’s pretty smart. Yeah, I would do that—go ahead and do that.” They understand. KJ Dell’Antonia Yeah, and just make sure it doesn’t say, you know, “Tara at Singcarlson. Gmail.com,” you know? Rachael Herron If it isn’t a Gmail.com, it is spam. Period. KJ Dell’Antonia Prob… yeah, probably. Rachael Herron A business person will probably not be using Gmail by this… KJ Dell’Antonia Yeah, they might not. But there’s the slimmest chance they made a mistake. But again, like Rachael said, find the real emails. I mean, really—if a real editor has emailed you, and the… any email is—call the main number of the publishing house and say, I got an email that says it’s from this person. Can you give me their actual email address? And they will do it. Rachael Herron And they will do it. KJ Dell’Antonia Be careful out there, kids. It’s so depressing that we are doing this. Although I was telling Sarina my theory this morning, which is that this is going to force us all back offline. Like you’re going to have to read an actual newspaper, because no link you get can you ever be sure it goes to an actual newspaper? You’re going to have to call the hotel or the restaurant to make a reservation, because the restaurants are going to give up, because they can’t fight the bots. And you won’t know if you got a real hotel. You’re going to have to call the theater to make—you know, it’s just… we’re not going to be able to—we can’t have nice things, people. And this nice thing—I think that’s, that’s where it’s going to be. That’s my theory anyway, that would be good. Rachael Herron I’ve got, you know—in New Zealand, everyone calls everybody else, and it’s horrifying. I’ve got to tell you, like, it’s just… it’s just assumed. I once had my phone ring, and, of course, I didn’t answer it, because I’ve moved here from America. KJ Dell’Antonia Of course! Rachael Herron And—and then the second time it rang, I thought it almost might be important. And I think it was—I don’t know who it was, maybe my dentist or something. And when I answered, she said, “I just called you, but—but no one answered.” I know! American—we don’t, we don’t do that. Yeah, right. But yeah, America is now going to be going the New Zealand way. KJ Dell’Antonia Yeah. Yeah. Well, maybe—maybe not. Rachael Herron Worse things could happen. KJ Dell’Antonia Anybody have any last advice for people on the subject of not falling into this? Rachael Herron Maybe talk to your friends about it, too. If you’ve got writer friends out there, talk to your pals, because it can be fun to screenshot the most egregious of them and send them back and forth. I mean, it is fun—that is, talk smack about it. KJ Dell’Antonia If your mother-in-law has been working on a book for a little while… Rachael Herron Uh… Lord! KJ Dell’Antonia You know, maybe has reached out to some writer sites, and you might want to just, you know, subtly let some people in your life that might need this information—you might want to try to find a way to pass it on. All right. Thank you so much, Rachael, for coming and talking about this. Thanks for taking the time. Sarina and I are so grateful. We are—all our listeners are. All of the things we talked about today are in the show notes, and all of the information about how to check out Rachael’s podcast—How Do You Write now called Ink in Your Veins—which you absolutely should be listening to if you aren’t already. I’ll put the link… Rachael Herron Especially the episode or two with KJ on there. KJ Dell’Antonia Oh, well, sure. But also to the episode about hitting the USA Today bestseller list and getting this scam at the same time. Rachael has written a bunch of great books, one of which—the most recent—is The Seven Miracles of Beatrix Holland. Which… did I get the title right? I hope I did. Rachael Herron You did! KJ Dell’Antonia Okay... I loved—and Rachael and I are going to be talking about it on a separate episode—but absolutely check her out. She is worthy of your writerly and readerly time. And that’s it from us, kids. So until next week—or until next time—keep your butt in the chair and your head in the game. Narrator The Hashtag AmWriting Podcast is produced by Andrew Perrella. Our intro music, aptly titled Unemployed Monday was written and played by Max Cohen. Andrew and Max were paid for their time and their creative output, because everyone deserves to be paid for their work. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amwriting.substack.com/subscribe