How to Identify a Book Marketing Scam

An email pops up in your inbox saying that a book club wants to read your book. A DM appears on your social media account asking if you’ve considered making a YouTube trailer for your book. How can you tell if these are book scams or legitimate offers?

There are more than 20 different tip-offs that you’re dealing with a scammer rather than a legitimate provider of services. No single one of these tip-offs is proof of a scammer, but the more of them that you notice in an email or DM, the more likely you’re dealing with a ne’er-do-well.

Unsolicited offer
Professionals in the writing industry rarely solicit authors with cold calls, whether it be by phone, email or a social media DM. Instead, they meet each other in business environments (such as writing conferences) and then communicate. When they do meet by email, authors typically are the ones who begin communication with literary agents, editors, publishers, marketing companies and others.

Message sent at odd hour of the day
With bots and AI, messages can be sent at any hour of the day. You can eliminate some of them, however, by looking at those sent to you during the middle of the night. Would a literary agent in New York City, film producer in Hollywood, or book club coordinator in Peoria, Illinois, honestly send you an email at 1:30 a.m.? That’s very unlikely, even if the sender were located in the United Kingdom or Hawaii and you live in Texas.

Personal rather than company-affiliated email
When you receive an unsolicited email, look at the email address. Legitimate professionals almost always use a company-affiliated email rather than a free email service like Gmail. So if the email came from Brett Jordan at Ace Marketing, look for an email address like brettjordan@acemarketing.com. An email like brettjordanacemarketing02@gmail.com is a bad sign. By the way, that number is another clue that the email is bogus. Few people use random numbers in their email address.

You’re addressed with not quite the right name
Scam emails often get your name wrong. For example, they use your last name rather than your first name (“Hi Smith” for Mary Smith), combine your first or last name (“Hi Msmith” usually because this is how it appears on your email address), or use some odd derivation of your email as your name ( “Hi Marysmith27” if your address is marysmith27@yahoo.com). A human being knows not to do any of that.

Poor English
For most scammers, English is their second language. While this was a dead giveaway in past scams, AI largely has eliminated spelling, capitalization and punctuation errors as well as most odd English use. Despite that, the language of scam emails still will be stilted at times or use AI-speak, which often is opaque or pompous (“how the content is broken down visually” or “how they’re presented and structured for discovery”). Even if the email was not sent by a scammer, would you trust your manuscript to someone who doesn’t write flawless English?

Sloppy details
Since AI is writing the email or DM, you can expect it to mess up details about the sender. For example, many emails are signed by a different name than used in the email (Brett Jordan signs the email sent by jackolson@gmail.com) or the name of the “marketing company” appears in two different forms (such as “Ace Marketing Inc.” in the opening line but as “Ace Marketing Co.” in the signature block). Any time you see an inconsistency or discrepancy, consider it a red flag.

Name of the company aims to deceive
Scammers make up companies that sound familiar to lull you into comfortability. For example, their company name is “Amazon Kindle Network,” which sounds like it’s from the largest self-publishing company and bookseller in the world. If a company name sounds a little off, then it probably doesn’t exist. Always google the name to verify.

Sender’s name is that of a famous author or a celebrity
Would a bestselling author (especially a dead one) or a famous celebrity take the time to write to you, an indie writer? Just how did they get your book and email address anyway? Sure, it’s remotely possible – and that’s part of the emotional manipulation, that you were discovered – but remotely possible is the key phrase here.

Sender’s name isn’t real sounding
Red flag the email or DM if the person sending  has a name that is weird (“Sunshine Promise”), too generic (“Mary Jones”), or of a book-television-movie character (“Kaelin R. Veyne”). Now, these names could be of a real person, so this red flag can’t be the sole ding for presuming the sender is a scammer.

Virtual address
Scammers always make themselves hard to trace, so they give addresses for virtual offices, use P.O. boxes for their address, or offer a randomly selected residential or business address from the United States, United Kingdom or Canada. If you receive a phone call, the caller ID is spoofed.

Stock or AI headshots
To appear presentable and to hide their identity, scammers tend to use AI photos, stock photos, or simply steal a photo from someone online. You can determine if a stock or stolen photo were used simply by saving that image to your desktop then doing a Google image search for it. By the way, don’t be surprised if the stolen photo is a headshot of an amateur softcore porn star.

Over-the-top flattery
Whoever emails or DMs you often is seemingly familiar with your title and has high praise for it and your writing abilities. This praise is full of superlatives. Such flattery is almost always a sure sign of a scammer trying to gain your trust. By the way, the scammer got the information about your book not by reading it but by scraping wording from your book description on Amazon and any reviews posted there. AI simply rewrote it.

Generic flattery
Despite the warm praise, when you really look closely it, the words are fairly generic, almost is if someone just read a summary of your book rather than the actual text. The praise gives no real details about your book – and any details given almost certainly are in your Amazon book description.

You were discovered!
Scammers try to emotionally manipulate you by saying your book was discovered by a “book scout,” a publisher or a filmmaker, recommended by Amazon, or given a “favorable review” by an unnamed “industry expert.” All of this is possible, of course, but extremely unlikely. Professionals don’t have time to browse Amazon or Goodreads searching for titles they might market or turn into a film, and publishers certainly won’t republish a book that already has been published and is still for sale.

Over-the-top metaphors and similes
As AI is used to write most of the emails and DMs, you should expect that there will be some outrageous metaphors and similes (“watch the reviews thunder in like Babylon at the city gates” or “2,500+ readers who treat reviewing like spiritual warfare”) in the text sent to you. That’s because AI has been trained on marketing copy, which uses hyperbolic language.

Non-standard industry terms are used
Scammers often try to sound intelligent by using jargon. Because they actually know very little about the industry, they tend to make up terms like “book specialist,” “book expert,” “reader outreach specialist,” “book scout,” or “private circle of readers.”

Spot fees
Reputable companies and organizations don’t ask readers to pay for spotlighting or reviewing books (and certainly not at the high prices scammers ask, even with a “very special discount just for you”). Book club readers don’t expect tips from an author to leave a review (Paying someone to leave a review of your book, by the way, can get you banned on Amazon).

Pushy sales tactics
Scammers always use aggressive, high-pressure methods to force a purchase. This is done by creating fake urgency, sending constant follow-ups, or using manipulative language. While this is not atypical for sales people in general, scammers usually turn it up a notch.

Non-credible testimonials
Should the scammer provide testimonials, all the reviews are positive, no last names are given (so that you can verify them), the images of the person giving the testimonial are AI generated, stock photos, or pics stolen from peoples’ Facebook pages/websites. Sometimes the reviews come from Trust Pilot, where reviews can be purchased and so hardly are trustworthy at all.

False claims about books they worked on
To gain your trust, scammers will lie about to whom they’ve provided services. Dig a little deeper, though, and you’ll likely find that the scammer says he’s been in the marketing business for five years but apparently worked on a book published in the 1990s. Or the authors’ names and book titles are not quite spelled correctly and maybe even some of the words in the book’s title are out of order.

Requests for personal information
While such requests usually don’t occur until after the scammer believes he’s gained your trust, sometimes he’ll ask for it right away. This usually isn’t an attempt to scam you out of money but is a phishing effort to steal information. The scammer may seek your credit card information (including your security and zip codes), bank account number the bank’s routing number, mother’s maiden name, Social Security number (if in the United States), and other information so they can access your financial accounts or commit fraud using your identify.

Big money promises
Scammers claim they can get thousands of people to look at your book with some simple marketing magic and that this will mean a lot of money for you as most of those people will buy your book. Even if this marketing guru is not a scammer, he just told you a lie. Thousands of impressions doesn’t net that many sales and probably not enough, in fact, to equal what you’ll spend on getting those views.

Odd signature sign-offs
Professionals don’t end their email with terms like “warm regards” or “warmly,” as if they are your friend or relative. “Sincerely” is standard, and increasingly with emails no sign-off is used at all.

Sender’s name is odd
Red flag the email or DM if the person sending it is a celebrity (especially a dead one), weird (“Sunshine Promise”), too generic (“Mary Jones”), or of a book-television-movie character (“Kaelin R. Veyne”). Now, the celebrity could be alive and those other names could be real people, so you must balance this red flag against the others listed here. 

No website
This isn’t 1998. Professionals today have a website. Most scammers don’t bother to have one; after all, their scam soon will be found out and the site will be worthless, so why put in the effort? Besides, a website would give you a number of clues that could help you suss out that whoever is contacting you is a scammer. To get around this, a scammer often will give a legitimate company’s website in their email and pretend to work for that company.

Website is by Lovable.app
Lovable is a Swedish company that provides software so you can build a website within a matter of minutes. All you have to do is enter prompts, and the software builds it for you. In many cases, the wording is generic, opaque or pompous (AI-speak) and only partial names are given. Sometimes, only the website’s home page is constructed and the other pages left blank (Remember, scammers by nature are lazy.). 

Duplicate websites
When the scammer does have a website that is found out, he’ll simply duplicate it and give it a slightly different web address. Professionals don’t keep two different, nearly identical websites promoting the same services or products and give them slightly different names. That would diffuse the effectiveness of their websites by splitting the number of people who visit them, causing both sites to appear lower on search engine pages.

“Let’s move to WhatsApp”
If the person you’re communicating with gives you this line, “I’m not on here much — can we move this to WhatsApp?” instead move to the delete button. WhatsApp is a favorite platform for scammers because places like Facebook and LinkedIn use automated systems to identify suspicious links, fake profiles, and fraudulent payment messages. WhatsApp is the Wild West of platforms, as none of those detection systems exist there. Pulling off a scam is much easier on WhatsApp.
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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out my book about marketing scams aimed at writers: