Writer Beware

I think AI is inundating my email inbox with author scams. Apparently AI is somehow gathering data on our books (from Amazon, Goodreads?) and generating emails soliciting promotion and other scams. They even lift inferences about your main character or reference plot points or themes etc. as if they had read the book! Wow.

A few of us have had emails from organizers of so-called book clubs wanting to highlight our books in their clubs. They claim they have thousands of readers in their clubs and will highlight ours next month or whenever. But after a back and forth a couple of times with one solicitation (and getting back a response with grammatical errors which to me screams AI) they then outlined the cost for them to highlight your book in their book club.

In addition to this I’ve gotten emails from AI, I believe, saying thank you for your purchase. Invoice attached. The first one of these emails I got many months ago and could see a PayPal heading. I opened it (fortunately I have high-quality and reliable computer protection in case a virus is included) and saw that I had purchased $349 worth of bitcoin. I went into my PayPal account and saw that I had not. Now when I get these emails in my inbox, I report them immediately as spam or phishing and don’t open them.

There are reputable promotion venues for writers to highlight their work, but as always, investigate, verify, and communicate with other writers before going down this path.