7 ms·

I set a trap for a book-marketing scammer (2025)

89 points by rznicolet 26d ago

boznz 9mo ago
Half my spam folder is currently from the same group of people, with similar sales pitches, though one also promised 25 five star Amazon reviews for $200 which is scary if true. The whole blog post just about sums up an indie writers journey, having to become a reluctant marketing person, and fighting the algorithm for recognition; the meme nailed it. Luckily I came to realise after my first book that writing was not about the sales (though that was the starting goal), but about finally putting all my ideas into a bunch of characters and having them live the life and fantasies I never could in a world I created. I got an email out of the blue this week from somebody who read my free sci-fi novel and liked it, such small things really makes the journey worth it.
- dang 26d ago
  (I moved this comment here from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46197161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46197161 as part of re-upping this post a la https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 - I hope that's ok!)
- bruce511 26d ago
  It's interesting how we seem to go through a cycle. a) There's a gate-keeper who picks winners, and charges money. Maybe book publising, maybe academic papers, maybe music - whatever. b) producers complain - these parasites are sucking all the money out the ecosystem, and adding no value. We need to bypass the gate-keepers. Go to market directly. c) The "indie" scene becomes legit. Barriers to entry drop. Consumers can find creators directly. There's no middle man. d) The indie scene bcomes popular. Everyone can publish an academc paper, or record a song, or write a book. (Of course 99% of it is rubbish, because, well, most of everything we create is rubbish) e) along come the "guides" - folks who'll teach, or promote, or review or whatever. Most of that is of (let's be generous) "marginal quality" - assuming it's not just an outright scam (which it probably is.) Turns out those gatekeepers were indeed providing something of value. But because they rejected almost everyone, and because they charged real money, they were disliked by creator and consumer alike. ah well... Ultimately of course, for the 99% of us, the fun is in the creation not the result. There's no money in creating (and for the 99% never has been). Enjoy the process - if someone likes it, great. Will you make our living doing this? Almost certainly not.
  - kmeisthax 25d ago
    You skipped a step between d) and e) - the stealth reimposition of gatekeepers under the guise of sorting through the crap. On the Internet, this took the form of "recommendation algorithms". The problem with a recommendation algorithm is that, while it is sold as "finding choices you wouldn't have known about", what it's really doing is narrowing the menu. It has to be, because of how the data flow works: 1. Obtain data on what kinds of people enjoy which books, movies, music, etc 2. Train a neural network to predict the sampled distribution. Because that distribution already contains a lot of data for the most popular works, and less for less other works, the model is trained with a bias for already popular works. Conversely, less-popular or niche works may be forgotten completely by the model. 3. Deploy the model. Because the model has a bias to predict certain already-popular works, it will recommend them more often, while the ones with little data in the set are recommended less. This changes the true distribution of the data. 4. Repeat. Take new sampled data from modified distribution and train a new model on that distribution. As a result of applying this cycle multiple times, the tails drop out. People don't watch or read niche works, so they get forgotten. This is ostensibly fixable, you could bias the model towards less well-known works, but it's more profitable to just make people pay to boost their posts. Bonus points: people who pay to boost are also polluting the model with a bunch of negative data about their work, so they are self-selecting into a class of easy marks who don't get recommended because they keep paying to show in front of people who don't want it.
  - matkoniecz 24d ago
    > Turns out those gatekeepers were indeed providing something of value. you missed step that proves or indicates that
- jorgen123 25d ago
  I'm sorry I only gave you 4 stars on Goodreads. I mostly only ever give 4 stars. But I second the out of the blue e-mail. For those wondering what book. Here is the trilogy. Free for download: https://rodyne.com/?p=1252 https://rodyne.com/?p=1252
matkoniecz 26d ago
> each one arriving within hours despite my repeated, polite “no thank you” responses why anyone would respond to spammers, if they recognize them as spammers? And want them to stop spamming?
- ilamont 26d ago
  Beat me to it. Why isn’t every unsolicited pitch without an unsubscribe link immediately blocked/marked as spam?
  - BLKNSLVR 26d ago
    Not to mention the obviously unrelated-to-publishing, dodgy sounding email addresses. Red flag #1 where only a single red flag is needed to discard it. Having said that, less technically minded people, as authors may be, may not even notice that.
    - bombcar 26d ago
      Many people don’t even know that Outlook can still show the source email address because it shows you the name instead.
  - itintheory 25d ago
    Is the presence of an unsubscribe link a useful signal? I presume that just marks your email address as active in the spammer's database.
    - goobatrooba 25d ago
      I think so too and have a funny conunndrum: I frequently get emails from some "Relations management" companies that they are including my contacts in a catalogue to sell to clients. I can opt out by clicking a link. So either I click and it may delete me, or it will confirm my address is real. I err on the side of not clicking, but I'm sure many less technically minded colleagues make the click.
  - 24d ago
matkoniecz 26d ago
> In writing this article, Greene used Claude (Anthropic) as a tool for structure, data organization, and feedback. yeah, it was quite visible in style (in parts that I bothered to read)
- leeoniya 26d ago
  i also tapped out quickly. how many times can you describe the same thing? Claude: "Hold my beer."
- RolandFlicket 26d ago
  Yep could tell something was off. Why does an author feel the need to use AI, isn't that their craft?
  - margalabargala 24d ago
    Ask a software engineer.
ilamont 26d ago
A trend that’s leading to more victims is the wave of boomer retirements. Every year there are millions of new 60 and 70 somethings with lots of time on their hands, many of them loaded to the gills and keen to write that novel/memoir/children’s book they’ve been thinking about for years. They are seldom aware of publishing industry requirements, and may be easily swayed by convincing email pitches, “authentic” social media personalities, or YouTube scammers.
strenholme 26d ago
I met a guy who fell for the romance version of that scam over and over again. He was living in an assisted living facility by himself and was very isolated there. He would, as we all do, get those messages via email/Instagram/other chat networks (I get the most of this kind of spam on Telegram, to the point I have disabled Telegram sending me notifications, but the occasional one slips through on WhatsApp; it seems for whatever reason they have given up on SMS spam) from supposedly “cute” girls who he believed were just random young girls randomly sliding in to his DMs (this guy is in his mid-70s for the record). It ended up that these girls would ask him for money, and he drained his savings accounts giving money to these “girls”, and even after running out of money, he kept believing these girls were real, they wanted to know him as a person, and that they just needed a little money to help out. Everyone close to him, including his family, kept telling him these girls weren’t real, to stop contacting them. He would briefly relent, delete all his messaging apps these scammers were using to contact him, then he would feel lonely or what not, reinstall the apps, and resume contact with the scammers. It didn’t matter how many times we told him they weren’t real. It didn’t matter how much money he lost from these scammers pitching their wares to him. He just stubbornly believed these were actual young girls who wanted to be his friend, no matter how many people told him they weren’t real, that he was just setting himself up to be scammed yet again. I had to break contact with him. It just really angered me that this guy couldn’t believe something as basic as these girls actually being African/Southeast Asian/etc. scammers and not real people wanting to get to know him.
- deepsun 26d ago
  People often believe what they want to believe, even bending logic and facts towards their desire. We see it all the time in politics, up to the point people vote for literal criminals who want to rip them off and they see it, but they just want to believe it's all false.
- kvakerok 26d ago
  Most of the people live in the world they invented, where they are the protagonist, naturally young girls want to talk to the protagonist, even when he's 70. You'd have to dismantle their whole worldview to disabuse them of the protagonist idea, but by 70 it's often too far gone and requires facing a million mistakes they have conveniently swept under the rug with the fairytale they've told themselves.
ant6n 26d ago
So wait, what was the trap?
klntsky 26d ago
It's sad that there are people who are creative enough to pull this off who choose to participate in petty scams instead of applying their ai and persuasion skills to something more useful.
bambax 25d ago
This seems to be limited to the English publishing world, at least for now? I self-published a historical fiction book a couple of years ago, in French, that got a little notoriety (I was interviewed on national public radio in France about it) and didn't receive any one of those scam emails. -- Not "few": zero.
- kmeisthax 25d ago
  Perhaps the scam hasn't jumped cultural / linguistic borders yet. Pig butchering scams used to be almost exclusively targeted at Chinese users until China kicked out the Triads. The Triads then set up slave camps in Myanmar and started targeting English-speaking users instead. I wouldn't be surprised if all the book marketing scammers are one or two groups of people that just haven't thought to target French authors yet. But basically any creative endeavor in the Anglosphere has its own attendant scammer ecosystem. Or who knows, maybe the Francosphere just doesn't have the algorithmic gatekeepers the Anglosphere has.
- mistersquid 25d ago
  > I self-published a historical fiction book a couple of years ago, in French, that got a little notoriety […]. Was it bad or scandalous, or did you mean “renown” instead of “notoriety”?
  - bambax 25d ago
    Ah, thanks for pointing it out. "Notoriété" doesn't have any bad connotation in French, but apparently it does in English. The more you know! I meant renown.
clort 25d ago
I recognise these scammers. I run a website for a small community group which just has a bit of information about them which has a contact us page with minimal protection. It comes in waves the language is very similar offering SEO and suchlike. I don't allow any of that through to the community because they are mostly non-technical and somebody will no doubt reply. This scam spam has been arriving since I set the website up (2019 IIRC), well before LLMs became available. Now that I consider it, haven't seen any lately I guess they have a new target.. I'd better brace myself for a new AI generated onslaught.
walrus01 25d ago
Replying to the first-ever email was really just making the problem worse for the author. Exacerbated by continuing to engage. One of the great things about SMTP and email is that a spammer can really never be sure whether a person opened or read an email. Many SMTP will silently accept emails and not inform the sender or auto-generate a reject bounce that a recipient's address doesn't even exist. Unless the reader opens an email and loads some active html content, image, 1x1 px pixel, etc, the sender can never know. When you start responding with hand crafted emails back to a spam farm all you've done is successfully mark your email address as "there is a live human reading this and they will reply" in some spammer's database.
liendolucas 25d ago
> Authors are desperate because books aren’t selling, traditional marketing isn’t working, and publishers are offering less support per title. We’re feeling pretty helpless about our career trajectories, watching sales numbers decline while wondering what we’re doing wrong. What's wrong? There's nothing wrong. Just people addicted to FaceBook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Netflix, YouTube, etc.
- kmeisthax 25d ago
  Book publishers have spent the last few decades making a profit off of managing the decline of their entire field of endeavor. Every opportunity to expand the medium was thrown out, and every big fad wound up hurting rather than helping. For example, you know that "generation of readers" a certain YA book supposedly made? What it actually did was destroy graded readers because publishers thought YA books had to go upmarket. The publishing industry is just chock full of short-sighted moves like this. If you look outside the Anglosphere you see far healthier[0] book publishing, to the point where translations of those books into English are filling the holes domestic publishers are leaving in the market. It started with comic books[1] and expanded into basically all fantasy fiction. Social media has little to do with this, except that they're also filling a hole publishers aren't interested in filling. [0] Healthy in terms of sales and audience. The authors of these books are being treated like shit, which perhaps is its own shortsightedness. [1] It is hard to understate how weirdly pigeonholed western comics are, even after the death of the comics code and the indie comics boom gave authors way more creative freedom.
stephbook 25d ago
> Some I’d deleted without recording. Some had been auto-deleted from spam after thirty days. Some I’d forgotten about before I started keeping systematic track. > I wasn’t being marketed to. I was being carpet-bombed. Three in a row directly followed by a juxtaposition containing a weird metaphor (shouldn't it be "bombarded" instead of "carpet-bombed"?) Good luck selling books.
- tverbeure 25d ago
  “No …, no …, just …” And more AI-isms. I think we finally found ground zero: the original author whose work was used to train the LLMs.
- matkoniecz 24d ago
  In footer they admit to "Greene used Claude (Anthropic) as a tool for structure, data organization, and feedback" presumably it stands for "I asked LLM to write it for me"
evidaxis 25d ago
[flagged]

89 points by rznicolet 26d ago

boznz 9mo ago

Half my spam folder is currently from the same group of people, with similar sales pitches, though one also promised 25 five star Amazon reviews for $200 which is scary if true. The whole blog post just about sums up an indie writers journey, having to become a reluctant marketing person, and fighting the algorithm for recognition; the meme nailed it. Luckily I came to realise after my first book that writing was not about the sales (though that was the starting goal), but about finally putting all my ideas into a bunch of characters and having them live the life and fantasies I never could in a world I created. I got an email out of the blue this week from somebody who read my free sci-fi novel and liked it, such small things really makes the journey worth it.

dang 26d ago
(I moved this comment here from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46197161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46197161 as part of re-upping this post a la https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 - I hope that's ok!)
bruce511 26d ago
It's interesting how we seem to go through a cycle. a) There's a gate-keeper who picks winners, and charges money. Maybe book publising, maybe academic papers, maybe music - whatever. b) producers complain - these parasites are sucking all the money out the ecosystem, and adding no value. We need to bypass the gate-keepers. Go to market directly. c) The "indie" scene becomes legit. Barriers to entry drop. Consumers can find creators directly. There's no middle man. d) The indie scene bcomes popular. Everyone can publish an academc paper, or record a song, or write a book. (Of course 99% of it is rubbish, because, well, most of everything we create is rubbish) e) along come the "guides" - folks who'll teach, or promote, or review or whatever. Most of that is of (let's be generous) "marginal quality" - assuming it's not just an outright scam (which it probably is.) Turns out those gatekeepers were indeed providing something of value. But because they rejected almost everyone, and because they charged real money, they were disliked by creator and consumer alike. ah well... Ultimately of course, for the 99% of us, the fun is in the creation not the result. There's no money in creating (and for the 99% never has been). Enjoy the process - if someone likes it, great. Will you make our living doing this? Almost certainly not.
- kmeisthax 25d ago
  You skipped a step between d) and e) - the stealth reimposition of gatekeepers under the guise of sorting through the crap. On the Internet, this took the form of "recommendation algorithms". The problem with a recommendation algorithm is that, while it is sold as "finding choices you wouldn't have known about", what it's really doing is narrowing the menu. It has to be, because of how the data flow works: 1. Obtain data on what kinds of people enjoy which books, movies, music, etc 2. Train a neural network to predict the sampled distribution. Because that distribution already contains a lot of data for the most popular works, and less for less other works, the model is trained with a bias for already popular works. Conversely, less-popular or niche works may be forgotten completely by the model. 3. Deploy the model. Because the model has a bias to predict certain already-popular works, it will recommend them more often, while the ones with little data in the set are recommended less. This changes the true distribution of the data. 4. Repeat. Take new sampled data from modified distribution and train a new model on that distribution. As a result of applying this cycle multiple times, the tails drop out. People don't watch or read niche works, so they get forgotten. This is ostensibly fixable, you could bias the model towards less well-known works, but it's more profitable to just make people pay to boost their posts. Bonus points: people who pay to boost are also polluting the model with a bunch of negative data about their work, so they are self-selecting into a class of easy marks who don't get recommended because they keep paying to show in front of people who don't want it.
- matkoniecz 24d ago
  > Turns out those gatekeepers were indeed providing something of value. you missed step that proves or indicates that
jorgen123 25d ago
I'm sorry I only gave you 4 stars on Goodreads. I mostly only ever give 4 stars. But I second the out of the blue e-mail. For those wondering what book. Here is the trilogy. Free for download: https://rodyne.com/?p=1252 https://rodyne.com/?p=1252

matkoniecz 26d ago

> each one arriving within hours despite my repeated, polite “no thank you” responses why anyone would respond to spammers, if they recognize them as spammers? And want them to stop spamming?

ilamont 26d ago
Beat me to it. Why isn’t every unsolicited pitch without an unsubscribe link immediately blocked/marked as spam?
- BLKNSLVR 26d ago
  Not to mention the obviously unrelated-to-publishing, dodgy sounding email addresses. Red flag #1 where only a single red flag is needed to discard it. Having said that, less technically minded people, as authors may be, may not even notice that.
  - bombcar 26d ago
    Many people don’t even know that Outlook can still show the source email address because it shows you the name instead.
- itintheory 25d ago
  Is the presence of an unsubscribe link a useful signal? I presume that just marks your email address as active in the spammer's database.
  - goobatrooba 25d ago
    I think so too and have a funny conunndrum: I frequently get emails from some "Relations management" companies that they are including my contacts in a catalogue to sell to clients. I can opt out by clicking a link. So either I click and it may delete me, or it will confirm my address is real. I err on the side of not clicking, but I'm sure many less technically minded colleagues make the click.
- 24d ago

matkoniecz 26d ago

> In writing this article, Greene used Claude (Anthropic) as a tool for structure, data organization, and feedback. yeah, it was quite visible in style (in parts that I bothered to read)

leeoniya 26d ago
i also tapped out quickly. how many times can you describe the same thing? Claude: "Hold my beer."
RolandFlicket 26d ago
Yep could tell something was off. Why does an author feel the need to use AI, isn't that their craft?
- margalabargala 24d ago
  Ask a software engineer.

ilamont 26d ago

A trend that’s leading to more victims is the wave of boomer retirements. Every year there are millions of new 60 and 70 somethings with lots of time on their hands, many of them loaded to the gills and keen to write that novel/memoir/children’s book they’ve been thinking about for years. They are seldom aware of publishing industry requirements, and may be easily swayed by convincing email pitches, “authentic” social media personalities, or YouTube scammers.

strenholme 26d ago

I met a guy who fell for the romance version of that scam over and over again. He was living in an assisted living facility by himself and was very isolated there. He would, as we all do, get those messages via email/Instagram/other chat networks (I get the most of this kind of spam on Telegram, to the point I have disabled Telegram sending me notifications, but the occasional one slips through on WhatsApp; it seems for whatever reason they have given up on SMS spam) from supposedly “cute” girls who he believed were just random young girls randomly sliding in to his DMs (this guy is in his mid-70s for the record). It ended up that these girls would ask him for money, and he drained his savings accounts giving money to these “girls”, and even after running out of money, he kept believing these girls were real, they wanted to know him as a person, and that they just needed a little money to help out. Everyone close to him, including his family, kept telling him these girls weren’t real, to stop contacting them. He would briefly relent, delete all his messaging apps these scammers were using to contact him, then he would feel lonely or what not, reinstall the apps, and resume contact with the scammers. It didn’t matter how many times we told him they weren’t real. It didn’t matter how much money he lost from these scammers pitching their wares to him. He just stubbornly believed these were actual young girls who wanted to be his friend, no matter how many people told him they weren’t real, that he was just setting himself up to be scammed yet again. I had to break contact with him. It just really angered me that this guy couldn’t believe something as basic as these girls actually being African/Southeast Asian/etc. scammers and not real people wanting to get to know him.

deepsun 26d ago
People often believe what they want to believe, even bending logic and facts towards their desire. We see it all the time in politics, up to the point people vote for literal criminals who want to rip them off and they see it, but they just want to believe it's all false.
kvakerok 26d ago
Most of the people live in the world they invented, where they are the protagonist, naturally young girls want to talk to the protagonist, even when he's 70. You'd have to dismantle their whole worldview to disabuse them of the protagonist idea, but by 70 it's often too far gone and requires facing a million mistakes they have conveniently swept under the rug with the fairytale they've told themselves.

ant6n 26d ago

So wait, what was the trap?

klntsky 26d ago

It's sad that there are people who are creative enough to pull this off who choose to participate in petty scams instead of applying their ai and persuasion skills to something more useful.

bambax 25d ago

This seems to be limited to the English publishing world, at least for now? I self-published a historical fiction book a couple of years ago, in French, that got a little notoriety (I was interviewed on national public radio in France about it) and didn't receive any one of those scam emails. -- Not "few": zero.

kmeisthax 25d ago
Perhaps the scam hasn't jumped cultural / linguistic borders yet. Pig butchering scams used to be almost exclusively targeted at Chinese users until China kicked out the Triads. The Triads then set up slave camps in Myanmar and started targeting English-speaking users instead. I wouldn't be surprised if all the book marketing scammers are one or two groups of people that just haven't thought to target French authors yet. But basically any creative endeavor in the Anglosphere has its own attendant scammer ecosystem. Or who knows, maybe the Francosphere just doesn't have the algorithmic gatekeepers the Anglosphere has.
mistersquid 25d ago
> I self-published a historical fiction book a couple of years ago, in French, that got a little notoriety […]. Was it bad or scandalous, or did you mean “renown” instead of “notoriety”?
- bambax 25d ago
  Ah, thanks for pointing it out. "Notoriété" doesn't have any bad connotation in French, but apparently it does in English. The more you know! I meant renown.

clort 25d ago

I recognise these scammers. I run a website for a small community group which just has a bit of information about them which has a contact us page with minimal protection. It comes in waves the language is very similar offering SEO and suchlike. I don't allow any of that through to the community because they are mostly non-technical and somebody will no doubt reply. This scam spam has been arriving since I set the website up (2019 IIRC), well before LLMs became available. Now that I consider it, haven't seen any lately I guess they have a new target.. I'd better brace myself for a new AI generated onslaught.

walrus01 25d ago

Replying to the first-ever email was really just making the problem worse for the author. Exacerbated by continuing to engage. One of the great things about SMTP and email is that a spammer can really never be sure whether a person opened or read an email. Many SMTP will silently accept emails and not inform the sender or auto-generate a reject bounce that a recipient's address doesn't even exist. Unless the reader opens an email and loads some active html content, image, 1x1 px pixel, etc, the sender can never know. When you start responding with hand crafted emails back to a spam farm all you've done is successfully mark your email address as "there is a live human reading this and they will reply" in some spammer's database.

liendolucas 25d ago

> Authors are desperate because books aren’t selling, traditional marketing isn’t working, and publishers are offering less support per title. We’re feeling pretty helpless about our career trajectories, watching sales numbers decline while wondering what we’re doing wrong. What's wrong? There's nothing wrong. Just people addicted to FaceBook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Netflix, YouTube, etc.

kmeisthax 25d ago
Book publishers have spent the last few decades making a profit off of managing the decline of their entire field of endeavor. Every opportunity to expand the medium was thrown out, and every big fad wound up hurting rather than helping. For example, you know that "generation of readers" a certain YA book supposedly made? What it actually did was destroy graded readers because publishers thought YA books had to go upmarket. The publishing industry is just chock full of short-sighted moves like this. If you look outside the Anglosphere you see far healthier[0] book publishing, to the point where translations of those books into English are filling the holes domestic publishers are leaving in the market. It started with comic books[1] and expanded into basically all fantasy fiction. Social media has little to do with this, except that they're also filling a hole publishers aren't interested in filling. [0] Healthy in terms of sales and audience. The authors of these books are being treated like shit, which perhaps is its own shortsightedness. [1] It is hard to understate how weirdly pigeonholed western comics are, even after the death of the comics code and the indie comics boom gave authors way more creative freedom.

stephbook 25d ago

> Some I’d deleted without recording. Some had been auto-deleted from spam after thirty days. Some I’d forgotten about before I started keeping systematic track. > I wasn’t being marketed to. I was being carpet-bombed. Three in a row directly followed by a juxtaposition containing a weird metaphor (shouldn't it be "bombarded" instead of "carpet-bombed"?) Good luck selling books.

tverbeure 25d ago
“No …, no …, just …” And more AI-isms. I think we finally found ground zero: the original author whose work was used to train the LLMs.
matkoniecz 24d ago
In footer they admit to "Greene used Claude (Anthropic) as a tool for structure, data organization, and feedback" presumably it stands for "I asked LLM to write it for me"

evidaxis 25d ago

[flagged]