Who Doesn’t Love a Good Con, Author’s Edition

Rob Kelley here, sharing one of the weirder experiences of becoming a published author. As everyone knows (because I keep telling everyone, repeatedly), my debut novel Raven hit the streets at the end of October. Thanks to all of my fellow Maine Crime Writers for your support in that journey, as well as all of the fine participants at Crime Bake last weekend. So much fun!

With publication came another dubious honor: the almost daily receipt of author scam emails. I don’t know how common this is, but I’m sure I’ve exacerbated it by being very present on social media in the run-up to my book launch. To be fair, maybe not all of them are cons, but most of them definitely are.

They come in two flavors. First is the “marketing consultant” email, gushing with AI-generated enthusiasm for my book including details lifted from my back cover copy. The compliments are fulsome and the promises to generate sales through Amazon, Goodreads, and social media campaigns are impressive. I only need to respond to an email like IMakeAuthorsRich@gmail.com. OK, so those are super obvious: no company name, no actual proposal, just a phishing expedition. (Which, by the way, is one of the many computer crimes I recently discussed on the Criminal Mischief series with thriller writer D.P. Lyle for Outliers University!)

What’s kind of sad in all of this is that I think some of the proposals might be real. I’m fortunate to already have a marketing partner, but if I didn’t, I very well might be wasting time trying to figure out who might be legit!

The second flavor is the far more annoying one. In these, the sender promises to promote me in their book club, with hundreds of readers committed to buying and reading my book. I’m actively marketing to book clubs, so this would be awesome, were it real. And yeah, because I’m thinking about book clubs, I fell for this one. An email came in via the contact form on my website (I try not to advertise my direct author email, a decision I am really happy about now!). I responded that I was interested and we exchanged a few innocent emails about how awesome it would be before they dropped the fee schedule on me. I mean, it might be worth it to pay $300 to get a couple of hundred guaranteed purchases, but I knew that wasn’t what was going on here. When I searched for the book club there was no Facebook account or any other result, except one Meetup.com event scheduled with that name. That seemed potentially legitimate until I got the third and fourth “book club” offers from different people who also had only one Meetup.com event scheduled and no other internet presence.

Lesson learned, with no money out of my pocket, fortunately. Though, one of the scammers, obviously annoyed with my unwillingness to fall for their scam, made sure to tell me they dropped a review of the book on Goodreads. One star. Everybody’s a critic, apparently.

Next month I’ll be writing about the process of creating an audiobook version of Raven through Amazon’s ACX platform. The whole thing was a blast. The audiobook is now in the final stages of approval by ACX and should launch in the next week or so!

Currently reading: We Are All Guilty Here, Karin Slaughter, 2025

Next in my TBR list: Signed copy of fellow Crime Bake Debut Author and Maine Crime Writers blogger Allison Keeton’s Blaze Orange, 2025.