Publishing Scam Emails Don't Look Like Scams Anymore

A literary festival invited me to be a featured author. So I did something I tell people never to do. I replied to the email. And then I watched step by step over 3 emails how the trap gets opened and they try to close it. Because how do I know if an email about my book is a scam is now one of the most common questions I'm getting from self-published nonfiction authors. In our Author Lab on Skool, we are talking about this almost every single day, and I am getting an email a day. One a day. So here's the answer up front. If it came out of nowhere from a Gmail address with a pile of praise, well, it's probably a scam. Real opportunities come from a company domain, and they don't ask you for money. But if you have a book on Amazon and strangers are emailing you about it, And you wanna know whether you should reply? This video is for you. Hi, I'm Julie the Book Broad, founder of Book Launchers and your host here at BookLaunchers.tv. Book Launchers is on a mission to help 100,000 books be discovered by 2030. Okay, so I got an email. Ray Hudson, promotions committee, session curator, Word on the Lake Writers Festival. Now, Word on the Lake is real. It's a lovely Canadian festival in Salmon Arm, British Columbia, run by the Shuswap Association of Writers. Actual festival, real people, actual writers. Now, if you don't know Canada or this area, it's a pretty small town, so it's not a huge event. But I'm not picking on them. They did nothing wrong. Someone stole their name, probably because they are a small event and unlikely to be known. Now, Ray, he wants to feature me. Oh, so lucky. Fully virtual too, because now I don't have travel costs. There's no logistics and his team is going to handle everything. All I have to do is reply with, I'm interested, plus the title of the book I want to feature. Now, here's the first thing I want you to notice, because I almost missed it. His email opened, Dear Jones. Yeah, Dear Jones. If you didn't catch it at the beginning, my name is Julie. So the mail merge obviously slipped and I got someone else's Email. That's probably fairly common. But I was in the mood that day and I replied anyway on purpose. I wrote back, I'm interested. Self-promote and succeed. 2 days later, Ray is thrilled. Wonderful news. Great choice. Strong fit. And then comes a paragraph that sounds like it means something, but really it does not mean anything. It said, professionally structured virtual feature with a dedicated spotlight segment It was curated, the positioning within their festival program, and I was going to get exposure to all their readers and writer audience channels. There's nothing in there. No date, no platform, no name of another author, nothing that I can actually verify. Then I hadn't replied in a couple weeks and I got a nudge. Your reply meant a lot and it tells me you already understand the value of strategic visibility. And then he asks me, When an opportunity like this lands in front of you, what matters most? The reach, the audience fit, or the simplicity of the process? He's not curious. He wants me to answer so he can build his next pitch out of my own words. I didn't reply, but I know exactly where this goes. And so do other authors who have followed this trap. And recently, Writer Beware documented the same festival scam in detail. The ask is a special placement fee, usually about $500, Maybe $650 for the ultra-special version. And if you push back, the price magically drops to as low as $175 for a mini special placement paid by wire transfer, which of course you cannot reverse. Real festivals invite you and pay you, or invite you and pay you nothing, but they do not invoice you. Now here's where most authors get this wrong, and it's costing them. The first thing is that scam emails are going to look sloppy. They will have bad grammar, weird spacing, obvious nonsense. Now, sometimes this is true, but AI has made this so much less true. The other thing is that people will go, oh my gosh, this is a real festival and they know real details about my book. They must have actually read it or researched me. And these are reasonable things, but again, I get one a day. And last week I got one that told me my book ranks number 301,000 in the Kindle store and I have 178 reviews at a 4.8-star average. And it even quoted one of the reviewers calling it the Bible of self-publishing nonfiction. That is all true and also easily accessible because it's all on my Amazon page in a public, free for anyone with a quick scrape To find in four seconds, and that same email then called my book Self Promote and Succeed in one paragraph and Self Publish and Succeed two paragraphs later, even though it was referencing the same book. The machine doesn't realize that I have two separate books. So here's the thing, and this is really the entire video in a single line. The what's the word? Prolification pro. I don't know what the word is. The widespread use of AI has made flattery easy and free. Praise used to cost somebody something. They had to read your book, form an opinion, and take time to write you. That effort was a signal that they were real. And that's how you knew. That signal, long gone. It's dead. It's worthless. A bot can now produce 4 paragraphs of specific, accurate, emotionally targeted admiration for you and your book in less time than it takes you to walk to your fridge and get a glass of water. So flattery, that's the tell that something is up. So let's not fall for the flattery. And let's watch for some of the other things that are going to tell you that this is more than likely a scam. Okay? So what we're looking for is an email that comes from a company domain, not a Gmail, a production company, a literary agency, a festival or a publisher, and they have their publisher We'll call it frankspublisher.com is the email domain, and you go to frankspublisher.com and there's a legitimate website. Usually they'll mash up formats. They'll jam a real person's name together with a real company in front of a gmail.com. harry@caaliteraryagent.com, right? But it's @gmail. Check the sender name against the actual address, not the display name, because those 2 often do not match, and scammers count on you never looking. The other thing you want to do is search. And I just ask Grok. I'm lazy. I don't do the search myself. I usually copy and paste this email right into Grok and say, is this real? Because they often use real verifiable names, but Writer Beware has seen this exact template sent under the names of agencies at real agencies. So Googling the name is not enough, but you have to find that person on their agency's own website and contact them through the address listed there, not the address that emailed you. And for me, usually when I upload the email word for word into Grok, Grok says, eh, that's a scam. Here's why. But the other thing to do is when you get the ask, is there anything there that's concrete? We want you on X day at X time. Here's the link. And there's a real opportunity that tells you exactly what you want. Scams tend to be open-ended. What are you working on? Are you currently represented? What matters most to you? They exist to start a conversation because every email you send back makes it harder to walk away. And they do this on purpose. It's a slow boil and they're trying to hook you in so you can't walk away. Now, their book clubs typically don't charge invited guests. Radio shows typically don't charge invited guests. Festivals can charge for tables here and there, but generally speaking, they're not soliciting you upfront. They will advertise the festival and it's up to you to reach out. If a producer needs you to fund a screenplay treatment, that's not a movie deal. That is a purchase, and you're putting money in somebody else's pocket for the money to walk away from you. So the first thing you would do, like I said, I just load it all into Grok and ask it if it's real. But if you can confirm that this is actual real opportunity without using anything they give you, you go to the festival's real site, you go to that agency's main site, the production company's main site, and you can find this person with the same title and same contact information Well, that's a good sign. If the only proof that this opportunity exists is inside that email, it doesn't exist. Remember, domain, person, specific ask, no fee, and independent proof. If a fake film producer is the only person who has emailed you about your book this year, the scam email is not your problem. You have a discoverability problem. And these emails work because they arrive to you when nobody else is arriving to you. Nobody else has told you your book is good or that they found it. So let's make sure we get that fixed. Head on over to booklaunchers.com/auditmybook and we'll tell you why your book is not getting found and help you get discovered. We will audit how discoverable your book is right now and show you the gaps. We're not gonna give you fake flattery. We're giving you an honest look at why real readers, real podcasters, and real media are not finding you. And if you wanna talk this stuff through with authors who are getting the same emails as you, come hang out in our Author Lab on School. It's free and it is where the cool authors hang out and trade scam email stories. booklaunchers.com/authorlab. One more thing and I'll let you go and delete some emails. I know it stings to figure out that the nicest message in your inbox was written by a machine that never read your book, but here's the good buried in all of this. Praise is free now, which means praise, it's not worth anything. But the thing that is worth something is proof. That domain, that track record, a name that holds up when you go looking. This is a world that rewards the authors doing real work, building real audiences, and earning real proof. You can't scrape your way to real proof. Real opportunity does not find you in your inbox. It finds you through the demand that you are building out in the world. So go build that demand. I'll see you there.