Authors are being bombarded by literary scammers

A slew of fraud perpetrators appear to have found a new target: writers. Many people looking to promote their latest novels are reportedly falling victim to these scammers, who may promise authors access to the reading public while preying on them financially.

How are scammers zeroing in on authors?

Some involve book club scams, where “writers with published books have been receiving invitations from reading communities that start to unravel after a basic Google search,” said author Snigdha Poonam at The Dial. Other scams include situations that “sound too good to be true” for writers, including offers to “publish our next book, market our book, handle social media for us, represent us as agents and get us book-to-movie deals.”

Once the scammers are able to secure payment, often the “paper trail leads to Nigerian third parties holding bank accounts in America,” said The Dial. Author John Cocks paid a ‘Mary Brown’ $478 “for a book trailer and some commissioned reviews,” said The Guardian, after ‘Brown’ promised to “assist in the distribution to her ‘wide network’ of book clubs.” Cocks later noticed the PayPal receipt listed a Nigerian named Dayo Oguntuase.

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AI also plays a large role, as it can “help to tailor emails, produce fake pictures and documents, and create websites” to lure in writers, said The Times. Authors who “normally consider themselves very tech savvy, not at all susceptible to any kind of scam,” are “suddenly being confronted” with AI-created deception, Eleanor Dawson of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain told the outlet.

How can authors protect themselves?

Use trustworthy sources. If an author hires a “qualified freelance marketing or PR team, you will pay significantly more ,  but you will also receive actual strategy, real outreach and meaningful expertise,” said Literary Hub. Once authors “know what to look for, the ‘read’ flags are hard to miss.”