You receive a message from a reader in your inbox. He or she is reading your just-published book or has gotten their hands on your manuscript query. They love it. The tone is warm, intelligent, specific, respectful. It’s the personal response you’ve been waiting years to receive. In depth. Themes you’ve been developing. Passages you wrote that mean something to you. You feel special, truly seen.
It’s a scam. It’s the new frontier of literary fraud, and it’s crushing.
With my work finally being published, I started receiving these a few months ago from a variety of angles. Each one was more credible than the last, most recently small book clubs that would like to feature Loosestrife for Porcupines. AI is learning fast. The reader appears to have spent a lot of time with my book. They write that it deserves more recognition.
As these letters are proliferating, targeting writers at every stage of their journey, I feel it’s important to share this with you. I’ve done some research. From the new memoirist who’s querying agents, to the poet with a new book from a respected press to the published novelist—no one is immune. The AI is likely to originate overseas, most now traced to Nigeria—a precision instrument aimed at where we are most vulnerable: the hunger to be read, to be recognized.
Until recently, scam emails were easy to spot. Impersonal flattery, poor grammar, implausible claims. I’m a widow with cancer and ten million dollars and I want to deposit it in your bank in America. Right. We learned to delete them without a thought. That calculus has changed.
Generative AI can now scour everything publicly available about you—your published work, things you’ve said about your writing on Facebook, whether you’re published or not, literary journal appearances, contest mentions, conference bios, writing community profiles—this blog for Straw Dog—and synthesize it into a letter that reads as though the sender spent an afternoon immersed with your writing. They quote passages you’ve written, name influences, identify the thematic preoccupations that define you and speak to them with apparent feeling. The email that arrives in your inbox is, to all appearances, a personal letter that took time and consideration. But. No matter how long, how sophisticated, how personal, it took the scammer seconds to generate. If you respond, they will write back like the friend you’ve wanted your whole life, warm, gracious, supportive. Their letters will appear honest, thoughtful, like they’ve really taken the time to respond. Signed Carol or Mark. There is no Carol or Mark. It’s AI.
Our writing means everything to us. The years of rejection, the near-misses, the invisibility that even talented writers endure for long stretches, create a hunger for recognition that these letters simulate. When one arrives that seems to see us clearly, the calculation is insidious.
These scams have branched into distinct categories. Here’s what’s currently circulating.
FOR PUBLISHED AND SELF-PUBLISHED AUTHORS
The Fake Book Club.
An enthusiastic email invites your book to be featured with their book club. The writer is struck by your work. His or her praise is extensive and specific. They quote passages. They want to promote your book to anything from a small group to a Good Reads group with hundreds of passionate readers—all of them fake AI-generated personas. The endgame is a “spotlight fee,” “coordination fee,” or “contribution fee” of anywhere from a hundred to several hundred dollars, in exchange for an adoption by a book club that does not exist. One wanted to develop a reader’s guide, questions for their discussion. For a fee. Legitimate book clubs do not charge authors to be read.
The Goodreads / Amazon Visibility Scam.
A marketing professional—sometimes impersonating a real, named publicist—writes to tell you that your book deserves more readers than it is reaching, and offers to optimize your presence on Goodreads, Amazon, or other retail platforms. The initial pitch is free. The fee arrives shortly afterward, in exchange for services that will do nothing.
The Private Review Community.
The sender has access to readers who will engage with your book and leave reviews. What is asked of you in return is a “reader tip” or access fee. Nope. There are no readers.
The Promotional Video / Media Package Scam.
A producer or media company offers to create a book trailer or promotional video. Sometimes this arrives via social media rather than email. A fee is charged for production. Nothing is produced, or what is produced is worthless.
The SEO / Discoverability Package.
A detailed, professional-looking proposal arrives outlining strategies to improve your book’s searchability and online presence. It is an AI-generated document that any writer could produce themselves in an afternoon. The fee for it can run into the hundreds of dollars.
The Hollywood Scout.
Someone claiming to represent film or television interests has read your book and sees adaptation potential. They need a screenplay treatment, a cinematic pitch document, or a trailer—for a fee—before they can take it further. This inverts how the industry actually works: when a producer is genuinely interested in optioning your book, they pay you. They do not ask you to pay them.
FOR QUERYING AND PRE-PUBLISHED WRITERS
The Fake Literary Agent.
An agent—sometimes with a convincing name and website, sometimes impersonating a real agent at a legitimate agency—expresses interest in your manuscript and requests a submission. You’re particularly vulnerable if you’re in the process of sending out queries. Reading fees or handling fees are then charged. Real agents earn their living exclusively from commission on sales, typically fifteen percent. They never charge to read your work. If an agent asks for money before offering representation, stop.
The Agent-to-Editor Pipeline.
A more elaborate version of the above. The fake agent expresses enthusiasm for your manuscript but tells you it needs professional editing before they can submit it to publishers. They refer you to an editor—also fake, also part of the operation—who charges hundreds to thousands of dollars for services. The red flag is that this agent is unsolicited. If you have queried an agent from a known house, and they are responding to your query and recommend an editor, that can be real and helpful. If they have found you, rather than the other way around, beware.
The Major Publisher Impersonation.
An editor at a named, real publishing house contacts you about your manuscript. The email domain is slightly off—a single transposed letter, a hyphen that shouldn’t be there—but the name is genuine, borrowed from the real editor’s public profile. The conversation proceeds warmly until the moment a fee is introduced for editorial assessment, manuscript preparation, or query letter refinement.
A Famous Author as a New Penpal and Mentor.
You receive an email from a well-known author—Suzanne Collins, Ian McEwan, Barbara Kingsolver, a name you recognize and respect, maybe even adore—who writes as though they’ve come across something you’ve written and, as a fellow writer, is seeking connection or to mentor you. Eventually, they mention they have a wonderful agent or publisher they’d like to introduce you to. The scammer controls both email addresses. The famous author and the agent they recommend are both fictional, or real and have no clue this is going on.
The Professional Organization Impersonation.
Fake entities impersonating the Authors Guild, literary agencies, and professional bodies have been documented. They approach querying writers with offers of manuscript assessment, acquisition interest, or membership benefits—all requiring a fee.
The data surface is larger than you realize. Everything public is harvestable: your author website and bio, any literary journal in which your work has appeared, the contributor note you wrote for an anthology, your QueryTracker or Manuscript Wishlist profile, your conference attendee listing, your social media presence—particularly anywhere you have discussed your manuscript or your themes. A genre, a rough premise, a writing history, and a name is enough for AI to generate a letter that feels intimate and specific.
Writers who haven’t published aren’t invisible. Anyone with an online footprint related to their writing is a potential target.
HOW TO PROTECT YOURSELF
The common wisdom used to be that if you’re paying them, it’s a scam. They, agents, film options, pay you. Or they read your book in their book group without a fee.
It’s gotten fuzzier because hybrid publishing, in which authors share production costs with a press, has earned a legitimate foothold. For many writers it now represents a viable—sometimes the only—path to publication. Reputable agents do sometimes refer clients to free-lance editors, and a great many manuscripts genuinely benefit from that intervention before submission. Payment in the writing world is not, by itself, a red flag.
The red flag is unsolicited contact. A legitimate agent, publisher, or opportunity does not approach you out of nowhere and work their way toward a fee. If you did not initiate the conversation, treat it as a scam until you have independently verified otherwise. Know that some can be quite patient and establish a relationship before the money request comes up. Remember, they create these letters in seconds. Best practice is Do Not Reply.
Even on the alert for all of this, I’ve gone through a few exchanges with what initially seemed legitimate, a small book club for instance, or organizations I knew to be real, names googled for authenticity, at the last minute, the email address flipped to suspicious and Nigerian.
A letter that knows your work is no longer proof that a human read it. Judge the contact by what it asks of you, not by how well it sees you. It’s a heartbreaking lesson.
Report what you receive. The Authors Guild maintains a scam alert page and welcomes reports from members. Writer Beware, run by Victoria Strauss and sponsored by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, is the most comprehensive ongoing documentation of these schemes and should be a regular resource. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) accepts reports that can contribute to formal investigations.
authorsguild.org/resource/publishing-scam-alerts
To have your work seen clearly by a stranger on its own merits—that is not a small thing. There’s a cruel, emotional cost to having intimacy faked, to discovering that the letter which felt like arrival was generated by a machine in the service of fraud. Your work deserves the real thing. Don’t let anyone sell you a simulation.
D M Gordon’s poetry collection, Nightly, At the Institute of the Possible, was a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award. As editor at Hedgerow Books, she midwifed eleven books of poetry into being, several of which were short-listed for national awards. She’s most proud of a decade-long, weekly walk-in public poetry discussion for Forbes Library, where she was the inaugural Writer in Residence. Short works in multiple genres have been published everywhere from The Cincinnati Review to SWWIM. She also wrote and helped produce The Good News, a weekly newsletter supporting political candidates campaigning for the environment and social justice. Recent and upcoming publications include Loosestrife for Porcupines, a Blue Light Book Award finalist; and two novels from Sibylline Press: Gabriel, about a lost boy in British Columbia (2027), and Edda, a prequel about his grandmother, a sex worker in WWII Seattle (2028).