Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here. Last fall I posted about an online scam trying to trick me into taking advantage of a wonderful promotional opportunity for one of my books. Since then such offers have proliferated. I get at least three or four similar emails a day at each of my email addresses, although they are indiscriminate about which name is listed as the author of the book in question. It isn’t just me receiving these solicitations, either. Every writer I know has been spammed relentlessly.
These AI generated come-ons are pretty easy to spot. They come from unfamiliar or weird names and claim to represent a book club, or thousands of avid readers willing to review the book, or some other large writer-friendly-sounding group. They praise the title they’ve chosen to target so lavishly that some recipients have been seriously tempted to pull out a quote to use in cover copy. They seem to know something about the characters in the book they mention but, tellingly, are ignorant of other, easily found information about the targeted author. They are unaware, for example, that the title they want me to let them promote is one of more than seventy books by me that are currently available for readers to buy.
That said, I almost fell for one recent email I found in my spam folder. This one was a little different from the norm and there is even a minuscule chance that it might still turn out to be legitimate. Several clues in the text, however, make me 99.9% certain this is just another scam.
Clue one: The email claims to be from the editorial director (using her real name) of a real publishing house, but the sender used a gmail.com return address. As it happens, I had a three-books series published by this company. All my correspondence with them, most recently concerning the return of my rights to those books after the term of the contract expired, went to .com email addresses in which the .com was the name of the publishing house.
Clue two: The sender claims to be reading a title I wrote as Kathy and addressed me as Kathy but sent the email to Kaitlyn’s email addy
Clue three: the details this person included by way of introducing herself came right out of the real editor’s bio at the publishing house’s website but were not something a real editor would be likely to include in a business letter. In fact, it would be very odd for an editor to approach a writer in this way at all.
Clue four: She signed herself “Warmly” with her first name and no signature line. Again, editors do not typically contact writers this way.
Clue five: She claims to have been reading one of my books and after telling me what she “absolutely loved” about it, she writes that she’d “genuinely love to connect and hear what you’re working on next.” Again, not a professional approach. But wait—there’s more. The book she claims to be reading is one of the three her company published. It came out in 2016 and rights reverted in 2025. Not only that, but shortly after the real editorial director took the job at this publisher in 2024, she expressed an interest through my agent in seeing of another book in that series from me. That is the way editors solicit submissions, although it is pretty rare for them to solicit them at all. I had my agent tell her I wasn’t interested in writing a fourth book in the series. Less than two years later, surely the real editorial director would remember that exchange.
Yes, indeed, AI scammers are still at it, and they are getting more creative all the time.
Here’s a question for those readers who have received similar emails: what is your most frequent reaction? Do you laugh it off. Feel annoyed? Angry? Or do you end up kicking yourself for almost falling for it?
If you want to read my earlier post, you can follow this link:
https://mainecrimewriters.com/2025/09/16/how-to-spot-a-scam-writers-edition/
Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett has had sixty-four books traditionally published and has self published others. She won the Agatha Award and was an Anthony and Macavity finalist for best mystery nonfiction of 2008 for How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries and was an Agatha Award finalist in 2015 in the best mystery short story category. In 2023 she won the Lea Wait Award for “excellence and achievement” from the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. She was the Malice Domestic Guest of Honor in 2014. She is currently working on creating new editions of her backlist titles. Her website is www.KathyLynnEmerson.com.
Thank you for writing about this problem. It is real. I got two such contacts over the past week. I am a short story writer and I have been inquiring about ways to self publish three books. It got in the winter wind and two such publishers contacted me via email and one used a phone message and text message system. Sad to live in such times. I hate passwords and scammers. Being 72 every cheat thinks I am not suspicious. I am a native Mainer. I trust no one.
You’re welcome. I don’t trust most emails from people I don’t know, but on the assumption that a real reader might actually be writing to me about one of my books, I check what’s in my spam folder regularly. This one was tricky–real person’s name but obviously not really her.
Great post. Yes, I get these, they take various forms. After contacting me, one of them wrote a 5 star review of one of my books. I checked the writer’s goodreads profile and she had posted more than 50 reviews that same day.
Interesting. Nice to get the review, though. Once upon a time, Amazon used to weed something like this out, claiming the reviewer must be a “friend” of the reviewee.
Oh yes. I definitely plan to use their lavish praise for ad copy. Why not? The latest wrinkle is that I get ads addressing other authors about their books. AI screws up? Those of us who have been in the trenches for decades might wish these were true but as I’ve told my students for years: no one is ever going to know on your door and ask to publish your book. The same is true for marketing it.
Kate
I recently got one addressed to dear [insert name here]
I was extremely suspicious when one such letter confused me with an author named Bill Shakespeare. Almost as dumb and a lot more frequent are the ones addresses to Songthresher and warn me that my Icloud/McaFee/’fill in the blank’ subscription has expired and I’ll lose everything.
I particularly like the ones saying my mailbox is outdated and will be taken down in x-days time unless I update my information. These claim to be from my email provider. The return address (usually visible if you pretend you’re going to print the email or, failing, that reply to it, although of course I’m not really going to do either) is always something totally unrelated to Spectrum or Roadrunner. I must have gotten over a hundred of these, all with different shut down dates, over the last few months.
I get half a dozen of these a day. Invariably, they’re constructed from my Amazon book summaries, so identification is easy. I just look for a fact that could only have come from an actual read of the book. So far, I’ve never found one.
Good plan.
The really crazy part is winnowing out the few (and there are a few) real inquiries. It’d be so much easier to just delete them all. (Though it is nice to know that Elena Ferrante likes my writing!)
Yes, that is a problem, especially the ones that have a one sentence message like “I just wanted to tell you I like your books.” No signature. No title. I assume that’s a real reader, but I have no idea what to reply, so those get deleted too.
Lee Goldberg has some outrageous responses to the emails he has gotten. He strings them along when they respond then publishes it on his blog as a warning to others.
karen94066 at aol.com
Good for him. I just get annoyed and delete.