The Writer's Demise

A Full Spam Folder, Autofilled Every Day

I’m taking a break from reading my spam.

Or I should say, “my scammers”.

Every day, my spam folder fills up with scammer spam. There have been 331 in my Spam folder during the last 30 days.

Half of them promise me big book sales if I let them feature me in their book club. Operative words: Book Club. They don’t have a book club. They’re impersonating a real book club with 1000+ members. Operative words: 1000+ members.

The other half of the scammer spammers have written a 3000+ word treatise on how they’re going to make me famous if I let them promote my book. Operative word: promote.

Yes, I understand that a newly-published writer needs help with promotion and a good promoter must be paid. Fair enough. But how does one choose?

In my case, I chose the one book promoter who did not appear in my spam folder. He’s working on my promotion as we speak.

So how do we weed out the scammers from the real book clubs and book promoters?

Carefully.

It requires hours of searching and carefully checking the email addresses of the impersonaters vs. the real thing. Usually the impersonators of book clubs have a gmail address with a couple of extra letters tossed into a copy of the real book club’s email address.

I almost forgot to mention the impersonators of Publishers! If you go to the page of most any famous Senior Editor at a famous Book Group, you’ll find that there’s a warning, letting you know that there are currently impersonators out there trying to trick writers into believing that Mr. or Ms Senior Editor thinks you’re the next big thing. As in, the NY-Times-Book-List Big Thing. Incredible.

I could write another book in the time that it takes to separate the weeds from the blooms.

But this is Reality. Capital R. It began as soon as my memoir, The Girl with the Black and Blue Doll, got a smidgeon of traction. They came out of the woodwork, pushing and shoving to get to their place in my spam folder.

Do I sound like I’m complaining? Yeah. I am. Sorry.

Seriously, it’s like wearing a sign that says “Kick Me!”

Do me a favor and visit my Goodreads page. And visit my Goodreads REVIEWs page too. There are two pages of reviews.

As an official Goodreads author, my page has places where we can have a conversation, and you can ask me questions. Go ahead and try it.

There’s also a link to buy my book.

Here on Substack, I publish a chapter every Sunday, so subscribing to my Substack has that benefit, besides these witty little pieces written when I’m dead tired from facing down the scammers.
Cheers!