As a writer I easily to fall into the trap of considering ambition to be a part of my job description: Naturally all of us want more readers, more reviews, more visibility. As a result, an offer promising these things can feel irresistible.
Recently I received an e-mail from the Austin Readers Collective offering highly desirable publicity for my third book of poems, Incomplete Strangers (Lost Horse Press, 2013). I was both surprised and disappointed that they had chosen this book and not my most recent one, but those feelings quickly passed—I was just glad they were interested in any book at all. The e-mail began with a description of the book that had all the hyperbole of a contemporary back-cover blurb, but it still manageed to describe fairly well the collection and its themes, and it was accurate in nearly all its details. The description concluded that my poetry “opens space for conversation about recognition, return, and the lifelong practice of making meaning without illusion.” The offer was to “spotlight” my book. The 3,000-plus members of the Austin Readers Collective would be invited, through multiple appeals, to participate in online book group discussions guided by questions provided by the organizers, including the person who contacted me, Daniela Valadez, the Collective’s codirector.
Tell me my book is brilliant and timely, and you have my attention, especially if you show some signs that you’ve read it thoughtfully. Tell me further that you will present the book to more than 3,000 people with your endorsement—and offer them the chance to participate in a book group organized as I would organize my own classes during my time teaching at the University of Washington—and you may own me for life. Wouldn’t it be worth the $310 they requested—not a pay-to-play, Daniela said, but more like earnest money: “a commitment that allows us to thoughtfully steward the feature [my book] covering curation, moderation, programming coordination, and dedicated promotional placement within our community.” She went on to say that the money “also ensures that each Spotlight receives the focused time, care, and accountability it deserves.” I did the math in my head: I would be spending ten cents to reach each reader on the Collective’s list. And at the end, twenty to fifty readers would gather in a discussion group, and each of them would know my book well enough to talk about it intelligently to others. Deal.
Still, I did my due diligence. Using the privacy-protecting search engine DuckDuckGo, I searched for “The Austin Readers Collective” and found nothing. No web page, no Facebook page, no LinkedIn page. I looked for Daniela Valadez and found she had no internet presence either. Why hide your light? Wouldn’t the writers whose work was featured want more visibility on the web? Wouldn’t visibility be useful both to Daniela and to the Collective? I expressed my concerns and suspicions to Daniela along with requests for further clarification of the timeline for the book discussions. Daniela’s response was that the Collective had no web presence in order to preserve the privacy of the authors and the participants.
I wanted to know which books and writers they had featured in previous Spotlights to get a sense of the kinds of work they chose, and I wanted to contact one or more of the writers to find out how the experience had been for them. Daniela’s privacy answer seemed to shut that door, but I pushed on it anyway. Might I contact one or two of the authors they had featured in the past? Daniela gave me one name: Pat Barker. I was head over heels. The Pat Barker I knew was the author of the Regeneration Trilogy, a magnificent series of historical novels—Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993), and The Ghost Road (1995). The first novel, which I found particularly compelling, is about the poet Siegfried Sassoon, victim of shell shock in WWI, and Dr. William Rivers, whose work with Sassoon develops into a new method for treating it. (The Ghost Road won the Booker Prize.) But it turned out Daniela’s Pat Barker was not my Pat Barker, and hers responded to me with an enthusiastic, thorough, and thoroughly vague letter offering superlatives in response to my questions. When I asked what book of hers had been discussed, she didn’t answer, even though I had offered the title of my own.
My next move embarrasses me, which is part of why I am writing this. Just at the moment I should have pulled the plug, I wrote to Daniela saying: Let’s move on this. After all, Barker had been positive overall. The next thing I knew I had an e-mail from Fakorede Joel Imoleayo at Upwork inviting me to sign a contract and pay $310 to hold my spot.
What saved me, ultimately, was the way the Upwork site works. I set up a profile, including a preferred method of payment, to facilitate responding to the e-mail. But I soon discovered that I had to work through the link in the e-mail and set up a new account on the platform where the contract offer would then appear. I did as instructed, but this time I didn’t enter a method of payment. Something was dawning on me. Daniela had never mentioned Upwork or Fakorede Joel Imoleayo. In separate e-mails I asked them who he was and how he was connected to the Collective. The answers were similar but not identical and didn’t really account for why someone from Nigeria was doing the work Fakorede was said to be doing. I did even more due diligence and found LinkedIn pages for Fakorede and Pat Barker. Both were blank, and both were from Nigeria. It brought to mind the old Nigerian prince e-mail scam that some of us may remember. Poking around some more, I found on Upwork one book club job Fakorede had completed and six that were in process. The one project listed as completed was identified by the author as a scam, and he was pissed that he was out $500. I let go of the dream, very disappointed.
Looking back over the initial e-mail and my subsequent interactions convinced me that the scam relied heavily on AI. Artificial intelligence could easily scrape my online presence—everything from my personal website to book reviews to teaching files still on some server at the University of Washington—to produce the initial personalized e-mail. The endless praise in the first and subsequent letters, the assurances, the solicitousness screamed AI. So did the mechanically reassuring letter from Pat Barker. In response to questions, neither Daniela nor Pat seemed able to add detail to the original version of their story.
As I was writing this essay, I received a similar offer of publicity from Nothing But Reading Challenges Partner, claiming to have another 26,000 members. While Nothing But Reading Challenges Partner does not exist, Nothing But Reading Challenges does, and has over 26,000 members. On its Facebook page, it warns: “We do not e-mail authors or publishers offering to promote books.”
AI scams have been showing up in other areas as well. A recent New York Times article warned of travel scams using fake websites, fake reviews, deepfake videos, and fake voices. Another recent article outlined how scammers are impersonating famous authors and literary nonprofits (including Poets & Writers) to take advantage of writers. AI has opened up nearly unlimited possibilities for scams, and soon everyone will be in the crosshairs.
Nevertheless, there are things we can do to protect ourselves. We can practice close reading of e-mails that contain invitations, requests, or offers and proofread them for misspellings or vague language. We can check e-mail addresses to make sure there’s nothing suspicious about the domain name. And then we can go further, researching the organization and the sender of the e-mail and, if we’re so inclined, doing a search for the organization and the word “scam.” If we’re still uncertain, we can contact the organization separately to ask about the contents of the initial e-mail.
Having taken these steps, I needed to take one more to spare myself the humiliation of being suckered. Up to the last moment, I was seeing evidence through the lens of what I wanted to be true. When I finally let the go of the fantasy, I won. Game Over.
Robert McNamara is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Abiding Time (Lynx House Press, 2024). He also co-translated The Cat Under the Stairs (Eastern Washington University Press, 2009), selected poems by the Bengali poet Sarat Kumar Mukhopadhyay. He lives in Seattle.
Thumbnail credit: Markus Winkler on Unsplash.