I set a trap for a book-marketing scammer (2025)

This is the story of a traditionally published sci-fi author who received more than fifty scam book-marketing pitches in thirty-three days, all hoping to prey on his desperation to sell books and net his next publishing deal.

It’s also the story of a plucky, persistent, puzzled AI named Veronica and a scammer who steals real authors’ identities in order to get their marks’ guards down.

But mostly, it’s the story of what happens when an entire industry is drowning, and the people holding out life preservers are running a con.

The wave began with Mercy Gold (which is a great name for a werewolf hunter or demon slayer, BTW).

“Hello,” her email started. “You’ve already laid a great foundation with your blurb and keywords that’s a strong start.”

A compliment sandwich, I know them well. You’re doing great, BUT there’s a problem you didn’t know you had. She offered to help me manage “light social presence and simple email marketing” to keep my book “in front of real readers.” Would I be open to seeing how this could support my “author journey”?

The email came from mercygold7400@gmail.com. Not a company domain. Not a professional address. Just a numbered Gmail account.

Two days later, another pitch arrived. Then another. By the end of October, I’d received seven. In the first three weeks of November, I got twenty-three more.

Isaac Michael, offering Pinterest and Goodreads strategies

Halfdaytravel, promising TikTok features at 1:28 in the morning

Pratibha Malav, with a price list for paid reviews across multiple platforms

Janet, pitching websites and cinematic trailers

Someone claiming to be “Dr. Sandra Maria Anderson” using the email address abbyamazonalirah@gmail.com

Some offered video production, others social media management, still others Amazon optimization or Google indexing services. They all shared generic Gmail addresses, vague promises of increased visibility, and an understanding that I was anxious about my books finding readers.

They were 100-percent right about the anxiety, and that’s what makes them dangerous. The economics of traditional publishing are brutal right now, especially for mid-list (and lower) writers.

My actual royalties per book sold (assuming they’ve earned out and I get, ya know, actual royalties):

Audiobook: roughly $1.30-5.00 (depending on format and territory)

If someone charges me $500 for marketing services, I’d need to sell as many as 2,000 additional copies just to break even. Publishers have PR teams, media contacts, co-op placement deals with retailers, and marketing budgets. If Angry Robot, with all those resources, couldn’t get my book onto certain Pinterest boards or Goodreads lists, what makes a freelancer with a Gmail account believe their strategy will work?

The truth is, they don’t believe it will. They believe I might believe it will.

Books ARE harder to discover than they used to be. Algorithms DO matter. Readers ARE out there, somewhere, not finding my work. And, when the next pitch arrives—probably tomorrow or right now—some part of me will wonder: what if?

To understand why these scams are proliferating, look at what’s happening to the industry. More books are being published than ever before (self-publishing explosion plus traditional publishers desperate for revenue), while readership is declining (fewer readers, less reading time, more competition from other media). The result is the average book sells fewer copies than it used to.

Authors are desperate because books aren’t selling, traditional marketing isn’t working, and publishers are offering less support per title. We’re feeling pretty helpless about our career trajectories, watching sales numbers decline while wondering what we’re doing wrong.

Meanwhile, publishers are desperate because the mid-list is dying, there are fewer breakouts, and they can’t afford to market every title the way they used to. They tell authors there’s nothing more they can do, leaving us to wonder if we should be doing something ourselves.

Scammers see opportunity in this desperation. There are more anxious authors than ever before, each one a potential customer. The market is growing (more books = more targets) while competition for attention intensifies. It’s the perfect environment to scale up operations using AI and automation.

That’s why the Summer and Fall of 2025 saw an explosion of these pitches. Summer sales numbers were bad across the industry. Publishers quietly told authors they weren’t picking up next options. Industry articles about the “publishing crisis” circulated widely. The anxiety peaked just as the Q4 season began, and the scammers launched coordinated campaigns targeting authors most likely to be feeling desperate.

In recent articles, Victoria Strauss, co-founder of Writer Beware (the industry watchdog that protects authors from scams , sponsored by Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association), has confirmed what I was experiencing wasn’t isolated. She’s been tracking the same wave since June 2025, tracing it to operations in Nigeria using AI to generate personalized pitches at scale. The scams, she wrote, had ramped up faster than any fraud in her decades of experience.

Five, count-em, five book marketing pitches in my inbox. One had arrived at 1:22am while I slept, from someone called “Green Link” promising to feature my book in “active reading communities” through “real organic [Hence the Green? Or am I the Greene?] no ads, just real engagement.” Another came at 9:48am from Sylvester Josh, offering 3D cinematic book trailers. By afternoon, I’d been pitched TikTok features, paid reviews that violated Amazon’s policies, and Amazon optimization services for problems I didn’t have.

A sixth pitch arrived that day but was caught by Gmail’s spam filter—someone claiming to be “Dr. Sandra Maria Anderson” using an email address that didn’t match the name at all.

Nov. 3 was a preview. Over the next three weeks, the pitches would arrive almost daily, sometimes multiple times per day, from senders with names like Mercy Goldcrown (when plain Gold isn’t enough), Naphy Expertt, Ophelia, Bella, Emmanuel, Evelyn, and KAMBIO.

They offered every service imaginable. The prices ranged from $20 to “contact me for [a] quote.” They all claimed to have “real readers,” “active communities,” and “organic engagement.” None provided portfolios, case studies, or verifiable results.

Gmail’s SPAM filter had been fighting for me, catching roughly two out of every three pitches. But that still meant dozens were getting through.

Between October 18 and November 20—just thirty-three days—I documented at least fifty-one pitches. The real number was probably higher. Some I’d deleted without recording. Some had been auto-deleted from spam after thirty days. Some I’d forgotten about before I started keeping systematic track.

I wasn’t being marketed to. I was being carpet-bombed.

Self-published authors face an even more intense version of this siege. With higher per-book royalties (often $2-7 per ebook versus my $0.25-0.40) and direct control over their Amazon pages, they’re more tempting targets—and the math looks just plausible enough to be dangerous. “If I make $3 per book and sell 200 extra copies, that’s $600!” But they still need to sell those 200 ADDITIONAL copies directly attributable to the service, and fake Pinterest boards don’t work any better for self-pub than they do for traditional publishing.

Self-pub authors are also more vulnerable because they’re responsible for everything: cover design, formatting, distribution, marketing. When someone offers to handle “just the marketing part,” it’s tempting. They have no publisher to shield them, no agent to offer advice, no industry contacts to warn them away.

Victoria Strauss (Writer Beware) has noted that earlier waves of publishing scams—from the Philippines and Pakistan—focused almost exclusively on self-published authors. The Nigerian operations are different: they target everyone with a published book, regardless of how it got there.

On Oct. 28, someone named Isaac Michael sent me seven messages in a single day, each one arriving within hours despite my repeated, polite “no thank you” responses. He’d promised to optimize my “visibility window”—I had exactly sixty days before the algorithm reset, he claimed. He’d already mapped the strategy: 12 Pinterest boards, 8 Goodreads lists, full sequencing. He cited specific boards: “Retro Sci-Fi Worlds” with 18K+ saves, “Alien First Contact Stories” with 12K+ saves.

His response speed suggested AI assistance. The pressure tactics suggested desperation. The numbered Gmail account (isaacmichael0181@gmail.com) suggested the same operation I was seeing everywhere else. (He also tried to convince me to spend all this money on the second book of a duology, which made no fucking sense.)

I finally ignored Isaac. But on Nov. 13, the same playbook returned with a new sender.

“Hey Robert,” Veronica Emmanuel began, “I’ve been digging into Six Plays and noticed a couple of big missed opportunities.”