The Nigerian book club scammers who harass me daily have consistently gotten meaner in response to my lack of response. I usually don’t even open their emails, but today I got curious. However, my lack of response is exactly what I explicitly state that I will do. This communications policy is printed on numerous places on my website.
Had they actually read it instead of just scraping my email address, they would know that I don’t respond to monetary requests from total strangers. Politeness is a key part of customer service, so I’m certainly not going to engage with someone being downright rude towards me let alone purchase a service from them.
Yesterday I received a gigantic wall of word salad from “Mrs. Ruth D. Smith.” This one was a gem… The email regurgitated personal details about my life story and portions of my film and poetry resume in sentence fragments and largely incoherent statements.
The email suggests utter shock that an accomplished municipal poet laureate with a poem on the moon such as myself would only have one single star rating on any of my titles. “Because you’re D.L. Lang.” Yes, dammit, I am D.L. Lang, and news flash she doesn’t really care that “They’re finding your 300+ readings in real life, but not your Amazon page.” Ironically, the fact that I receive messages from hundreds of scammers about my books and referencing Amazon means people around the world are finding me quite easily.
She calls Amazon a “poetry graveyard,” claiming to have found my book on a list between two books that don’t even really exist (likely an AI hallucination). But have no fear! Her untitled Discord bot farm book club is just the thing to supposedly resurrect my book ranking from the dead.
If my parents made a list of my top 100 flaws from their point of view after 4 decades of experience as my parents, I would bet you with 100% certainty that not having enough online reviews would be no where on it. My parents and spouse have read my books and even tried to leave me reviews, but Amazon is very strict about filtering out reviews from friends and family, and playing review games is against their TOS, so no reviews is better than fake, inflated review counts that mislead people.
What Ruth’s email correctly points out is that there is a disconnect between profit and being widely recognized for my art in the real world with proclamations, county fair awards, performance invitations, and press articles, but that should go to show everyone that fame does not always equal wealth, and that online presence should not be the only arena where writers promote their art. Assuming a writer is wealthy just because they are published shows a broad lack of understanding about the economic realities of being a writer.
People are buying my books from a variety of retailers. Writers are currently up against corporate boycotts from well-intentioned citizens as well as inflation and tariffs causing the general cost of living to go up, leaving most working class people without the disposable income to purchase new books at retail price in the first place. When everything else is more expensive, entertainment budgets are among the first to take a hit.
Most of my income is going towards bills that keep a roof over my head, so I have no budget to invest in a “private community of 2,000 real readers.” Real or imagined, that just isn’t how book clubs work. If a book club is interested in my book, they would ask their individual members to purchase copies from a local bookstore or online retailer instead of reaching out to me directly and expect a payment on top of discounted books.
The confusing part about this is that for the past five years I was giving my ebooks away for free on platforms worldwide. All of these personal requests for a free or discounted book are a waste of my time when all the readers had to do was search their favorite ebook service for my name and download the book.
So what to do about this conundrum? I had already removed my email address from my site, and replaced it with a form only to receive similar messages via the contact form. I installed plugins that were supposed to block scraping by bots and AI. I blocked individual IP addresses that trace back to Lagos, Nigeria. I have now upgraded my website security plugin to be able to block the entire country of Nigeria.
However, I’m pretty sure the book scammers are just passing my email address betwixt themselves because I once responded that an anthology was not my book and to please unsubscribe me. I suppose the scammers could also use a VPN and still access my website, but I’m still optimistic that it will cut down on the majority of new messages.
I sincerely apologize to any Nigerians who were genuinely trying to access my site. You are not at fault for the actions of your fellow countrymen. I am merely trying to protect myself. I recognize the economic hardships caused by imperialism have lead many otherwise decent young people down this road just to survive, so it’s nothing personal.