I’ve started deleting any emails that have my book titles in the subject and assuming they are spam. Every once in a while I open a few up just for kicks. I often find them entertaining, but not worth a response.
Nearly every day now I receive word salad praising Tea & Sprockets or some other years old collection of mine. The only problem is that the recent sales numbers don’t match the hundreds of emails saying they recently read my manuscript. They flat out plagiarize the book description in their emails and use vague language that could describe pretty much any poetry book without referring to any specific poems contained therein. Therefore, I know immediately that the sender has not read the book.
I received some today that differed from the usual book club or review swapping invitations. One was imitating a well established writers festival in Australia, and asking that I pay them a fee to participate virtually, which is the tell that it is a scam and not a real performance opportunity. Their email address misspelled the word festival, and it did not match the festival’s public contact information. The actual festival they were imitating does not hold virtual events nor does it feature any non-Australian authors. The odds of them being interested in me are slim to none.
The next was an invitation from a publisher to republish one of my titles on their small press out of England. It was imitating a legitimate publisher’s representative with a fake email address not listed anywhere in connection with the actual publisher. It used the phrase “the breadth of the collection” similar to a previous scam email about a different book of mine sent by a jibberish name with no online search presence. If I wanted my collection to be traditionally published, I would submit it directly through the proper channels. In looking this publisher up, their submissions page returned a 404 error, so I can safely assume they aren’t accepting unsolicited submissions right now. The emails also wanted to know if I had a literary agent. In most publishing advice I’ve read, poets are not encouraged to get literary agents unless they’ve already got an extensive following and income, so it’s very uncommon for someone at my level of fame to have one.
The third was referring to the poet laureate anthology that I edited, lamenting its lack of reviews. Usually, the spam emails reach out to me praising anthologies that I am in, mistaking me for the publisher. This is unique in that they actually chose to focus on one that I edited. This anthology was created for a special anniversary event that took place well over a year ago. The 100 printed copies that do exist were sold directly to locals or donated to local organizations in 2025. While the book is listed online, most copies were not sold through an online platform, and readers are unlikely to leave reviews there since they did not buy it online. The email’s author acts like they’ve read the anthology, but rather than naming any specifics of the poetry focuses on the word “unity” referenced in the title. They claim it is a complete factual record of the program, but then they get simple facts wrong about who the current poet laureate is.
I can tell that my contact information is being scraped from my Amazon author page since the emails almost never references titles that aren’t being sold through that retailer. The senders often can’t even bother to get the facts right, so it’s easy to spot the scams. When they do get the facts right, phrases are openly copy pasted from Wikipedia, regurgitating my entire life story at me replete with flowery compliments pulled directly from the thesaurus. The emails are so tediously long and filled with information irrelevant to whatever gimmick they are trying to promote. They often reference a specific book of mine, but they never get into the actual book’s content.
Artificial intelligence has actually made the scammers easier to detect if you know what you are looking for. As I demonstrated in my post You Cannot Trust the Robots to Tell You the Truth AI is not a reliable source for information on an author’s career. If you’re researching an author, go directly to their official website and legitimate press. The margin of human error is much less than AI’s hallucinations.
For a recent example, I was googling the Benicia Poet Laureate program the other day. The overview it gave me was factually incorrect in many regards. It put the wrong name as current poet laureate and photo of a different poet representing her. Even worse, it completely hallucinated a poet named “Sue Rosen.” Then much to my surprise, it stated that I had served from 2009 to 2010. I didn’t even live in Solano County nor performed until 2014, and I’ve never lived in Benicia let alone served as that community’s laureate!
Always, always fact check, read the source material directly, or better yet just skip over the AI overview entirely. AI is like an unprepared teenager completing an essay question–if it doesn’t know the answer, it spouts out pure BS!
So to reiterate what past posts have said, I am not looking to publish my work differently, I will not pay to perform, I will not pay to artificially inflate my review numbers, I’m not looking for someone to redesign my website, and your AI generated praise is worse and even less believable than the worst pick up lines.