Scammers, Scammers Everywhere
If you’ve been in the writerly world for more than five minutes, and especially if you’ve set up a social media platform of any kind for your writing, then I’m sure you’ve come across vanity presses. This is a scam going back at least a decade, in which a company masquerading as a publishing house reaches out to unsuspecting and often unpublished authors, offering to publish their book for them. Like traditional publishers, vanity presses offer to handle everything that goes into publishing the book, like editing, cover design, and some marketing. Unlike trad publishers, however, vanity presses ask the author to pay to publish. The price tag is often thousands of dollars, and in the worst cases the vanity press never publishes the author’s work – they just take the money and run. In other cases, the vanity press publishes the book, but with slipshod editing, mediocre cover design, and no real marketing.
Any way you slice it, vanity presses are scams – they do the same things an author could do themselves (for less money) if they self-published a book. And while they may give an author an ego boost by telling them how wonderful their book is and how it’s destined for greatness, guess what? Vanity presses tell everyone that. They accept any book that’s submitted to them for publication as long as the client pays up, unlike trad publishers who are very choosy. A vanity press makes money off the author, not the author’s book selling well, so they don’t care if it’s good or not. They already got paid.
But it seems like the old vanity press scam has been evolving in recent years. There’s now an offshoot, which I guess we’ll call the Marketing Agency Fake Author Scam. So, the way this one works is, you’re on social media, minding your business, and you get a DM. The name on the person’s profile is that of a mid-list author (the scammers seem to be smart enough not to pose as household names. I’d be a lot more suspicious if Stephen King or George R.R. Martin were contacting me on Facebook.) The author is someone whose name you have to look up, but when you do, you see they’re very successful with lots of good reviews on Amazon. This author inevitably opens with something like “I came across your profile and I was so impressed with you! I just had to reach out. I’d love to talk with you about your writing journey.”
Like vanity presses, this scammer is hoping the dopamine hit to your ego stops you from thinking critically. “A higher profile author found ME on social media and they’re impressed? And they want to chat? This is my big break!” Of course, stopping to think about it for a minute brings up the inevitable questions. Why is this author taking time out of their busy day to look through obscure author accounts on Instagram? What could they possibly pick my brain about, when they’re more experienced and successful? Most importantly, what are they so impressed with? I had these so-called authors reaching out to me before I was even published – there was nothing to impress anyone with back then.
There was no doubt in my mind that the person who contacted me wasn’t the real deal, but I checked her “profile” just for fun. This YA author who seems to specialize in fairy tale retellings, who was an editor’s pick with thousands of reviews on Amazon, somehow had like 900 followers. This absurdly low number was coupled with the profile having nothing but pixellated images of the author’s book covers and her author photo. It was clearly a hastily thrown together profile that was in no way professional.
I’d recommend just blocking these people and moving on, but I’ll admit I engaged the scammer the first time this happened to see where it would go. The “picking my brain” they mentioned about my author journey consisted of asking me a few generic questions, such as “What inspires you? My family inspires me to write.” Eventually the pitch came – this person wanted me to use their marketing company to propel me to the next level of my career.
I took a look at the so-called marketing agency’s website. It was like a bigger, better vanity press, promising to get me thousands of followers and make me a household name. They even had pictures of all the books they’ve worked with in the past – literally every one was an AI-generated cover and random title name. None of the books were real when I tried to search them.
All this to say, don’t waste hours going down a rabbit hole like I did. 99 times out of 100, if someone DMs you first and you don’t know them, they’re trying to scam you somehow. And be wary of those who try to butter you up with empty praise.
