Recently, I was contacted by a “book marketing service.” The woman who contacted me (well, the photo on her Google account was a woman anyway) said many wonderful things about my book We Own the Sky, and she said quite a few flattering things about how much potential she thought The Muse Chronicles had and that they could reach a lot of new readers if I put some effort into marketing them.
This was already something I knew. I spent a great deal of time in the past trying to market my independently published titles, but ever since I got a day job that felt more like a career to me than just a “job” in late 2022, I have barely put any money, time, or effort into marketing my books.
It did occur to me that AI could have helped her put together everything she had to say about my book, or she could even have come up with her remarks by reading all of the reviews for my book on Amazon, but she had some great marketing ideas.
I went back and forth with her several times over email, not thinking it was weird that she always wrote me back IMMEDIATELY, even on weekends or holidays, not thinking it was weird that she never gave me a company name, not even checking her email address (which was gmail!). It wasn't until she refused to send me an invoice and she requested multiple times for me to send a payment as “friends and family” on PayPal to another gmail address that I realized it was probably a scam.
Although this episode was embarrassing, it did inspire me to revisit my indie titles. I've been working so hard on querying literary agents about my newest women's fiction novel--a genre that I believe does better in traditional publishing--and starting a new nonfiction book about journaling that I have barely even thought of my indie books in years.
I wanted to write a blog post about this because people get scammed every day. Actually scammed when they give up money that they never see again. Scammers are getting better and better at disguising themselves, creating email addresses and websites that look legit or even creating Google Ads that make them look like real companies. Google usually takes these down, but by the time they take them down, it's possible they have already gotten some people to fall for it.
We all get embarrassed when we fall for these things, but it happens to everyone. Unless you literally question every interaction you have throughout the day, and most of us just aren't that skeptical.
I wanted to tell you about my experience so those of you who've recently fallen for something like this will not be embarrassed. Sometimes these things happen to us so that we can learn valuable lessons and pay attention to areas of our lives we need to pay more attention to.
So the next time you start to fall for something like this--hopefully you won't get to the point where you actually lose money--ask yourself if there's a reason you wanted to believe something you knew was probably too good to be true. This is why these kind of scams tend to work on indie authors. Because it takes so much work to constantly market your books, and sometimes it's nice to believe someone would reach out and offer to help you with marketing. But now that I've realized this, expect me to do more to market my indie books.