SPEAKER_00 0:00

And you put in a year or two years. Sometimes people put in five years writing their novel and just getting it right. And then they wonder why they only sold three copies. So you're emotionally vulnerable. And writers are perfect, a perfect target for that. We really are. Way better than a lot of people that they've tried to scam in the past.

SPEAKER_01 0:19

Welcome to the Write It Scared podcast. I'm your host, Stacey Fraser, a formerly repressed creative soul, turn fiction writer, story editor, and author accelerator certified fiction book coach. At Write It Scared, we tell the truth about why writing a novel is so hard by acknowledging that most writers grapple with two stories. The one they want to put on the page to the best of their ability, and the often subconscious internal story that prevents them from doing it. This show is designed to help you identify and rewrite the internal narrative holding you back while you discover and write the story you want to tell and learn all the tools to help you do that successfully. Join me bi-weekly for a new episode where we'll talk about writing to deepen our understanding of the craft and of ourselves as writers. Writing a novel is an inside job we do not do alone. Welcome to Write It Scared. I'm glad you're here. Let's dive in. Hi, writer. Welcome back to the Write It Scared Podcast. I'm your host, Stacy. And this is where we talk about the brave and the vulnerable act of writing our novels so that we can do it with more clarity, more confidence, and a whole lot less isolation. Today I'm joined by author and editor Rob Bignell to talk about book marketing, specifically how newer authors can protect themselves from the growing number of book marketing scams that we see targeting writers today. We talk about some of the most common scams showing up in your emails and on social media, the red flags to watch for, and what you can do to protect yourself. But then we also get into the more practical side of marketing, where to start as a new author, choosing strategies that actually fit you and your books, and building your platform a little at a time. I'll introduce you to Rob properly in just a moment, but first it's time for this week's Courage File, which comes from a writer named Carrie. And I'm going to paraphrase a little bit here. Carrie says that she started writing several months ago, kind of on a whim, after seeing a Facebook post from a friend of hers who had written and self-published their first novel. Carrie used to write when she was younger as a kid and in her early 20s. But now at 59, she found herself feeling the absence of that writing and not having written in multiple decades. So she started to write. And she says, I had four or five chapters done, joined a writing group at my library, and was feeling excited. I was finally going to write a novel. About two months into this writing journey, imposter syndrome kicked in, and I thought, who am I to write a book? I'm too old. It's too late. So I stopped. I missed one writing group and then another. And then I pouted. But Carrie says she was listening to this podcast and a few others. And there were episodes that made her realize that she shouldn't stop writing because of her age or her lack of skill. So Carrie says, I started back up and have been writing, maybe not every day, but at least three times a week and have an end goal in place to finish a novel within the year. So please keep going with the podcast. I love the stories from the authors and about their journeys and how it isn't easy for any one of us to do this. We're all feeling the same way fear, doubt, anxiety, but at least I know I'm not alone in the journey. Absolutely, Carrie. Thank you for sharing this with us. And you're 100% right. Uh, no writer is immune to feeling the fear, the doubt, the anxiety. And the important thing is we do what you did, right? We make a decision about what we want. And then after we make a decision, we take action, which is exactly what you did. So thank you for being a lovely demonstration for us. So, listener, if you have a writing win or a moment of writing courage that you want to share, I don't care how small it is. I want to hear about it. Submit your story to the Courage Files using the link in the show notes, and you'll be entered to win into our quarterly drawing for a free 10-page editorial assessment and 30-minute book coaching session with me. Okay, now let me introduce you to our guest. Rob Bignell is a longtime professional editor who owns and runs inventing reality editing services. Rob has helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at a reasonable price. He's the author of more than 80 books, including the Storytelling 101 Quick Read Series, The Seven Minutes a Day Writing Guidebooks, The Nonfiction, Best Sights to See, Hikes with Tikes, Hitting the Trail, and Heading to the Cabin Book Series, The Literary Novel Windmill, Four Children's Books, and M. Since 2011, eight of his hiking books have topped the Amazon bestseller list, and several of his short stories in the literary and science fiction genres have also been published. Rob holds a master's degree in English and a bachelor's in journalism and has taught college-level writing courses and is an award-winning publications editor and writer, having worked in the Los Angeles metro area, San Diego, as well as Palm Springs. Hi, Rob. Thank you so much for coming onto the Write It's Scared podcast. I'm excited to have you and talk about your new book, Protecting Yourself Against Book Marketing Scams, that I think you published just a couple months ago, right?

SPEAKER_00 5:34

Right. In July.

SPEAKER_01 5:36

Yeah, I read it and it is very helpful. It's concise and it definitely belongs in the pocket of any new author out there because book marketing scams, which we'll talk about today, are so prevalent, especially in our AI-infused world.

SPEAKER_00 5:51

And they're just going to increase in frequency. I hate to say that, but that's a sad reality.

SPEAKER_01 5:56

Yeah. But before we dive into that, why don't you just start off by telling us how you came to be in the industry? Because you're you're not only an editor, but you're also a writer of fiction and nonfiction and many books on different writing craft topics. So yeah, take it away. Let me know. How did you get here?

SPEAKER_00 6:15

Sure, sure. I spent most of my years, even before college, deciding I was going to be a journalist and an English major, which is kind of two different tracks. One writing for newspapers and magazines, the other writing fiction, nonfiction, and so on. Ultimately, the newspaper industry drying up in the mid-2000s. And then, of course, when the Great Recession hit, it totally collapsed. So I then had to think about what I was going to do for a living, right? And at first, I initially started by just trying to freelance myself out as an editor of the companies because I was living in the Los Angeles area. And it was lucrative to do. You could get a lot of contracts, but it turned out that you'd work for somebody for five, six weeks, finish their project, and then you'd spend them months chasing other jobs until one landed, and then you'd work there six weeks. And you were just constantly going through the cycle. And I'm like, all the money I saved during the six weeks I worked, I'm spending on the four weeks that I'm searching for jobs. And so I started kind of reaching out on the internet to social media and so on, the advertising editing services. And I got a couple of people then who contacted me and said, I have a manuscript I wrote, fiction, a couple of nonfiction ones. Would you mind editing those on the side? And so I did. And then I asked them who they were going to send it to for agents and so on. And they said, I'm just going to self-publish. Self-publishing at that time was still a vanity press thing. But there were companies like Lulu.com that had just come out. And then, of course, Amazon, through its Create Space and eventually through Kindle, Direct Publishing started opening up the self-publishing market for everybody. I just made a hard decision to switch. I'm just going to work for people, indie authors, who are trying to get their book published, mainly through Amazon on Kindle and Create Space at the time. Then that led me to also writing my books because that freed me up to instead of writing for other people, what my editor wanted me to write or my publisher wanted me to write, I could write what I wanted to write. So I started doing that, mainly hiking and guidebooks. As far as the writing guidebooks that I wrote go, as I worked with a lot of clients over the years, about two or three years into this, maybe in the mid-2010s, I started finding that indie authors had the same questions over and over again about things like how do I show and rather than tell? How do I do active voice? And how do I plot out my book? And how can I make my characters so they're not vanilla? And I started writing the same answers over and over again. So eventually I just kept them as stock answers that I could give and kind of revise a little to fit that specific India author's need. And ultimately I had so many stock answers I realized I could just kind of put these all into a book, if you will, or several books. I quickly discovered. So I just began assembling all of these into articles that I posted online for authors to read for free, and then ultimately put them into books. But I also wanted to write fiction as well. So during this time, I've written a couple of novels, a couple of children's books, a book of poetry. And right now I'm working on, I'll tell you at the end what I'm working on next because that's from our what are you doing next questions always comes at the end of the poetry.

SPEAKER_01 9:24

It does write. It does.

SPEAKER_00 9:26

Anyway, so that's how I I've come here to this point. I've worked with well over 1,200 to 1,300 authors during the last 15 to 20 years.

SPEAKER_01 9:34

I love that. I love that for you. Let's talk about the newest book that you have out Protecting Yourself Against Book Marketing Scams. Tell me what drove you to write that.

SPEAKER_00 9:45

Sure. About a year and a half ago, I began noticing something really spooky happening. And that was I was starting to get a lot of emails from people who wanted to do marketing for my book. And or any of my books. I just get random emails about a random book that I wrote, even though it maybe had been out for 10 years already or 15 years. And then sometimes it was the newest one that came out. But I began to notice that all of these emails had a lot of similarities with one another. And that there was something strange about the email. It just didn't make sense. I knew the industry, I knew how publishing works, but the way that they were describing that they were going to do marketing for my book, I knew it wouldn't work. It didn't make sense what they were doing. It sounded good, but I knew better. And so I began researching just online, reading up on are other people getting these emails and so on. And came across some really good, reputable websites like Writers Beware, which is out of the UK, the Authors Guild. And then there's some really good authors out there who've also encountered some of these problems. And that got me really curious because as I read these articles, I'm like, this is really bizarre. What's going on out there? And so on. They're scammers are deliberately aiming at authors, and they're using AI to do it. And a lot of authors are getting scammed by this. In some cases, it was only maybe $30 or $40 before the author realized something's wrong here and I need to get out of this. Sometimes it was as much as two, three hundred dollars to format a book, for example, and then it was never formatted, never returned to them. Sometimes it was $500 for a 30-second to 60-second video, but it was all AI produced and really didn't say anything about the book that anybody couldn't find on Amazon just by reading the blur. And in some cases, it was extremely large amounts. I know of one guy who lost, I know you're gonna not believe me, but it's true. He lost over $200,000. He was an elderly man, and they convinced him that he needed to buy all of these copyright licenses to get his book sold in European countries. You can imagine there's 35, 40 European countries and $1,000 a pop. It's $40,000 that he spent on licensing for copyrights. You don't need to buy a license for a copyright in any European country, not even the United States. So it's incredible the amount of money that people were willing to spend to chase this dream and then getting just scammed by crooks out there who really know what they're doing because it's the same crooks who were doing the Nigerian print scam way back when the internet started and the email started back in the 1990s. They've just evolved and gotten better at it.

SPEAKER_01 12:37

Found a new target, evolved and found a new target.

SPEAKER_00 12:40

Right. So eventually I wrote the book and and said I've got enough research material here that I really feel people need to be informed about this.

SPEAKER_01 12:47

Oh, absolutely. What's going on? I opened my my email and I have pretty strong filters, so it'll send so almost nothing gets through the cracks, really. But if I go to my spam, oh yeah. Oh my gosh. It's just it's overwhelming. And sometimes I do look there because every once in a while something legit is there. For example, I'll have somebody reach out and want to be a guest on the podcast, and my spam filter picked it up. So I peruse through there every once in a while, but I'm just floored at the amount of scammy stuff that is in there. So absolutely. And so that's that was one of the first questions I wanted to ask you about is considering there's we'll talk about the different types of marketing scams that are that are out there, but who's vulnerable and why? Sure, in your opinion.

unknown 13:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:38

The most vulnerable people are those who are unfamiliar with the publishing industry, and that's usually indie authors, and it's usually indie authors who are starting out. And so as an indie author, you usually go and publish your book, you kind of stumble through it and figure out how to do it. And sometimes it turns out really well, and you get it going, your book up for sale, and then nobody buys it. And you're wondering what's going on? How come nobody's buying my great book? And and you probably did write a really good book, too. And so you start researching and you're like, oh, my cover is not so good. So you redesign your cover and then read an article about somebody says you should get a TikTok video and get your book to go viral on TikTok. And then you're like, How do I do that? When a scammer comes along and emails you and says, Hey, I can do a TikTok video for you, or hey, I could rebrand your book for you and put a new cover on it that will is guaranteed to sell it. You tend to fall for these things. And because you're maybe new, probably are new, you don't really realize what the pricing is on it. And so you think to yourself, that's a good deal, isn't it? 50 bucks for a TikTok video or to get on TikTok. And so you go ahead and do it and you spend your $50. And then either the video never shows up or you get one, but it's horrible. It's made by AI is clearly inferior to what you were expecting to get and what you should get if you're gonna go viral on TikTok. And then that's how you get the scam. The other people who are really targeted are those who've inherited copyrights from people. So because these people have no experience writing, but they think the book they inherited should probably should sell better. So, for example, if my grandfather wrote a book about his experiences in World War II, and then he passes away, and I inherit his copyright, and let's suppose I'm uh an RN at the local hospital. I know a lot about healthcare, but I know nothing about the author industry and the writing industry and the publishing industries. And so I get this email saying that they can help me get this book to sell more. And I'm like, my grandfather wrote a great book, and that's what we need to do is market it. And I don't know why grandpa didn't do it. He was elderly, he didn't really understand the internet and the computer systems and all that kind of stuff works. So that's why I didn't sell, and now I'm gonna make my grandfather's book sell, and it's gonna be a great way to memory remember him. But because I'm an RN at the hospital and I don't know any better, I get scammed.

SPEAKER_02 16:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:08

So those are the groups they're targeting. People like you and me who who publish books or are interviewing people all the time in the publishing industry and the writing industry, we probably catch those scams right away.

SPEAKER_01 16:20

We know better and we laugh at them like sometimes there's sometimes an email slips through. And I really like what what your book references to with the emotional aspect of it, how they how these these scammers are taking advantage of and playing kind of Russian roulette with our emotions, so to speak, because we've invested all this time and energy, right? And we want it to be visible and the validation. So where I was going with that is like sometimes you'll get those ones that'll be like, I can get you in front of a big name publisher, right? Right. That kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_00 16:53

Yeah, and you put in a year or two years. Sometimes people put in five years writing their novel and just getting it right, and then they wonder why they only sold three copies. So you're emotionally vulnerable. And writers are perfect, a perfect target for that. And I mentioned that in the book explain as well the why they target authors, and we're the perfect audience for it. We really are way better than a lot of people that they've tried to scam in the past.

SPEAKER_01 17:18

Who is doing the scamming?

SPEAKER_00 17:20

Yeah, scams come from all over the place. They can be people who are in prison and just get access to computers so they're scamming. They can be people in the basement, they're their mother's basement, and they're living there, and down on their locks, they decide to scam people to make a quick little bit of money so they can get their own apartment. But the bulk, the the overwhelming bulk of these scams tend to come from three places. Most of the emails that you receive and a lot of the stuff that you see on social media, on X, Facebook, Instagram, Blue Sky as well now, tend to come from Nigeria. There are a lot of criminal organizations in Nigeria, and that and one of them, Black Axe, that organization, is responsible for the bulk of cybercrimes that have occurred that involve sending money back and forth between places. And this group isn't just in Nigeria, they have cells that are in other African countries, Kenya, for example, South Africa, but also in Europe. Interpol and Europol has cracked down on this in Europe as well. But again, they're so virulent that it's difficult for any police organization to totally crack down and stop them because as soon as they stop one cell, a new one pops up somewhere else. They do have cells in the United States as well. So the bulk of the emails you're getting and social media frauds are primarily coming from this Nigerian criminal organization. There are other criminal organizations in Nigeria that do it as well, but the bulk of them are from Black Axe. If black axe were wiped off the face of the earth tomorrow somehow, the amount of emails you would get that are scammy would be incredibly noticeable.

SPEAKER_01 19:04

But how do they obtain our emails?

SPEAKER_00 19:07

Sure. Yeah, it's easy to get emails. You get them in a couple of different ways. First, anytime you sign up for something like a newsletter and so on, you're really playing roulette with your email address, Russian roulette, because you're giving it to somebody and then they can sell that email list. Hey, here's all the people who signed up for my newsletter. And if you're a large corporation, that's worth a lot of money to people. So you can sell that, and then the black acts will legitimately go out and buy that email list. Or they'll hack it and get it. Now, one of the things that a lot of hackers do when they break into companies is not steal money, but steal email lists from people and that because then they can hit you individually rather than then try to take out down a big company's money. So they do that. The other way, especially with authors, is with AI, they can create programs that just basically scrape the web for your email address. So if your email address is out there any place at all, and you they can also find that you published a book, then bingo, they've got you because this is the recommendation for making your email address, I don't know, make it say I don't know, and or spell out the at or so it can't scrape it easily. Right, exactly. That's one approach to do. The other approach is to simply just get rid of your email address as much as you can and never use it. So you can do that in a couple of ways. First, if you've got your own website, don't ever list your email address on it instead of a contact page. Most websites have a contact page, right? And and then the other way you can think about that is if I have to sign up for things like newsletters and so on, what you can do is sign up through a secondary email address. The downside of that, of course, then is you're looking at two different emails every day and so on. But but probably the email address you sign up for the newsletter because it's not an author's name, but it's a made-up name, then that's not going to get scam emails because it doesn't match up with the name of an author on a book, which is for sale at Amazon, for example.

SPEAKER_01 21:17

That's good advice. Very smart, very smart. We'll get into talking about more ways to protect ourselves in in a few minutes, but let's talk about some of the most common book marketing scams that writers should be aware of right now, particularly for new and newer authors that are vulnerable.

SPEAKER_00 21:37

There's about 30 to 35 scams that are going on at any time, which are aimed at authors. Most of them are marketing oriented, but some of them as well are geared towards self publishing. And so a really common one for new authors that you'll get is the pretending to be a hybrid publisher. A lot of these come out of Nigeria, out of the Nigerian sales, but they also come out of Pakistan and the Philippines as well. The Philippines is where a really scammy vanity press called author Solutions moved to back in the 2000s. And they engaged in a lot of junk marketing and a lot of, hey, we'll format your book and make covers for you. But they do it on the cheap and they pay their employees cheaply. And a lot of their employees figured out what the system was because they worked for them and then went independent and just started scamming people independently like that.

SPEAKER_01 22:30

For anybody who doesn't know, let's just back up really quick and explain what a hybrid publisher is. Sure. And to my understanding, it's an independent publishing company that is subsidized by the authors. So the authors pay to either have the publishing services like the editing and the copy editing and the cover design and maybe distribution as well. And so they that's one way that company makes money. The other way is off of the book sales. So that's hybrid. Whereas traditional, the author doesn't pay anything.

SPEAKER_00 23:06

And actually, you get a payment, or in a lot of cases, not so much anymore, but in most cases, the publishing company, when they buy your book, give you a payment against your advanced sales.

SPEAKER_02 23:16

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 23:17

And of course, if you were just self-publishing, you're doing it all on your own, and you might contract out people to do it. So the hybrid is in-between self-publishing. Right.

SPEAKER_01 23:26

And the appeal is this one-stop shop, you get all those pieces together, which is very appealing in order to get your book into the world so that it can make money.

SPEAKER_00 23:38

Right, exactly. The downsides of, of course, is it's about true self-publishing. So you're really dependent upon this independent this hybrid publisher to stay in business. And they know of a lot of horror stories of authors who that company went out of business and they have no access to their book anymore. And even though their book is still up on Amazon selling copies, they never see the money and they don't know how to get it back at all. So you're gambling, at least with the traditional big five publishers, they probably aren't going to go out of business. Yeah, and small presses as well. There's a lot of really good, legitimate small presses out there, too, who work. But at least with self-publishing, as long as you've got the passwords to get into your account, you're gonna make all your money and so on. So yeah, so what they do is what scammers do that is they pretend to be these hybrid publishers, and they'll even set up fake websites, or what they'll do is use email addresses that sort of look like the hybrid publishers. So let's suppose we had a company called Stacy Publishing that was a hybrid publisher, right? And so probably what would happen if is if you emailed as the CEO of your company, hybrid publisher, Stacy, is your email address would say Stacy at Stacy Publishing, Inc., right?com. So along comes scammer from Kenya who's working for Black Axe, and he goes, I think I can take advantage of Stacy Publishing because people think she's legitimate. She is, obviously. And so they'll go to her website, look it up, and everything we'll check out is okay. So they'll change the email address to be something like Claire Stacypublishing Gmail.com. And so they've got the name of your company in the front part of their address with their name, which by the way is fake. There is no Claire, it's somebody else. And then, but it's a Gmail address, and that's always the giveaway that they're doing it. Some scammers can spoof emails, obviously, and make it sound like it is coming, which is scary. But the one thing you have to remember, and an FBI agent told me this who deals with cybercrimes. He says most scammers are lazy. They're just working off of numbers. So if they can send out, quantity, not quality.

SPEAKER_01 25:55

Right.

SPEAKER_00 25:55

Exactly. So they don't really care so much if they get it right, as long as they can trick one person out of that building they sent to you and make a little money off of them, they're doing pretty well. So that's the scheme you have to look for. So they're not going to bother to spoop. Some do, but most don't. In fact, spoofing is usually an indication that it's uh a higher form of some kind of scam or phishing strategy. And those tend to come from Russia or organized crime groups in Europe, like the Netherlands, Germany, Eastern Europe, and they'll go and bother to do it. But they tend not to be hitting authors at all. Fortunately, they haven't figured out that we're a good target. So, anyways.

SPEAKER_01 26:40

And today's and today, so that was one is people posing as legitimate hybrid publishing.

SPEAKER_00 26:48

But they also they also pretend to be literary agents, editors from actual publishing houses. Sometimes they pretend to be authors as well, especially big name authors, which it's strange to I just can't imagine some people, some of the big name authors like Stephen King actually writing me personally. It's happened, I guess, right? And so there's always that. But then you also get some funny ones, which are actually from dead authors. I've had Robert Lewis Stevenson email me.

SPEAKER_01 27:17

Lewis Lemoore. Yeah, exactly. There's my dad's one of my dad's favorites.

SPEAKER_00 27:21

Oh, really? Yeah, so so, anyways, it happens. But uh another one though is creating other websites for your author websites. The thing with the author website is they probably use an AI program to do it. There are Sweden has some, oh, I can't think of the name of the darn company now, but in Sweden there's a company. Is it lovable? Yes, thank you. That's the company. There are a couple of others as well, but lovable is the most popular and probably the easiest to use. And so they'll just create this fake website on Lovable for you. But the other thing they do is they might actually go through the motions and set up your site for you if you want something simple. But they have the passwords, remember, to your website because they set it up for you. So at any time, once you become a popular author, they can then, and especially if you have email services on your website and you're paying for this website. So you might say, Yeah, set it up for me on WordPress, and here's the I'll pay for it. Here's my passwords. So they'll set it up, everything's great. And then someday, one day, just out of the blue, you can't access your website. And you realize that your website is actually now a porn website. Oh god, which is true, it's happened to a lot of people. And then they'll use your email from that site to send out more scam and spam to people in order to trick them. And of course, there's no way you can get WordPress to stop your site because you no longer have the passwords to get in. And you ultimately you can get it to stop, but it takes two, three weeks to do this after you've discovered it because you've got to go and prove to these get to the WordPress hey, here's my payments. I made this payment, this is not my website. You got to take it down, and so on. So the goal is really just to get you to pay for their crimes as well.

SPEAKER_01 29:10

How about cover on social media? What about any particular scams that you know new authors should watch out for on social media?

SPEAKER_00 29:18

Yeah, they're using the same ones on social media as they do in the emails. Yeah, they just use the same thing. A lot of times it's the beta read scam. You'll see that this is new on Blue Sky. If you're on there every day, there's about 10 or 12 of us who've kind of got a pack. We go through and scour the sites for looking for new beta readers to come up, and they're easily identifiable, that they're obviously fake. There's good beta readers on all of these social media sites.

SPEAKER_01 29:45

X basebooks these scammers are saying I can beta read for you.

SPEAKER_00 29:49

Yeah, exactly. And they English is their second language, so most of them know enough English. But what they generally do is get your manuscript, run it through an AI reader, and then the AI writes a summary of it, and then they send it back to you. And so they didn't really read your manuscript at all. They just gave you an AI summary of how.

SPEAKER_01 30:06

Oh, and you probably and you definitely pay them for this.

SPEAKER_00 30:09

Exactly. Or what they'll do is they it's like phishing, and you reel them in just a little and you wait for them to struggle, and then after they weaken, you keep reeling in the fish. You do the same thing with the author. You give them the free beta read, and then you say, Hey, I can edit your book for you too. And so maybe the beta reads free, but the edit costs money, and then they never deliver on the on the edit, obviously. Or if they do, they just run it through an AI and fix a few grammar problems and that you have and some typos. And you ended up paying five, six hundred dollars for something you could have done yourself. Yeah, so that's the big thing that's going on social media. But there's tons of others, you know, things like improving your SEO, which sounds really great. And then everybody needs to do that with their website. And so I again a lot of times they just make up stuff too, and say, we're gonna provide this service to you, and you have really no idea what they're doing, but it sounds great. Yeah, Bob.

SPEAKER_01 31:07

I was just trying to use metadata to get more sale. Ah, yes. Yes, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 31:13

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 31:14

Yeah. So what should writers do if they've been subjected to a scammer? For me, I've got all of these emails that I never, never I don't open. They're in my they're in my inbox, but let's say I did open them and it was a scammer. What should I do with it?

SPEAKER_00 31:30

Yeah, immediately reported this phishing if you open it. And if you don't open it, just send it to your scam or scam. I'm sorry, send it to your spam and leave it there. I find that uh Gmail is probably one of the better popular email sites that you could use that does a fairly good job of eliminating spam from coming to your email box. So you can imagine if you're getting 10 scam letters a day in your inbox, that they probably stop 20 others from coming in. So you can just imagine the bulk of the stuff that's coming out. But you still wish they would get rid of those other 10, right? And I find that because I and a few others, we report these over and over again to Gmail in a variety of ways, and they tend not to do anything about them, unfortunately. But you should still keep reporting them as spam because one thing that does happen is if an email address gets reported enough times as spam, ultimately Gmail will stop it from coming into anybody's inbox. The scammers get around that by just simply cycling through emails. So they'll just create a new email address every day and keep sending it out, but still report it. You do get open up one. The thing to do is not to respond to it. And if you do respond, you probably are gonna get either really nasty emails back to you, or you're going to get somebody trying to lure you in and try to be her friend. The latter's more common than the first, but but if you do figure out it's a scam and you call them on it, that's when you're gonna get the nasty emails that come back. Other times they just ghost you, which is probably the best thing that can happen.

SPEAKER_01 33:10

Yeah, that's just give up on the worst case scenario. Yeah, but I personally am a do not engage. That is my that is my strategy. And in life, I tend to be a trust but verify person online. I am a verify and then trust kind of person anymore.

SPEAKER_00 33:28

So I yeah, I it's sad that we have to be that way. And because most people are decent people and most people are kind and mean well toward other people. Even if you don't get along with them, your personalities clash, they tend to mean well. But the scammers could care less about who you are or what you are or what your financial situation is. All they see are dollar signs, and that's what they want.

SPEAKER_01 33:51

If you could give like one major preventative strategy to avoid this, what would it be? Hey writer, I'm taking a quick pause in our interview to share a handy free tool from Write It Scared. Do you have a story idea you can't stop thinking about, but you're not quite sure how to turn it into a novel? Or have you started writing only to stall out when you weren't sure what should happen next? I have something that will help. My novel planning quick start guide, first refidence, will help you organize your ideas, test drive your story concept, clarify your characters, and create a high-level plan so you can start writing with more confidence and less guesswork. Grab it free at writitscared.co forward slash novel planning guide or find the link in the show notes. Now let's get back to our episode.

SPEAKER_00 34:39

Yeah, get your email offline. Get it offline. Any place that it appears online. LinkedIn, for example, is one of the big places that AI scrapes your email address for. When we signed up for LinkedIn 15, 20 years ago when LinkedIn first came out, right? We put our email addresses up on it. We did the same thing on Facebook, but Facebook is deliberately taking them down, primarily because Facebook doesn't want you emailing each other. They want you staying on Facebook, talking to each other there. But LinkedIn left them up, and and that's where a lot of the AI AIs are scraping your emails.

SPEAKER_01 35:14

All right. So get your get your email off the off of your social media sites and think seriously about having it on your website.

SPEAKER_00 35:23

And you will see a drop in initially, anyways, in some of the the scam that's coming or the spam that's coming to you from scammers.

SPEAKER_01 35:30

Okay. So what would you say to a writer, a new writer who's getting ready to publish, and they are staring at this great big moving beast of marketing. Do you have anything encouraging that you could share or any tips of where they could get started? And feel safe if you do so.

SPEAKER_00 35:52

Yeah, a couple of things. First, realize that that all marketing advice isn't good for everybody. So what worked for me may not work for you as an author. There's a couple of reasons for that. One is the kind of book you wrote. So if you wrote nonfiction versus fiction, you market them in slightly different ways and use different strategies for that. I know when my children's books are marketed in a totally different way than my hiking guidebooks are. But my hiking guidebooks are pretty similar to my writing guidebooks and strategies because they're both nonfiction, if you see what I'm saying. So you have to realize that. And then secondly, as part of that, each of us have different unique personalities. Some of us are really outgoing, some of us are more introverted, and some of us aren't great at speaking in large crowds, but we do great speaking one-on-one with somebody. And that really affects which marketing strategy you're going to use. For me, I don't have any problem speaking in front of crowds. I did high school and college forensics and stuff. So I don't mind giving a presentation. But for another author, they get up there and give a presentation and they'd be horrible at it because they're just nervous and frightened out of it. So you have to be self-aware of what works for me and what doesn't. And then pick and choose the marketing strategies that you're going to use. Having said that, there are some real basic things that every author should do no matter what they wrote. The first thing is you should get yourself a website that is that you own and that nobody else designed, that you put together. There's lots of easy ones you can use that have templates and themes to them. I use WordPress, but I know other people who use other ones that are just as good. But get a website that is an author's website, then and then you put your books on your author's website because um I'm not getting too deep into marketing, but the the key thing that you're doing is you as the author are a brand. So nobody buys Cujo, the book, they buy a Stephen King book. And then one of those Stephen King's books is Cujo. And so Stephen King is the brand. And you as an author, your name that you use on your books is your brand. So your author's website should be focused on your brand. Two, you should get out onto social media, start slow. This is called building an author's platform. And what should happen is I would use things like Blue Sky, X, Facebook, Instagram, and then later, if you have a lot of books and you really want to sell a lot of books, then start getting into things like YouTube and so on. But start slow with social media. The idea is to build up followers and to start doing all of your social media even before your book comes out. And what you're going to post on social media are articles that you write and that are your website. And so what articles do you write? See, for me, it's easy, right? Because I got hiking guide books. I write about the hiking trails, right, that I do. And you can go to my hiking website and find out about all those trails and stuff like that. But it says nothing on that site about my children's books that I wrote or my novel or anything like that. Maybe it does some passing in my bio, but that's it. So you stay really focused on your website and you try to draw people back to it in a number of different ways. And if you write fiction, you have to be really creative in what you're writing about. Suppose you wrote fantasy, and in your fantasy book, you're world building. So you might write articles about world building. Hey, this is how you worldbuild, this is how you don't do it, this is what I did. Maybe you talk about the research you did. Hey, I wanted to make sure I had this special kind of sword that was used. And so I researched swords and tell about your research. Other fantasy readers, even though they're reading fiction, they're interested in nonfiction about your journey as an author. So you have to think creatively about what you're doing to get that all out there. Once you've done that and you actually publish your book, then start thinking about getting press releases out to people. That's part of your author's platform as well. And so these press releases can go to newspapers, magazines, bloggers, podcasters, other authors who write in your area, your genre specifically, readers who have book clubs and stuff about in your genre, and you start focusing on getting to them. And you start just building these connections and these networks. But the idea is to always get them to go back to one of two places, either your website, which is who you are, and because there they can find out about all your books and read more about you and your research. And then that keeps them focused on you rather than somebody else's book, right? Yeah. Or you send them to where you sell your book, your Amazon.com page. So that way they're like, I love Stacy's book. I'm gonna go to her page and I go there and then I buy her book right now. And that's the idea. Keep them focused on you, get them to buy your book. And then you can do other things like book readings, book signings, presentations about your topic, and so on. But that and you see what you're doing is expanding out. You start from your website and then everything gets wider.

SPEAKER_01 41:00

And don't forget to write the next book.

SPEAKER_00 41:03

Right. Yes, that's the challenge. What you have to do, I think, is set aside time every day to work on marketing. And it can be just as little as 15 minutes a day. And that will take you maybe a month in to build your website. But if you're still writing your book, start doing your website now and get it up. Don't wait till your book is published and then try to do it retroactively, right? That doesn't work. And also remember that marketing is for indie authors, anyways, is a long run. It's a marathon, not a sprint. So you just can't go out and quick sell a whole bunch of books. You've got to do it little by little, piece by piece. And eventually it just builds out. And pretty soon people start discovering you without you even trying. They just they run across your hashtag on social media and suddenly discover who you are as an author. They listen to Stacy's podcast and discover who I am and go like, oh, I was looking for a hiking guide book, or in my case, I was looking for an editor or something like that. Yeah. And then that's how they discover me. And so that's what you have to do as an author, too. Spend a little bit of time each day doing it.

SPEAKER_01 42:08

That's a good strategy. That's a good strategy to just instead of thinking you have to shotgun it and get it all done at once, nothing like that in their works. Because that's a beautiful analogy. This is it is a marathon, not a spread. So it's yeah, a little bit at a time, little dribs, little drabs, and little bits of effort over a long period of time creates you know the outcome. The outcome that you're desire that you're just like writing.

SPEAKER_00 42:34

If you wrote a thousand words a day, it will take you what 70 days to get up to 70,000 words, and now you've got a novel. So obviously your novel's not ready to be published yet. You got to revise it and add it and so on. But at least you got a novel to work with after 70 days. But if you don't put in that time every day on those thousand words, you are gonna get it. It might be two years before you get to 70,000 words.

SPEAKER_01 42:58

Absolutely. But you have given us a ton of insights on identifying and protecting ourselves from marketing scams. And I highly recommend your book. It also lists out all the different types of scams, and there's a checklist in it that you can that you can run through if you're thinking that something is suspicious. It's yeah, so definitely check it out. And if it's an unsolicited email, it's very suspicious. Verify first. Trust later.

SPEAKER_00 43:27

Yeah, that those are the first clues. It's unsolicited. You're like, yeah, that's not how people work in this this industry. And secondly, if it's a Gmail address, that's a really bad sign, too.

SPEAKER_01 43:38

So it used to be about the company being from Delaware. I read this quote.

SPEAKER_00 43:43

Yeah, that's a little harder to find. But what happens is for cells in the United States, like these Nigerian cells, they can set up a shell company easily out of that particular state. I think Yeah, North Dakota's gotten really, I believe it's North Dakota, yeah. They've gotten So that it's really easy to set up shell companies there too now. So they're exploding with that. And so it's really hard to trace these people. And that's why I you don't hear all the time about these arrests because they've done a good job of covering their tracks.

SPEAKER_02 44:13

Dang.

SPEAKER_00 44:13

And that's one way they do it. So yeah, as an indie author, you probably won't figure out where they're from and that. And that's also a sign that a very bad sign. A company should be able to tell you where they're from.

SPEAKER_01 44:25

So if you Yeah, and a lot of times I get these emails and there's just a name at the end. There's no, there's no what company are they with or anything like that. And I'm like, whatever. It's a waste of time.

SPEAKER_00 44:39

Yeah, exactly. Somebody should if they want me to edit their book. Yeah, if they wanted me to edit their book, they should be able to ask me where you're from, and I can give them the city and they can look it up online and see, yeah, he has a house there in town. And when you can probably even Google map where I live, unfortunately. But you know, you could figure it out anyways. Okay, he's legit. But when somebody's really just go to Fiverr and I want to keep it privacy purposes, I want to keep privacy purposes. You can just have a P.O. box then in that town, or you don't have to give me your mailing address. Just tell me what city you're from. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 45:14

But what do you think is the most underrated book marketing strategy?

SPEAKER_00 45:19

Optimizing your author's brand so that it is easily recognizable by AI search and summarization.

SPEAKER_01 45:28

Break that down a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 45:30

So the we if you went and Google something today, Google your name, and I bet your name will pop up. There's lots of websites, right? But the first thing that will pop up and has been popping up in the last year or so is an AI-generated summary that Google creates, rather, of who you are. And this is all drawn by AI quickly scraping through websites about you and what you've done. So in the past, we've always told authors, hey, when you get a website, you have to optimize for SEO, search engine optimization. So that way your website appears high on the rankings. Otherwise, if you're on page 10 of Google, nobody's going to ever discover you. You want to be on page one, one of those first 10, preferably one of those first three. Now, what you want to do is not necessarily you want to still be in the first three, but most people are reading those summaries to learn out, to learn about who you are. And then from there, they'll click the little website button, which is on the side, which is where Google says, I got the information from this site. And then they'll look up your website and search out for you. So what you really want to do is make sure that your website, when you're marketing, fits what AI is looking for when it's summary, creates its summary. And there's a whole strategy to that.

SPEAKER_01 46:50

Another book.

SPEAKER_00 46:51

It is. And it I'm working on that, researching it actually right now, but it's slow going. And because I've been working on some other projects in the meantime that I had to finish up and promoting my last book, but that will probably be my next writing guide book that I do. It's on AI optimization.

SPEAKER_01 47:07

Optimize your website to be what AI is looking for when somebody types in who's uh your name. Your name. Okay. Or your brand.

SPEAKER_00 47:19

Your name's your brand. Your name is your brand. And and it could be like, for example, with a podcast, your brand could be the name of your podcast, too. But for most authors, just selling books, it's their name. So that's what we're really looking for.

SPEAKER_02 47:31

Fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 47:32

Yeah, AB, you want to be in that summary. So my wife runs a bookstore. And so our goal was how do we get her bookstore name to pop up when somebody types in the name of her bookstore and doesn't type in something else? That way it shows up and gives accurate information about what she does at the bookstore and what she offers. And that's what you want to do as an author. So it's a it's I wouldn't call it a challenge, but you have to rephrase things on your website. And when I talked about building that author's platform earlier, getting in social media, that's part of it. The more social media connections you have out there, the more social media sites, the more podcasts you appear on, the more interviews you do with people, the more likely there's information for AI to scrape and put together and access.

SPEAKER_01 48:22

It's leading into things that are long form pieces of content and short form too for the purpose of feeding a machine that will tell somebody who you are. Right.

unknown 48:30

Right.

SPEAKER_01 48:31

Yeah. So we have touched on a lot of stuff. You've mentioned some excellent resources, the Authors Guild, Writers Beware. For hybrid publishing, there's another one, or for hybrid publishers, it's the independent book. What is it? What are they called? Oh, the Independent Book Publishers Association. They have a criteria for legit hybrid publishers. So you could look to that. And then of course your book has tons and tons of references and resources. So why don't you tell us where listeners can find you, your books, and then what's coming next for you?

SPEAKER_00 49:06

Sure, yeah. All my books are available on Amazon, of course. So you can just type in my name, Rob Picknell, and look it up there, and they'll all pop up. My website is inventingreality.com. And there you'll find over 2,500 articles about writing, grammar, self-publishing, marketing. I don't provide any marketing services at all to people beyond proofreading your press release. There's also a list of all my books. If you're interested in editing services, I do have editing and self-publishing services that I offer as well. And then there's some other things on there too that you can look at and get for free and find out more about who I am and so on. I'm always working on something like hiking guidebooks, for example, writing guidebooks, researching, but the main focus of my writing right now is my science fiction anthology. So I've put together 13 of my stories, most of which have already been published into a single anthology. And then in addition to that, I have the first and a planned 13-part series, science fiction series. And the first one is called Project Fireball. And in Project Fireball, it turns out that in 1936, a UFO crashed in Bavaria. The Nazis captured it and now they're trying to reverse engineer it. And a uh professor from Dresden gets roped into doing it and he figures out how it works. And so now the question is: will the Nazis develop the UFO saucer technology before the end of the war in order to save the day? I love it. For their Reich. So of course, there's a I won't give away the what stops him from doing it, but but anyways, that so those are my next two books. They should be out just before Thanksgiving.

SPEAKER_01 50:54

That sounds really fun. It feels like science fiction alternate history a little bit. And ooh, I love it.

SPEAKER_00 51:00

Yeah, I tried to work it so it could have actually happened, but it's all done in secret in these secret places. So there could still be that flying saucer buried in the caverns in the owl mountains out in Poland somewhere. We'll have to dig it up and find out.

SPEAKER_01 51:15

That is really cool.

SPEAKER_00 51:16

It would freak me out if they actually did find one. And then I'd be like, Hey, my book, what's right.

SPEAKER_01 51:22

Yeah, well, tell what they say. What used to be dystopian is now in the historical.

SPEAKER_00 51:28

Right, you're right, yeah. Yeah. Just go over to current events. That's where you'll find the dystopians.

SPEAKER_01 51:33

Yeah, exactly. So again, thank you so much for your time and for the resources that you put out in the world that help other authors.

SPEAKER_00 51:40

Yeah, you pet. Thanks for having me on the show. I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 51:44

Thank you for listening to the Write It Scared podcast. If you enjoyed today's show, please make sure to hit the follow button so you never miss an episode. And please leave a review. Reviews help other writers like you find the voices and messages they need to hear to continue to write their stories. Let's lift each other up. Remember, you can be scared and still be unstoppable. I'll see you soon.