I set a trap for a book-marketing scammer (2025)
rwwgreene.substack.com
August 22, 2026
16 min read
44/100
Summary
Science-fiction author R.W.W. Greene documented at least 51 unsolicited book-marketing pitches between October 18 and November 20, 2025, with offers ranging from Pinterest and Goodreads placement to paid reviews, book trailers, Amazon optimization and social-media promotion. Most used generic Gmail accounts, claimed access to real readers or organic engagement, and supplied no verifiable portfolios or results. Greene says Gmail’s spam filter caught roughly two-thirds of the messages. Greene tested one sender, Veronica Emmanuel, after she offered a detailed promotion plan for Six Plays, a work by the Elizabethan playwright Robert Greene, who died in 1592. After being challenged, the sender said a batch-processing system had incorrectly connected Greene’s name to the public-domain title, then continued pitching marketing services without naming his actual books. Greene also identified an email sender using the name and headshot of UK author Judy Leigh to promote a purported Medium book-promotion program; Greene says Medium does not run the program described. Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware has tracked a wave of similar pitches since June 2025 and says operations in Nigeria use AI to generate personalized outreach at scale. Greene estimates that a traditionally published author earning $0.25 to $0.40 per ebook would need up to 2,000 additional sales to recover a $500 marketing fee.
Key Takeaways
- R.W.W. Greene recorded at least 51 unsolicited book-marketing pitches in 33 days, from October 18 through November 20, 2025.
- A sender pitching Greene confused him with the long-dead playwright Robert Greene and attributed Six Plays to him before blaming a batch-processing system for the error.
- Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware says Nigerian operations have used AI-generated personalized pitches in a book-marketing scam wave tracked since June 2025.
- Greene says a scammer impersonated UK author Judy Leigh and promoted a fabricated Medium End-of-Year Book Feature Promotion.
- At ebook royalties of roughly $0.25 to $0.40 per sale, a traditionally published author could need as many as 2,000 extra sales to recoup a $500 marketing charge.
What the discussion said
The thread mostly treated the scam as a symptom of isolated, hopeful people being easy targets and of self-publishing authors being pushed into marketing work. Commenters traded examples of nearly identical pitches, fake-review offers, and vulnerable older aspiring writers, while others argued that replying to unsolicited mail simply identifies a live, engaged target. That broader discussion was not really about AI. The AI-specific reaction centered on the article’s disclosure that Claude helped with outlining, organizing material, and feedback. Several readers said the assistance showed in the prose: they found its rhythm unnatural, overly padded, and prone to revisiting the same point until the investigation became hard to finish. One reader pushed the criticism further, questioning why a writer would outsource any meaningful part of prose production when writing is supposedly the point of the craft. No one defended the Claude use directly, so the visible AI discussion ran distinctly skeptical rather than balanced. A separate observation complicates the idea that generative AI created this scam economy: similar SEO and promotional spam had been hitting small websites years before modern LLMs. The concern is less that AI invented the fraud and more that it could give already-persistent scammers a cheaper way to generate another wave of plausible outreach.
Community Sentiment
Concerns
- Claude-assisted structuring and feedback reportedly leaked into the article’s voice, making the prose feel mechanically repetitive rather than sharply edited.
- Readers question whether AI support undermines the value of an author’s craft when the resulting writing no longer sounds convincingly human-authored.
- Marketing and SEO scams clearly predate modern LLMs, but that established fraud machinery could become more convincing and scalable if paired with AI-generated outreach.
