Scamalot

I'm too trusting sometimes.

I think it comes from the fact that I try my hardest to treat people kindly and fairly, so I make the mistaken assumption that most other people act the same way.  This is a strategy that works well until it doesn't.  Because while there are lots of good people out there, there are a significant number who simply aren't.

The subset of these malefactors I run into the most often are scammers.  Being a struggling author, I get daily emails from people who are trying to take my two-digit monthly royalty statement and convert it into a one-digit monthly royalty statement via fake offers for promotion and marketing.  The whole enterprise is evil -- preying on the hopes and dreams of a hard-working creative to enrich their own bank accounts while giving nothing of value in return.

Simply put, these people are parasites.  The tapeworms of the publishing industry.

I generally just delete emails from scammers, but I have to admit that my friend, the awesome writer Andrew Butters, has an inspired approach:

Scammer:  Hello Mr. Author Andrew Butters.

Andrew: No.

So it's fortunate that a great many of them aren't all that good at it.  The majority of the scam promotion emails I get have a slick, glib feel that my wife thinks (and I agree) comes from having fed my Amazon book blurbs into an AI program, but this hasn't stopped them from sometimes accidentally blundering and giving away the game.  I got not one, but two emails targeting my novel Lock & Key that started out exactly the same way:

Darren Ault shoots a bullet, humanity vanishes, and suddenly Vikings, cults, and a foul-mouthed librarian of timelines are all part of the mix—Lock & Key reads like a full-blown temporal rollercoaster.  Yet your reviews are far fewer than the epic adventures inside.  Your mix of humor, mind-bending time travel, and irreverent sci-fi is exactly the type of story that clicks with this group.  Want to see what happens when 2,000+ readers dive in and leave verified reviews that could boost your book across the sci-fi/fantasy world?

Never mind that on page one, we find out that Darren was the victim, not the shooter, and the entire fucking story is working out why he wasn't killed when he was shot point-blank in the head.

I also had one regarding my novella Convection that read like a book report written by someone who hadn't actually read the book, but is a real master at using florid language:

I just reviewed Convection, and it’s an atmospheric, slow-burn survival thriller that delivers on multiple fronts, natural disaster suspense, psychological tension, and a creeping sense of dread.  The Bayou Vista Apartments setting is brilliantly claustrophobic: a handful of strangers trapped together while a Category 5 hurricane pounds the Louisiana coast, each bringing their own secrets to the storm.  Your pacing turns the hurricane into both a physical and emotional pressure cooker, while the ensemble cast dynamics keep the tension sharp and unpredictable.

Well, thank you for all that, but once again, there's nothing there you couldn't have learned from the book blurb.  At least, unlike the Lock & Key scams, you didn't miss the whole damn point of the story.

I do get a laugh out of the ones who can't even make the scam sound authentic.  I have had emails start out "Hello Bonnet," which strikes me as a little abrupt if you're trying to hook me in to giving you money.  I had another tell me how much they'd enjoyed my book If Only You Knew, which isn't even close to any of my book titles.  And just last week I had one that began, I shit you not, "Hello Anastasia."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Scam by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images]

But none of these came as close to catching me flat-footed as the exchange I recently had with someone who claimed to be the award-winning author Ottessa Moshfegh, which started out with a nice (and not at all fulsome or overdone) comment about how she'd seen my Facebook author page and thought my books sounded interesting.

To my own credit, my first thought was to wonder why an author of Ottessa Moshfegh's stature would be hanging around on the Facebook author page of a relative unknown like myself, but... well, the algorithm is weird, and I do often see pages for people I've never heard of.  And the other peculiar thing is that I don't promote my books much on Facebook (hell, I don't promote my books much period, but that's another matter).  But there was something about her initial email that was so low-key and casual that it took me off my guard.

So we had an email exchange that was courteous and friendly, asking about stuff like what my inspirations were and which of my books would be the best to start with.  I asked her the same thing, and got thoughtful responses that sounded entirely authentic.

Then, in an informal, almost offhand way, she asked me how I was doing with marketing.  That was the point I definitely got that old by-the-pricking-of-my-thumbs feeling.  I responded that it was the part of the job I hated the most, because I kind of suck at self-promotion.  She came back with a heartfelt, "We all feel that way!"... but she knew a good publicist, and if I was interested she could put us in touch.

Aha.  There it is.

Fortunately, the real Ottessa Moshfegh has a Substack with "contact me" information (linked above), so I decided to do a little reality check.  I sent her an email saying that I'd had a nice exchange with someone who claimed to be her, and if it really was her then cool beans, but if not I thought she should know she had an impersonator.  A day later, she wrote back.

It was not her.  And she was pissed.

Not at me, of course.  In fact, she apologized to me (not that it was in any way her fault), and thanked me for letting her know.  The real Ottessa seems like a class act, and it double sucks that a scammer would impersonate her, and use her name, reputation, and cachet to try to bilk a starving (well, figuratively speaking, anyhow) author like myself.

The upshot is that Pseudottessa buggered off and I haven't heard from her since.  But if she happens to be reading this, here's a message from me and from real Ottessa:

Go to hell.

So I may be trusting, but I'm learning.  I might get fooled for a little while, but it's never long enough that I'm even tempted to give them money.  Part of this is that I'm a world-class skinflint, but it's also that I've had enough experience with people in the publishing world who make extravagant promises and then deliver fuck-all that I've gotten wary.

I'm still generally an optimist about people; I think on the whole it's better than being a cynic.  My dad used to say "I'd rather be an optimist who is wrong than a pessimist who is right," and I think that's spot-on.  But it's also made me hate scammers even more, because they take advantage of people's naïveté and trust, and that's just an ugly thing to do.

So be on the lookout for these guys.  Especially with the help of AI, they're getting pretty fancy about it, and it's easy to see how the unwary might be taken in.  Not all of them are as stupid as the guy who thought my name was Anastasia.  And mark my words, as we get better at recognizing them, they'll find other, better tricks to pull.

Evolution in the Kingdom of Scamalot.  Which is kind of a scary thought.

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The parasitic model

My post yesterday, about how the profit motive in (and corporate control of) media has annihilated any hope of getting accurate representation of the news, was almost immediately followed up by my running into a story about how the same forces in creative media are working to strangle creativity at its source.

The article was from Publishers Weekly, and was about an interview with HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray.  It centered largely on the company's whole-hearted endorsement of AI as part of its business model.  He describes using AI to take the place both of human narrators for audiobooks and of translators for increasing their sales in non-English-speaking countries, which is troubling enough; but by far his most worrisome comment describes using AI, basically, to be a stand-in for the authors themselves.  Lest you think I'm exaggerating, or making this up entirely, here's a direct quote from the article:

The fast-evolving AI sector could deliver new types of formats for books, Murray said, adding that HC is experimenting with a number of potential products.  One idea is a “talking book,” where a book sits atop a large language model, allowing readers to converse with an AI facsimile of its author.  Speculating on other possible offerings, Murray said that it is now possible for AI to help HC build an entire cooking-focused website using only content from its backlist, but the question of how to monetize such a site remains.

Later in the article, almost offhand, was a comment that while HarperCollins saw their sales go up last year by only six percent, their profits went up by sixty percent.  The reason was a "restructuring" of the company -- which, of course, included plenty of layoffs.

How much of that windfall went to the authors themselves is left as an exercise for the reader. 

I can vouch first-hand that in the current economic climate, it is damn near impossible to make a living as a writer, musician, or artist.  The people who are actually the wellspring of creativity powering the whole enterprise of creative media get next to nothing; the profits are funneled directly into the hands of a small number of people -- the CEOs of large publishing houses, distributors, marketing and publicity firms, and social media companies.

I can use myself as an example.  I have twenty-four books in print, through two small traditional publishers and some that are self-published.  I have never netted more than five hundred dollars in a calendar year; most years, it's more like a hundred.  I didn't go into this expecting to get rich, but I'd sure like to be able to take my wife out to a nice restaurant once a month from my royalties.

As it is, we might be able to split the lunch special at Denny's.

Okay, I can hear some of you say; maybe it's not the system, maybe it's you.  Maybe your books just aren't any good, and you're blaming it on corporate greed.  All right, fair enough, we can admit that as a possibility.  But I have dozens of extraordinarily talented and hard-working writer friends, and they all say pretty much the same thing.  Are you gonna stand there and tell us we're all so bad we don't deserve to make a living?

And now the CEO of HarperCollins is going to take the authors out of the loop even of speaking for ourselves, and just create an AI so readers can talk to a simulation of us without our getting any compensation for it?

Ooh, maybe he could ratchet those profits up into the eighty or ninety percent range if he eliminated the authors altogether, and had AI write the books themselves.

Besides the greed, it's the out-of-touchness that bothers me the most.  Lately I've been seeing the following screenshot going around -- a conversation between Long Island University Economics Department Chair Panos Mourdoukoutas and an ordinary reader named Gwen:

The cockiness is absolutely staggering; that somehow it's better to put even more money in Jeff Bezos's pockets than it is to support public libraries.  They've already got the entire market locked up tight, so what more do the corporate CEOs want?  It's flat-out impossible as an author to avoid selling through Amazon; they've got an inescapable stranglehold on book sales.  And, as I found out the hard way, they also have no problem with reducing the prices set by me or my publisher without permission, further cutting into any profit I get -- but, like HarperCollins, you can bet they make sure it doesn't hurt their bottom line by a single cent.

And don't even get me started about the Mark Zuckerberg model of social media.  When Facebook first really got rolling, authors and other creators could post links to their work, and it was actually not a bad way to (at the very least) get some name recognition.  Now?  Anything with an external link gets deliberately drowned by the algorithm.  Oh, sure, you can post stuff, but no one sees it.  The idea is to force authors to purchase advertising from Facebook instead.

Basically, if it doesn't make Zuckerberg money, you can forget about it.

If I sound bitter about all this -- well, it's because I am.  I've thrown my heart into my writing, and gotten very little in return.  We've ceded the control of the creative spirit of humanity to an inherently parasitic system, where the ones who are actually enriching the cultural milieu are reaping only a minuscule percent of the rewards.

The worst part is that, like the situation I described yesterday regarding the news media, I see no way out of this, not for myself nor for any other creative person.  Oh, we'll continue doing what we do; writing is as much a part of my life as breathing.  But isn't it tragic that the writers, artists, and musicians whose creative spirits nurture all of us have to struggle against seemingly insurmountable odds even to be seen?

All because of the insatiable greed, arrogance, and short-sightedness of a handful of individuals who have somehow ended up in charge of damn near everything that makes life bearable.  People who want more and more and more, and after that, more again.  Millions don't satisfy; they need billions.

As psychologist Erich Fromm put it, "Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever actually reaching satisfaction."

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