This One’s for All You Spammers

Yeah, this one’s for all you scammers out there. I’ve had five or six posts over the last few years, but the pace is picking up; I’ve had four in the last two weeks and one of them was a prize winner.

Usually I get an email through the contact section of this page that tells me how much the person enjoyed reading my blog and then points out something that I have done wrong that could be improved in future. I took the first one at face value and went back to correct the spelling he’d pointed out. I looked for several minutes before realising that I had spelled that word correctly in the blog. The word was ‘inital’ according to the spammer. I wrote it off as a helpful person who couldn’t spell.

The next few had almost identical wording, all pointing out something ‘wrong’ in my blog that they could help me to correct. They can achieve stellar success in blog rankings and SEO scores, and I’m sure they charge reasonable prices for the service. But the easy way to get a 100% discount on a service is not to buy it.

This month’s crop of friendly ‘I can help you get more readers’ emails was followed by one that made me check the date. Not April 1st, not yet. The bot that wrote me the email really enjoyed my novel. You haven’t missed the publication date, by the way, I haven’t published a novel yet.

I mentioned this oddity to author friends (real, genuine, published author friends), only to find I was way down the rankings of targets. One author got a dozen of those emails a week. Block, delete, ignore is the standard response. That’s fine, even when a famous author contacts you to say how much they love your book. A little more spooky when a deceased author contacts you to say how your book has held them spellbound. Is it enough to block them, or do you need to call Ghostbusters?

As long as that’s all these bots do – offer to help – that’s fine. I may have seen the more sinister next step in this weird game and it’s a bit less amusing. A site that states that it will broadcast an author’s work for free (meaning no more book sales, no more royalties) unless said author pays the protection money to stop them.

Authors of the seventies, eighties and nineties – Jilly Cooper, Wilbur Smith, Dan Brown – wrote a book and earned money for it. These days? If you write a book, you’re an open target for people who do no work, can’t spell simple English words but are viciously determined to earn money on the back of your hard work.

If you don’t think writing is hard work, try it. Write a novel. Send it to friends and see how hard they laugh. Send your short story to a competition and see whether anyone hails you as the next big thing of literature or struggles for a polite response. It doesn’t work like that. My current novel is all but finished after years of drafting, re-writing, editing, editing again… and now? Almost afraid to put it out there, because I despise spammers and I value a quiet life. If I get novel spam before I publish, how much worse could it be?

Perhaps as bad as the two professional authors featured in an article in ‘The Bookseller’ magazine who reported that Goodreads published a one star review of their novel before anyone had read it. No author copies issued for review. In one case, the novel had just arrived back from the editor with a round of edits and was nowhere near being ready to publish. When the authors protested, Goodreads replied that the reviewer was entitled to post a review based on whether they imagined they’d enjoy the novel or not, and refused to take down the troll review. When The Bookseller contacted them for an interview, they changed their minds, but a new indie author is unlikely to have the chance of getting a big magazine to weigh in on their behalf.

Enter Amazon, who got their start as booksellers. Amazon, who are about to turn every Kindle publication into an e-pub and PDF version to sell alongside the Kindle-only format. That doesn’t sound drastic, till you think of a PDF as equivalent to a paperback. The paperback sold in a bookshop, that got passed to a friend, to a charity shop… one sale, one royalty payment, three readers. Multiply that. One paperback, one sale and an endless round of friends reading that one copy.

If that sounds okay, how chuffed would you have been if your employer paid you a tenth of the agreed salary? One read, one payment. If Jeff Bezos can’t afford that, I’m sure there’s food banks in America he can go to.

What can you do as a reader? Buy the damn book. Every author spent hours and months and sometimes years to get it readable. Paying them a pound to read it is fair. Borrow it from your library if you can; free to you, but the author gets an ALCS payment equivalent to a royalty. If you want something for nothing, ask yourself what you’d do for nothing. How many times did you work for free, wrote off overtime, told an employer to keep that final pay cheque to help them out? Commercial employers, never. Charities, maybe. Billionaires? Bugger off.