A Conversation With Victoria Strauss on How Writers Can Spot Publishing Scams (Killer Writers)

Author Victoria Strauss is the co-founder of Writer Beware, and for nearly three decades, she has immersed herself in scams, schemes, and pitfalls that prey on writers of all genres. Today, with artificial intelligence, impersonation scams, and increasingly sophisticated solicitations that make deception harder to recognize, Victoria and I talked about why writers are now particularly vulnerable and how authors can protect themselves without becoming wary of legitimate opportunities.

(Find more Killer Writers conversations here.)

“Victoria, you founded Writer Beware at a time when writers still assumed that the publishing industry was largely trustworthy. What first convinced you that there was a widespread problem requiring public attention?”

“I first joined writers’ groups online back in 1998. When I started going online, I didn’t know writing scams existed. But in these writers’ groups, I started to hear people talk about their experiences with fee-charging literary agents, crooked editing services, and fraudulent vanity publishers, and it was like I’d discovered an entire underbelly of the publishing industry I didn’t know existed. We assumed the scams were static.”

“Meaning they would remain the same?”

“But that hasn’t proven the case.”

“It’s gotten worse.”

“Much worse.”

“When new writers imagine publishing scams, they often picture some sort of obvious fraud, yet many questionable operations look professional. What are some of the most common forms of writing scams that you see today?”

“The scams of the past—analog scams, vanity publishers, fee-charging literary agents—those are still around. But what is mainly threatening writers right now is a whole class of new scams, many of them generated by artificial intelligence, targeting self-publishers predominantly, but also pretty much anyone with a book.”

“I get emails all the time.”

“Highly personalized marketing emails. But one of the main signs of scams these days is just out-of-the-blue solicitation. Reputable literary agents and publishers are unlikely to cold call you with wonderful opportunities, whereas for scammers, that’s the main way they find their clients.”

“I got a great email from John Grisham, of all people.”

“He has contacted me, too!”

“He’s getting out there!”

“Twice, in fact. This is a very common scam: Someone who’s a well-known writer reaches out in a friendly way to share experiences as writers. But the goal is to refer you to some scam service.”

“The goal is to take your money.”

“The methods change, but the goal never does.”

“Why are writers particularly vulnerable to manipulation and predatory promises compared to people in other industries?”

“Anyone in a creative industry is similarly vulnerable, because the odds of success are slim, and there are so many people clustered at the gate trying to get through. There’s a high level of frustration and rejection. It’s wearing on the psyche. Scammers promise success. They promise validation. You’ll make a million dollars. Your book will be a bestseller. It’s targeting that hunger for recognition and validation. Similar scams exist in music, art, and modeling. But I think one reason writing scams are so prevalent is that there are so many writers. The self-publishing industry provides a bigger opportunity for scammers, because self-publishers need services in a way that traditionally published authors don’t.”

“Are there psychological tactics that scammers consistently use when targeting writers?”

“It all comes down to writers’ desire for validation. Some scams are no-frills—you get an email saying, falsely, that a major publisher is interested in publishing your book, and they’re going to offer you $250,000 and make your book a bestseller. That’s pitching directly to a writer’s ego and desire for success. I'm also seeing more subtle scams now, where the scammer reaches out with a very detailed discussion of the person’s book and a lot of praise—all generated by AI—purporting to be a marketer who just came across this wonderful book and really wants to help. Not charge a lot of money, not screw anybody over, but just help the book reach the audience it deserves. And those tend to be more roundabout. They’ll end the email with an open-ended question—if this interests you, please reach out—so they don’t seem to be pushing. But the idea is to draw the writer in over many emails, on the theory that the deeper they can involve you in this flattering interchange, the harder it will be to back out when they finally get to the money part, which often takes several email exchanges to reveal.”

“Is there a way to identify these crooks?”

“One marker of this scam is a Gmail address, because they use Gmail extensively. So if you get an email from someone who purports to be an established marketer with a business, but all they have is a Gmail address and no internet presence, that’s definitely a scam marker.”

“How can writers distinguish between a disappointing service and a predatory operation?”

“Writer Beware’s motto is we protect writers against schemes, scams, and pitfalls. And there’s a difference between those three things. A scam is outright fraud: They take your money, don’t deliver any services, and you never hear from them again. A scheme is something predatory that targets writers but isn’t necessarily fraudulent. High entry fee contests that make money by charging exorbitant entry fees, selling additional merchandise, and usually having dozens of entry categories to maximize entries. There really is a contest. Winners really do get whatever reward is promised, but it’s a scheme in the sense that it’s a money-making opportunity rather than something to honor writers as it purports to be. A pitfall is when things go wrong, say, an inexperienced person establishes a publishing house and recruits writers but doesn’t really know how to run a business or manage finances. So royalties are late or unpaid, or the publisher goes out of business, leaving authors high and dry. That’s a pitfall any writer can stumble into through no fault of their own. The publisher may be totally well-intentioned; they just don’t know how to do the job.”

“The best intentions pave the way to…”

“Right. That’s why when you’re considering a publisher or a literary agent, you want to look for relevant experience. In any other employment category, where you’re thinking of hiring somebody, you vet their background, you look for a resume, you look for accomplishments and experience.”

“What are some warning signs that writers often overlook because they’re too emotionally involved in the opportunity that’s being offered?”

“Fees where they shouldn’t be charged. If you’re self-publishing your book and want to create a professional product, then you’re going to pay service providers for a cover design, editing, and copy editing. These are circumstances in which money flows from the writer to a service provider. If you’re looking for traditional publication, or if you want to hire a literary agent, there shouldn’t be fees. You can choose to pay a publisher, but if you do, it’s not a traditional publisher.”

“Have you seen scams evolve alongside changes in technology: self-publishing, social media, AI? In what ways is the landscape becoming more sophisticated or dangerous?”

“Definitely changes in all those areas. The rise of self-publishing opened the door to service scams, and now the rise of AI has created this tsunami of solicitations and impersonations from scammers.”

“Scamming made easy.”

“Yes. The publishing scams—you’re getting a million emails a day—are the new iteration of the old Nigerian print scams, because they do mostly come from Nigeria, and they operate based on enormous volume. There are relatively few people who are running these scams, sending out hundreds of thousands of emails every day, which AI makes extremely easy to do. It also makes it easy to provide individualized responses for writers who take the bait and respond. And many scams these days come from overseas. When I first started seeing these around 2018, one marker was poor English, because they were staffed overseas in boiler rooms by people who are fluent English speakers but not necessarily fluent English writers. Grammar and syntax errors were markers for scams. But almost immediately after ChatGPT was released in 2022, I started seeing a change in these email solicitations: They became completely grammatical, totally colloquial English, so that marker of scams has gradually been lost. You see it also in the backroom operations of publishing companies, where covers are generated by AI.”

“Some of these are coming to my personal email. How do they get my personal information?”

“AI agents scrape the internet or avenues through which you provide your email address as part of accessing a service. I heard from somebody who gave me convincing proof that scammers accessed the contact information of an online bookstore they were part of. Just as scams are AI-generated, the lists of people to contact are also AI-generated.”

“Writers often feel ashamed after being deceived. What emotional patterns have you observed among victims, and why is it important for writers to talk openly about these experiences?”

“It’s super important, because to avoid scams you need to know that they exist. I often hear from writers who are blindsided by scams and realize they need to be careful. So speaking out, writing on social media, and sharing your experience all help raise writers’ awareness. That said, the shame you mentioned is common. I hear it from people who contact me. They’re beating themselves up for being stupid.”

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“They’re not.”

“They’re not stupid; they’re not alone. I’ve heard from so many people who’ve been tricked by the same scam. Don’t beat yourself up; treat it as a learning experience. It can help you in the future. Unfortunately, I think that shame also keeps writers silent. They want to put it behind them.”

“As if it didn’t happen.”

“So they don’t report. Or they’re afraid of retaliation. Sometimes I hear from people who are afraid to provide me with documentation of the scam they experienced, because they’re afraid the scammer will somehow find out and retaliate. That’s generally not true. Once you show that you’re not going to pay, or once you stop paying, the scammers have no further interest in you. It’s almost a rite of passage these days, an encounter with a scammer.”

“From your perspective, what does the prevalence of so many scams reveal about the broader publishing ecosystem, particularly in relation to the dreams that writers are bringing to it?”

“I think the existence of dreams and hopes over the course of human history has always been an open door for predators to take advantage. When I first started tracking scams, other than the writers themselves, there was literally no connection between the scam industry and the legitimate publishing industry. They were two completely different things. The scam industry was a shadow world, and the publishing industry really didn’t need to notice. But in the past few years, there’s been this incredible surge of impersonation scams, with scammers impersonating literary agents, publishers, editors, movie studios, authors, everything you can imagine. That interpenetration between scams and the real world of publishing has gotten deeper, and it’s forced the publishing industry and successful authors who have never been troubled by any of this to take notice in a new way. You will see fraud alerts on publisher websites, on so many literary agency websites. Even newspapers and radio stations have been impersonated. Scams are having a more immediate impact on the entire writing and publishing ecosystem than ever before.”

“As a writer, you almost have to be a detective yourself, don’t you?”

“In a way, yeah, and after all these years I still really enjoy the process of tracking down and exposing the schemes and the miscreants. Last year, there was this big FBI bust of a Philippines-based publishing scam, and I just saw on the news today that the CEO of the scam has pleaded guilty. We’re talking over 800 victims with a restitution order of $48 million plus. For people who say, ‘How bad can it be? Writers have no money; these scammers can’t make a lot of money,’ that’s an example of the insane amounts of money that scammers can extract from victims. It’s a volume business. If they can collect small amounts from a very large number of writers, it adds up.”

“It’s up to each of us, then: Don’t get caught up in something that appears too good to be true, educate ourselves on how the industry works and avoid anything that sounds ‘fishy,’ and when we are taken advantage of, share with others so we, as writers, are a united front against these scammers. Scamming isn’t going away, but as writers, we can help take care of each other.”

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Victoria Strauss is the author of nine novels for adults and young adults, including the Way of Arata epic fantasy duology and the Passion Blue YA duology. She’s co-founder, with the late Ann Crispin, of Writer Beware, SFWA’s publishing industry watchdog group. https://victoriastrauss.com/