by Rachel Thompson BadRedhead Media, LLC.
I have written many posts about the various scams targeting authors. Here are snippets from each one, specifics to look out for, and examples of these scams. My Substack is free, so you can click on each link to read more if you’d like.
Let’s review each with links to the full articles for further research.
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PR Scams
The topic of one of my most recent Substack newsletters (FREE to subscribe!), I review some common tactics and what to look out for.
1. Unrealistic Promises
Be cautious of PR firms promising guaranteed media coverage or success without a tailored strategy. A “PR firm” recently contacted me offering Times Square billboard ads, a NY Times book review, and other costly options for the low, low price of only $500.
Sounds like a great deal, right? Nope. No website, no discernible online presence, and an invoice I didn’t pay to a company based in India (no offense to India). Plus, logic would dictate that a NY Times billboard ad would cost far more than the price they quoted. (Most digital billboards cost $5000 or more.)
I’ve shared their info directly with Writer Beware, which they’re (hopefully soon) adding to a public post.
2. Upfront Fees Without Clear Deliverables
Genuine PR firms should provide a clear contract with outlined deliverables before requesting payment.
In my experience, most will offer a monthly payment option, so you don’t have to spend a significant amount all at once.
3. Lack of Proven Track Record
Research testimonials, case studies, and past client results before engaging a PR firm. And sometimes that’s not even enough – with the above example, I looked at their case studies and then contacted those writers.
They wrote the articles, but not for that company. It’s reasonable for you to ask for references, examples, etc. Don’t fall for the pressure tactics.
Specific Examples of Publicity Scams
Here are several well-documented PR scams:
• Leavitt Peak Press Scam
A fake publisher that contacts authors with unsolicited emails, offering to republish their old books with “100% royalties for life.” Be wary of such unrealistic offers.
Read more here from the Authors Guild.
• Authors Guild Literary Impersonation
Scammers posing as the “Authors Guild Book Acquisition Team” attempted to lure authors with fake submissions and lucrative deals.
• Next Phaze Media Group
This scam involves bogus agents charging authors upfront fees for potential movie deals, never delivering on the services.
• Pageturner Press & Media
A member of the Authors Guild was planning to self-publish his latest book when an alleged senior agent from Pageturner Press & Media (Pageturner, US) assured the author that they could secure a publishing deal with an advance of $1.5 million with Basic Books, a well-known imprint of Hachette Book Group.
The representative insisted that the writer make additional payments for advertising and distribution efforts, which never materialized. More here.**
**All well-researched and documented examples.
Linked Resources
Read the entire article here (FREE to subscribe)
- Publishing Scams
As an author navigating the online world of social media, marketing, and author platform activities, you need to be vigilant about various scams that can target your personal and professional life.
Here are some common scams to watch out for and how to handle them with linked resources and help:
1. Vanity Press Scams: How to Identify and Avoid Them
What to Look Out For:
– Offers from publishing companies that require a hefty upfront fee to publish your book. No legitimate publisher will ask for any money upfront.
– Promises of guaranteed bestseller status or unrealistic sales numbers. No one tactic will get you bestseller status or millions of sales. I do suggest promo bundling, but that’s a topic for a future post.
How to Handle:
– Research the company thoroughly. Look for reviews and testimonials from other authors. GTS – Google That Shit. There are plenty of blog posts, articles, and videos available that discuss suspicious companies. Take five minutes and see what there is to see.
– Join writing communities and ask for feedback about the company.
– Remember that legitimate publishers do not ask for large upfront payments.
2. Spotting Fake Literary Agents on Social Media
What to Look Out For:
– Agents who charge reading fees or demand payment before securing a deal. They get a 10-20% commission off you once you’re signed. Believe me, they get their money (and most earn it ethically).
– Agents who have no verifiable track record of successful client placements. Ask for verifiable links and examples.
How to Handle:
– Verify the agent’s credentials through reliable sources like the Association of Authors’ Representatives (AAR).
– Be cautious of agents who approach you unsolicited on social media, via email, or even by phone calls. They could be completely legit, and several author friends have connected with agents that way, but I would check them out thoroughly.
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Social Media Scams
Receiving scary emails from Meta or other sites? As a social media manager, part of my job is to check my clients’ various author pages inboxes (I don’t touch personal accounts), particularly on Facebook and Instagram.
For the last year or so, I’ve started seeing these threats (examples below) and have been deleting these messages, which look entirely believable and are usually accompanied by the threat of the next apocalypse unless you click on the link!
(Don’t click on the link.)
In actuality, these are scam attempts to hack your accounts, dig into your ad account to grab your credit card or other sensitive information, and, often, lock you out of your account.
And because Facebook is, ya know, so customer service-friendly, they immediately respond to our queries. NOT.
How To Spot A Scam
THIS IS A FAKE NOTICE, screenshotted just over the past month:
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META and AI
Are your books being used to train AI models?
Have you heard? There has been a recent stir involving Meta (the parent company of Facebook and Instagram) and its use of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly concerning writers and their intellectual property.
Full transparency: I’m not an AI expert, nor do I claim to be. I have been researching its use as a small business owner, and watching everything unfold, like many of you. I don’t have answers, but I’d like to discuss the potential pros(?) and cons from an author marketing perspective.
Are your books in there? Mine are.
Check now:
Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train. The collection’s current iteration captures millions of books and scientific papers. ( Here’s the free article on The Atlantic).
The controversy centers on Meta’s use of a vast database of pirated books, Library Genesis (LibGen), to train its AI models without author permission.
LibGen is an online repository that offers free access to millions of books and academic papers, many of which are copyrighted.
This means that Meta’s AI systems have been learning from and potentially replicating content created by writers without our consent or compensation.
Do you have to be on Meta to have your books used? No. This is a database of published works. Doesn’t matter whether you use Meta products or not.
How are writers and publishers responding?
This situation has led to significant backlash from the writing community worldwide. For instance, Richard Osman, author of The Thursday Murder Club series, has called on writers to challenge Meta over these copyright breaches.
Similarly, Australian authors have expressed outrage upon discovering their works may have been used without consent to train Meta’s AI. Legal actions are underway, with lawsuits filed against Meta for copyright infringement, as authors demand enforcement of copyright laws and fair compensation.
This controversy could impact us in several ways:
- Intellectual Property Concerns: The unauthorized use of writers’ works to train AI models raises significant intellectual property issues. If AI-generated content begins to mimic the style or substance of existing authors, it could dilute the originality and value of their work.
More here about France’s reaction. - Market Saturation: The proliferation of AI-generated content could lead to market saturation, making it harder for genuine, human-authored works to stand out. This could affect book sales and the discoverability of authentic content.
- Erosion of Trust: If AI-generated works flood the market (and they are), readers may become skeptical about the authenticity of content. This could decrease reader engagement and trust in published materials.
To navigate these challenges, you might consider the following strategies.
Click here to read the rest:
Scammers count on writers being too overwhelmed, too trusting, or too eager for a traditional publishing contract to ask questions—but you don’t have to fall into their trap. With awareness, community, and a healthy dose of skepticism, you can protect yourself, your money, and your work.
Whether it’s a shady PR promise, a fake literary agent, or a tech giant mining your words to train AI, the more you know, the harder you are to exploit. You deserve transparency, respect, and real results—not empty hype.
Stay informed, stay alert, and remember: your words matter. Don’t let anyone take advantage of them. Knowledge isn’t just power: it’s protection.
by Rachel Thompson (@BadRedheadMedia) May 4, 2025
What about you, scriveners? Have you been approached by any of these scammers? Did you fall into any of their traps? For more on scams, check out some of Anne’s Publishing Scams blogposts here and here.
About Rachel Thompson
Rachel Thompson is the founder of BadRedhead Media, LLC, where she helps authors build sustainable, ethical, relationship-focused marketing strategies that actually work.
An award-winning, bestselling author and veteran book marketer, Rachel has worked with hundreds of writers over the past fourteen years to elevate their visibility, protect their creative rights, and grow their platforms with confidence.
She has written three books specifically for writers: The BadRedhead Media 30-Day Book Marketing Challenge, and two mini-guides on SEO, blogging, and newsletters, as well as Author Branding.
She’s also the author of Broken Pieces, Broken Places, and Broken People, powerful memoirs on trauma and healing.
💻 Website: badredheadmedia.com
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Yes, there are a lot of scams out there. My Facebook timeline is poisoned with all sorts of ads offering help in writing, editing, publishing, and marketing books. These programs vary from $179 to $499 but can go much higher.
Bestselling author J.A. Konrath (whose books have sold in the millions) said it best about programs like these:
“Selling hope to the hopeless is big business.”
Even the higher end programs with so–called Brand names are scams, in my opinion.
Take for example, FORBES BOOKS (a subsidy publisher). Their authors have paid either $125,000 or $250,000 to get their respective books published with promises of great results. Yet the typical book published by Forbes Books has sold fewer than 750 copies through normal book channels (bookstores, Amazon, and big box stores) in its lifetime.
On the Forbes website, they say that they featured one of the books of their authors in an ad in Times Square in New York. I don’t care how much the ad cost. This will have been wasted money. The book that was featured in the ad has sold fewer than 500 copies through normal book channels.
Here is the bottom line: A book will not sell by itself and you have to be truly creative with your promotion. I have come up with 75 to 100 of my own unique “marketing” techniques that 95 percent of authors and so called “book marketing experts” are not creative or smart enough to come up with. All of these are much more effective than an ad in Times Square. I have used similar unique “marketing” techniques to get over 125 books deals with various foreign publishers around the world. These “marketing” techniques involve what my competitors are NOT doing — instead of what my competitors are doing.
I’m to the point where I don’t trust any of them.
I understand that, Alex! I shared links of legit organizations where you can input the name of the person or company. Hope that helps.
Swipe left and delete.
Rachel and Anne, thanks for warning less experienced writers. The scams keep getting more sophisticated and convincing.
Ernie, thanks for that great quote from Konrath: “Selling hope to the hopeless is big business.”
Anne, wishing you a fun, successful appearance today!
Hi Debbie, and thank you for reading and commenting. I’ve worked with authors for over 14 years, and even the most experienced businessperson can sometimes be fooled by how convincing they are.
Again, I look up everything, and check all the various sites linked in the article. Lots of help available.
Thanks for sharing, Ernie. Grats on your success!
Excellent post, Rachel! I don’t know why people can’t understand that if it sounds too good to be true, it is. You do an excellent job showing how these scams work.
Thanks so much! It’s truly scary – scarier than before because of all the AI stuff going on. Thanks for reading and commenting x
Scams are an epidemic. Why would writers have immunity?
Your article is an inoculation.
Having written a book or two and finding myself still waiting for success to break down my door, haul me into the street, and vault me and my work into the heavens, I recognize the vulnerability of wannabe best-sellers.
When “opportunity” knocks, we’re already inclined to believe we’re entitled to the good fortune that has finally arrived.
Be skeptical. The Brooklyn Bridge is not for sale, especially at the price being offered.
“The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.”
John Steinbeck
Great quote! Thanks for reading and responding, John. All truth.
Another scam that’s becoming increasingly prevalent is the use of AI to rapidly duplicate books in an Amazon top 100 category with a few key details changed like the title, wording in blurbs, names, and occupations. The covers and the first couple chapters of these books tend to be very similar to the books copied with minimal rephrasing, then they deviate as the AI used takes whatever course the author set. It’s not ‘technically’ plagiarism but certain markets, like the sapphic fiction categories, are being flooded with books produced in a day that are rip offs of category top 100s and riddled with errors.
Yes, absolutely it’s a huge issue! Jane Friedman has written extensively about it (her books were AI republished without her knowledge or consent): https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/aug/09/amazon-removes-books-generated-by-ai-for-sale-under-authors-name
Re: the fake FB DM’s.
I did briefly get sucked into one, but I had a lot of my FB friends, who ran their own pages and the like, tell me it was just a scam. Still, it spooked me enough to change my FB password before continuing on my merry way. I now block and delete those messages.
What helps is that I have a basic understanding on how FB notifies you in case you run afoul of a rule, because it happened to me once with a comment that I had made on someone’s page. I followed their rules, appealed and got the strike removed.
A piece of advice: if you mess up on FB, they will tell you directly via a notification on what you did and the steps needed to rectify.
Yes, exactly! Those scams look very real and I get at least one or two clients freak out weekly about them. And these are smart, experienced authors. Instead of ‘trust, but verify’ it’s ‘verify, research, and maybe perhaps, trust.’ Sad, really.
Thanks for the info, Ernie! Grats on your success.