The Lucrative World of Literary Scams | Hacker News Reader

The Lucrative World of Literary Scams

thedial.world

75 pointssamclemens14 comments

I receive an email like this every day, pretty much. They are always pretty easy to spot, but sometimes there's a few seconds where my hopes are raised, like the message I got from "eric@lareviewofbook.org" yesterday – that singular book being mine, I suppose.

Yes, these have happened before, but if you increase the scams by 10x or 100x, then it's a different, much crueller, beast.

A deep dive into a different literary world scam from Dan Olsen (aka Folding Ideas) covers the world of con artists pushing done for you audio books [0]. It's probably only accelerated since genAI and LLMs became accessible, now you don't even need to low ball audiobook talent to get it made now. I wonder how amazon has tried, if they have at all to avoid being flooded with spam.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw

I know a few publicists who every one here would agree are 100% legit. They've been America for a long time. They've worked in publishing. Etc. And what do they do? Charge the author, send out some press releases and get the author in front of some book clubs. And what is a book club? A bunch of faces on Zoom.

I'm not sure what's so different between the legit publicists and the scammers.

Having the left half of the UI being blocked by an image that does not add anything to the article is quite the design choice.

    > "Not every author is a narcissist, but they all want to be recognized… That's exactly what these scammers are targeting. They have identified a very, very lucrative niche."...
    > 
    > Writers are waiting "for somebody to read their writing," Hoy added. She argued that is why many writers believe the praise scammers heap on them. AI makes many of the compliments sound nuanced and personalized. Elderly authors are particularly vulnerable. As Hoy explained, a significant number of people who have a book in them leave off the writing until they have retired. Something else also kicks into the picture at this life stage: a sizable retirement fund...
    > 
    > ...the voices seemed human...
    > 
    > It is happening all over the world...

Holy gracious smokes... This is such a sorrow... Please... please... dear Artists, People... please don't give up! Please just do the miracle, your professional, ingenious, the invaluably precious, ineffably magnificent Art!

Not new at all, just probably scaled up by AI. Scams like this targeting authors have been around for ages: vanity publishing, fake agents, fake publicity, etc.

Similar scams target would-be actors, musicians, models, etc. Scams targeting models often lead into sex trafficking but sometimes they're just payola scams like this.

There's even some targeting startup entrepreneurs, usually in the form of dodgy "virtual incubators" or people who claim to be able to get you in front of investors or get you publicity.

These guys make the old-school vanity publishers look like paragons of virtue. At least with them, you'd end up a with a garage full of unsold books that you'd paid too much for. Even the Amazon sharecropping system is better. But yes, scammers have preyed on writers for as long as there have been writers. Today's technology allows it to be international and industrial in scale.

Yeah I get like 20 "a family office is looking at your company" emails a day.

Only 20?

I had a spear phishing attempt by someone pretending to be representing the Saudi royal family. Was initially tipped off by the fact that a Saudi wealth fund looking at our company would be like a lion stalking a gnat.

I have an acquaintance who only found out that the investor isn't real after he arrived in Dubai for the meeting and the investor wasn't there

Gold.

Beats my disappearing Chinese investor story. This was from years ago and also an acquaintance.

Company raised a bit angel party round that included several M from a Chinese investor. After series A company is sold and the angels are above water.

All attempts to find and contact this investor failed. Name may have been fake. Business entity may not have existed in China or elsewhere.

Last I heard money was put into escrow for a few years and then would be equally distributed to other investors (shares would cease to exist) but I’m not positive what happened.

Just seems like a variant of romance scams.

then read a bad book? its funny because true artists learn to process praise and you get used and kinda addicted to the Pain of people being indifferent and the cruelty of no one wanting to understand your work, do you think art is for the weak?

it seems obvious. request money=scam

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