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Writer. He/him demisexual # bi cis. Stutters. # ActuallyAutistic . Eight self-published fantasy works, five currently available.
indieauthors.social
Writer. He/him demisexual # bi cis. Stutters. # ActuallyAutistic . Eight self-published fantasy works, five currently available.
indieauthors.social
@dylanmadeley@indieauthors.social
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6d ago
@christymarx@beige.party So, my experiences haven't been that involved, but I too got in touch with Victoria Strauss early in a particular wave of new scam types last year. The ones with effusive praise which, if you look at it, is just back cover blurb and maybe one review or author interview fed into an LLM. Pretending to be a secret cabal of reviewers, a very easy story to disbelieve.
But my latest one, still not as intense as yours from the sound of it, was pretending to be from the East London Book Club in Wanstead. I found it odd that a random UK book club would read my author bio and still invite my Canada-dwelling self to drop in for an in-person Q&A about a book that, surprise, is not yet released! However, the name and (scraped) image they used checked out. Perhaps the one detail they used to be more convincing was their undoing: they included the real Meetup dot com link of the club they were impersonating.
So, I signed up for a free trial on Meetup just to verify with one of the admins. It resulted in a lovely correspondence where we all got caught up on the "book club scam" type emails, I passed on the most recent and relevant Writer Beware blog post about it. Apparently, the real person who had been impersonated got a genuine chuckle out of reading what fake-her had to say. But they are seriously looking into it however they can. Because I didn't lose anything but time that day, while I suspect such emails could be a reputational hit for any real clubs being impersonated.
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