Writer Sanctum
Writer's Haven => Marketing Loft [Public] => Topic started by: Hopscotch on November 19, 2025, 10:12:14 AM
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Have received a solicitation from the Manhattan Book Club of Hudson, NY, to speak about and then discuss one of my books w/club members in a zoom session. Requires an author's fee to participate. But website doesn't reveal the fee and usual googling doesn't turn up much detail about the club. Does anyone have experience w/this group?
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The combination of 'book club' and 'fee' just says scam to me.
These 'book clubs' are becoming a major scam method these days.
If you need to pay to do a zoom meeting where you're the guest, then no, that's not worth even thinking about.
If the solicitation came from a gmail account instead of an account on the domain of the website, then it's definitely not legit.
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All emails from "book clubs" are sent to junk/spam folder. Some more savvy spammers (or AI agents) will not mention fee until you ask for more information with a follow up email. I advise you ignore the email. There aren't enough book clubs/readers with interest to account for the amount of solicitations I've been getting over the past few months. It's also a popular enough scam now to be well known via ChatGPT and the like (you can always run the AI by AI Grin).
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My first thought would be that if the book club is large enough to be of benefit to the author, they'd be large enough to earn a decent commission from Amazon or other affiliate programs that they would not need to charge the author anything. In fact, they'd probably be happy to book any decent author they could.
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Thank you all!
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My first thought would be that if the book club is large enough to be of benefit to the author, they'd be large enough to earn a decent commission from Amazon or other affiliate programs that they would not need to charge the author anything. In fact, they'd probably be happy to book any decent author they could.
That's a really good point. :tup3b
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All emails from "book clubs" are sent to junk/spam folder.
:littleclap :cheers :littleclap
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I've been hit with two of those in recent days. It definitely seems to be a scam on the rise.
Aside from the fee, it's not too hard to detect. The book club isn't real and thus has no web presence. Or it is real, but its name is being used without its consent. When I questioned the last scammer, I was referred to a website that is connected to several book clubs, but as it turns out, doesn't host online book club meetings as the scammer claimed.
The initial emails are getting more sophisticated, using the product description of a book (and extrapolations from that) to provide an air of authenticity. But that's as far as the authenticity goes. When I asked questions about how the book club operates, the scammer seemed to be using AI to formulate answers. They were easily disproven.
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You have to pay them to discuss your book?
If they actually liked your book, wouldn't they do it for free?
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Lots of posts in Facebook groups and Wide for the Win site about fake (or even cloned) book clubs. Some are real and copied...they're doing it with authors too.
If anyone is asking for money, I assume it's a scam.
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If anyone is asking for money, I assume it's a scam.
This is the way. :cheers
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If anyone is asking for money, I assume it's a scam.
This is what I plan to tell my CPA next year.
If you don't hear from me, I'm probably in prison.
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they're doing it with authors too.
I got a friend request yesterday from an author with 600+ friends.
There was one oddity. I had only 1 mutual friend with this author, and normally there'd be more than that, because they find me through me being friends with other authors, so you accumulate groups of them.
It turned out that single mutual friend had the same name as the author asking me to friend, and when I clicked that author, the author had 2 thousand friends.
There's too many people blindly accepting friend requests without checking them out, that make the scammer's job really easy.
Instant NO.
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I know several people who accept all Facebook friend requests, because they are in the business of self-publicizing. So if
I see their names on the list of friends, it's a pretty good chance I do not want to accept the friend request.
Writer Beware has a lengthy write-up of the book club scam. Or maybe it's the "flattering description of my book" scam. Two versions of the same thing. The reality of book clubs is you should reach out to them yourself, and your best chance is with local ones. No legit book club is likely to reach out to you unless you're a big deal--in which case, you won't have time for them. Some romance writers groups are very active in pursuing book club venues; they establish good relationships with certain libraries and do panels, interviews, or presentations on a regular basis.
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When I was still teaching, we had a faculty book club in which the host selected books based partly on whether or not she could recruit the authors to speak. So that was a case of someone reaching out to an author.
I don't know how she developed her pull, but she actually delivered some fairly high-profile authors. (Some lived in the LA area, some had other business in the LA area.) I think perhaps it was that she delivered more than just faculty purchases. She developed a parent book club and also one that didn't have any connection with school. For at least part of the time, she also had an online book club. And when the high school wanted to do a schoolwide reading experience, she was the one who picked the book. In other words, I think maybe publishers liked her because she could deliver a fair number of sales.
Who knows what else might have been at play? She had the self promotion gene that I seem to lack. She only published one article herself, but had she decided to write full-time, I'm pretty sure she would have ended up on the bestseller list, one way or another. She had just that kind of force-of-nature personality.
She also had the community going for her. Lots of entertainment personalities lived in the area. I doubt she pitched this part, but having her feature a book for schoolwide or community reading offered a pretty good chance of getting it into the hands of a producer or director--or at least, one of their kids, who might leave it lying around the house at some point...
But needless to say, she wasn't charging authors for the privilege of being associated with her book club. If anything, I think they might have gotten an appearance fee. But they certainly got red carpet treatment.
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I don't know how she developed her pull, but she actually delivered some fairly high-profile authors...
...But needless to say, she wasn't charging authors for the privilege of being associated with her book club. If anything, I think they might have gotten an appearance fee. But they certainly got red carpet treatment.
I think you answered your own question.
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Yes, no doubt!
But there must have been a time when she was first getting started when authors and publishers would have wondered who she was. I suppose it only took one giving her a chance to get the ball rolling.
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https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/11/22/yes-all-those-author-services-and-book-club-emails-are-fake-and-no-dont-send-them-any-money/
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Just got a pitch from the Manhattan book club myself. I'm not flooded with these, but I get one or two a week and they're all obviously fake. Almost never do I respond to a cold call email coming from my website contact email.
I'm not convinced any of us need to. Maybe we write in solitude, but most of us have plenty of opportunities to network with other authors and find promotion opportunities; romance writers in particular have multiple info loops to check for such. I belong to four romance writing groups, two of which used to be RWA chapters and two of which still are. Tons of promo info and ideas are always available in just seeing what others are doing. Sometimes it's exhausting to see how much others are into.
And there is always calling or visiting the local public library and asking to set up something.
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Cloning is becoming increasingly common.
There is an actual Manhattan Book Club that looks real. The easy way to determine if you're dealing with the real thing is to contact [email protected]. (This also suggests that the email should be from that domain, though it is possible to spoof an email address.)
There are a lot of book clubs in the world. I've never heard of one charging an author to feature a book. They can pick any book they want without the author's involvement. And if they do want an author, that's usually a draw for their book club and if anything, pays the author a small fee rather than charging the author.
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There is an actual Manhattan Book Club that looks real. The easy way to determine if you're dealing with the real thing is to contact [email protected]. (This also suggests that the email should be from that domain, though it is possible to spoof an email address.)
The giveaway is the reply to address.
The from can be spoofed. But they want the reply, so that has to be real. If it's Gmail, or anything not the from address, then you know it's dodgy.
Most scam emails have 2 different addresses to them.
I quite often get emails supposedly from my own domains. But the reply to is always different.