Speaking of which, I just got a book club one that almost fooled me.
The writing style was similar to some of the new emails selling marketing of one kind or another. Supposedly, a book club really wanted my very first book for their next selection. The first thing I did was check, and I found an FB group whose name corresponded to the book club in the email, so I thought maybe it was legit.
A red flag popped on the second email that came after I responded favorably to the first one. Being chosen involved a small fee to handle promotional costs, etc. Book clubs don't usually charge the authors they're reading, needless to say. So I double-checked. The book group I'd identified on FB turned out on closer inspection to be a group of people reading the books written by that author rather than being sponsored by that author and reading other people's books. Though I doubt the scammer will keep reusing the same name, for the sake of completeness, I'll mention that the name being used was Jenny Colgan. Per my research, the real Jenny Colgan is a Scottish writer with Hatchette UK who has written a huge number of books and been a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller, among other things. She has a website (though it seems to have been put together by her publisher), as well as some social media presence. What she doesn't have is a book club. For a club that theoretically does a lot of promotion, you'd expect considerable internet evidence, but I couldn't find a trace. That said, the scammer, though using Jenny Colgan's name, didn't explicitly claim to be that Jenny Colgan.
I decided to ask for a link to the book club to see what response I would get. Since we'd talked about a virtual book club meeting, I also ask for platform information so I could test my setup on it. That's information the book club sponsor would obviously know.
I got no response to the first question. For the second, I was told it would be a private virtual session or something like that, complete with boldface. I asked both questions more pointedly, explaining I needed the first for verification purposes and reiterated that I need the platform to make sure my camera and mic worked on it.
I'm sure I'll never get a response since there is no real book club. Sigh! But that is what scammers do--they tell us what we want to hear. I don't know how the scammer selects targets, but the book in question has a fair number of reviews, a good Kirkus review, several awards (in the old days I used to get editorial reviews and entered contests, but the record, neither does much for sales) and would get a fair number of search hits from the days when I did extensive advertising. There's just enough there for it to be plausible that someone might stumble across it. Interestingly, the email was sent from the right time zone for the real Jenny Colgan, but that's easily accomplished with a VPN.
