Anyone familiar with the Manhattan Book Club?

[Hopscotch]

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?

[TimothyEllis]

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.

[alhawke]

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  ).

[Post-Doctorate D]

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.

[Hopscotch]

Thank you all!

[TimothyEllis]

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. 

[Jeff Tanyard]

All emails from "book clubs" are sent to junk/spam folder.

 

[Bill Hiatt]

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.

[Cabbages and kings]

You have to pay them to discuss your book?

If they actually liked your book, wouldn't they do it for free?

[Lorri Moulton]

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.