There are a lot of things writers do that make us think, “Wow, I really am a writer now!” There are the obvious activities like writing “THE END” for the first time at the conclusion of a story, essay, or book, or filling up an entire notebook with words. But there are other markers, like setting up a website and creating social media accounts specifically for writing.
As a beginning writer, I set up an email account just for writing. I used it for professional correspondence, sending stories to journals, reaching out to literary agents, and eventually for conversing with fans. My first email address for writing was a simple Gmail account: bethmartinbooks@gmail.com. I’m sharing this address with you today because it has been shut down and is no longer in use.
Wanting an even more professional-sounding email, I later established a new account using my custom domain. For the longest time, I had email forwarding set up from the older email to the new one, but as time went on, I started getting inundated with SPAM.
How the SPAM Began
I’ve been doing a handful of events every year ever since I published my first novel. About a month before a certain book event, I started getting emails with subjects like “Email List for Event Name Authors!” that said I could get the list of Author Names participating in the event and their email addresses for a modest fee. I thought these unsolicited offers were weird, and I was a little concerned that somehow private information had been leaked by the event, so I reached out to the coordinator.
Unfortunately, the book event coordinator had seen this grift before. No private information related to the event had been leaked; the list of all the participating authors was available on the event website. Someone, likely with the help of bots, went through the list, scraping each author’s website to compile a list of emails for sale. The coordinator encouraged me to remove my email address from my website, which I did.
SPAM Gets Sophisticated
It used to be that all the spam messages I got were pretty low effort. “Hey, I saw your book on Amazon. I have a popular bookish platform. Pay me to advertise your book!” Fine, they weren’t worded that egregiously, but they were clearly very low-effort, doing little to no research on me or my work before trying to sell me services.
But now, with the prevalence of AI, these SPAM messages have become much more sophisticated. It takes scammers no time at all to feed one of my book descriptions into a chatbot to produce a personalized message that almost feels like it was written by someone who read my book. The message will include specific (yet somehow still vague) praise about characters and themes in the book. They no longer go in with a blind sell; instead, they try to inspire a conversation, build your trust, and then launch into the sales pitch.
Here’s part of an example email I received:
Subject: Helping “The Party Guest” Reach More Readers Who Love Thought-Provoking Fiction
Dear Beth Martin,
I recently discovered your compelling short story, The Party Guest, and was immediately struck by its depth, nuance, and insight into the unexpected ways life challenges our assumptions.
Erin Swan’s experience arriving at the wrong party and uncovering truths that upend her perspective beautifully captures the complexities of human connection and self-reflection. You’ve crafted a story that balances relatability and surprise while exploring themes of change, acceptance, and vulnerability. It’s the kind of narrative that invites conversation long after the final page.
As a Book Club Expert and Literary Consultant, I help authors like you grow their visibility and reach new audiences through curated book club spotlights, author features, and interactive reader discussions…
The email goes on. It almost feels like the person reaching out is personally invested in my story's success, making it tempting to use their services. However, the actual details of the story in the email are lifted directly from the story description on Amazon. The theme of “human connection” is present in most stories, but mine doesn’t really delve into self-reflection. If the emailer actually read “The Party Guest,” they’d know the story deals more with accepting the challenges life gives us.
Also, I only sell my short stories for $1.99, so I won’t see a great return if I spend a bunch of money on marketing them.
I Want Readers to Reach Me
Unfortunately, by removing my email address from my website, I no longer had an easy route for readers to reach out to me. In the past, I’ve gotten emails from fans who read and enjoyed my books, wanted to recommend an event to attend, or had questions about getting into writing. I love these emails, and I want to stay accessible to people who genuinely want to connect with me.
Although most social media networks let you send messages to people, I wanted something that everyone could access and didn’t require a third-party account. (A number of people don’t use social media, and I totally support their choice not to!) I decided that a contact form would work best, ultimately using a simple Google Form to let readers send me a message.
I was really excited when I got notifications that a bunch of responses had been sent through the contact form, but I was immediately dismayed when I read through them. When spammers couldn’t find an email address on my webpage, they sent their spam through my contact form! So instead of digging through junk emails, I was digging through junk form responses. I was back where I started.
After some research on how to prevent spam form responses, I settled on adding an anti-spam question. Common anti-spam checks include simple arithmetic problems or asking humans to leave a specific field blank. One of my long-standing gripes about marketing messages was individuals reaching out to me to sell their book services without doing enough research on me to even know the title of one of my books, so I used that pet peeve to inspire my anti-spam question: “Please list the title for one of Beth Martin's books or short stories.”
Beth has it all Figured Out… Right?
My contact form works for now, but I can see AI-powered SPAM becoming even more sophisticated in the future, forcing me to pivot my approach. But that’s part of being a writer: always learning, growing, and trying new things. In addition to the contact form, people reach out to me through social media or by replying to my newsletter. I’ve even had fans seek me out at a show or event to chat.
And that’s why I do all this. To share my stories. And I love it when people let me know how my stories impacted them.
So, thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought—shoot me a message. And good luck in the good fight against SPAM!
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