> The catch, as you’ll doubtless have guessed, is that the author has to pay a fee for their appearance, variously described as a “spot fee” or a “spotlight fee” or a “spot-securing fee” or a “participation fee”.

Am I being too naive to assume that legitimate book clubs shouldn't be doing this anyway - or is all online activity just a way of generating income now?

Is it me or are those emails clearly understood to be AI generated?

The grammatical usage and structures are a huge tell. Perfect and soulless.

With the whole ecosystem stacked against new and indie authors, and AI getting so good I can see why some people could easily fall for this. I made the tough decision at the start of my Sci-Fi novel writing career to work 100% on the book and 0% on the marketing. It meant I got zero traction and attention in the market (except by word of mouth), and I had to keep my day job, but totally took away all the stress and anxiety.

When I retired last year I took the next logical step and now I give my eBooks away for free, being content with the fact I've achieved something good and I'm giving back to the community.

Yog's law : Money should flow toward the author

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_D._Macdonald

Thanks for sharing this. New authors have enough challenges without getting scammed. I've written a (free) guide for the writing process here: https://frequal.com/forwriters/

The writing is just the first step, however. Promotion is a whole another set of hurdles. I can easilybsee an eager or despondent author falling victim to a promotion scam.

The need to defend against scams and abuse is a cost distributed across all of society - it’d be amazing if there were a way for all to share the costs without creating a giant firewall to wall off the bad countries.

How does one take the good and reject the bad? Even our immune systems still get beaten by cancers.

The main spam i get these days are "your cloud account has expired, pay immediately or you will loose your data".

It's something telling about the internet when spam transitioned from Viagra to cloud computing 8-/

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Such a retarded scam I doubt anyone would pay .