Scams

A strange introduction

My book has been out in the US a month today! Joshua Rothman wrote this lovely piece in The New Yorker in which he thinks about the lasting allure of the idyllic writer’s room; I spoke with Andrew Limbong at NPR too, who did his own visit to the house of Lucille Clifton (whose poem ‘study the masters’ I used as an epigraph). This coverage has been lovely - it’s been wonderful to see my book generating more conversation, more people wondering about the space of the writer. And of course, it’s welcome too, in order to help get the book out to more people, and hopefully more readers.

That question of how to get a book out there, whatever that means, is of course a crucial one in publishing. People have made whole careers in the area; events on the subject are plentiful; guidance galore, all based on the desire of writers to be visible, and importantly, to be able to make money from their work. This is something I have spent time thinking about in the months since my book came out in the UK: how do we, as writers, get coverage and reviews? How do we find ways to bolster our desire for our work to have a life beyond us? What structures can we call upon, and where do they fall short?

In some ways, I’m looking for ways of measuring ‘impact’, a word I’m borrowing from UK research frameworks, in which ‘impact’ has become a way of recording the lasting effects of your work on the wider world. It is based on the idea that the closed system of the university needs continual opening up, its relevance demonstrated frequently and forcefully to other people, other realms. And as many of us know, it is a totally flawed way of framing the work that happens in university, as if its relevance isn’t always demonstrated by the very fact of its happening in the first place.

Still, there is some sense in the idea that the work we do needs to move beyond the scope of our control. I write because I am perpetually curious, and I want to learn more. Writing allows that process of continual exploration: it’s even better when other people add to that exploration, bringing their own insights and experiences to topics about which you’ve thought long and hard.

So is there a way writers measure their ‘impact’ in today’s publishing industry? I had a sense that the most immediate way of finding this out was through books sold, prizes won, and events taken part in. But in today’s publishing climate these measures may tell only a small part of that. Last week I went to one of the days put on at SOAS and the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies on ‘the business of producing and promoting women’s writing.’ They invited a range of speakers, including Professor Gisele Sapiro and the director of Persephone books (consistent ‘discoverer’ of women’s writing, a kind of faux-feminist marketing I hate), but it was a panel of writers led by Dr Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, the Publishing Director of Cassava Republic, that proved the most insightful. Not only did Dr Bakare-Yusuf lead encourage each writer to give a thoughtful account of her route to writing, but she also gave valuable insight into the need for there to be more communication between publishers and writers. To her mind, writers need to be better informed of the efforts of marketers and PR companies, so that they don’t feel like efforts were not made for their books. She pointed out how difficult ‘coverage’ is at the moment, and how reviews don’t necessarily help books sell. Everyone needs to get better at talking to each other, she said.

This is where the scams come in.

I received my first email at the beginning of the year, from someone giving a strange potted summary of what my book is about, shortly followed by an invitation to have my book featured on the Goodreads Reading challenge. This quickly set off my alarm bells, and a cursory Google showed that the challenge the emailer mentioned was not something that could be paid for - and a thread had been set up to warn others of emails promising something that wasn’t possible.

I replied to the email (I’m now not quite sure why) asking them to leave me alone, and that I knew what they were offering was not real. I received a strange, clearly AI-generated response, quoting the Bible and accusing me of cowardice. I was at first rather taken aback but mostly I was amused - and wondered what prompts the person had used to compose the sentences.

The emailer continued to send me responses every once in a while:

They were nothing if not tenacious.

A few days later, I received another message, again with the potted summary, strange praise which was essentially rewritten promo copy, and offers of help to get me engagement:

The email was signed-off from a name I had seen doing the rounds on the internet. I was another person in a long list of names getting targeted. Even in the course of drafting this post, I received another, again with that hollow praise, and promises that the emailer could get me readers who would cherish my book.

These scam emails seem on the surface to be another form of the malicious contact we are used to in the 21st century, in the same vein as text messages about missed parcels, or even those Nigerian prince emails (I have started to receive newer versions of these, most recently from the ‘FBI’). But they seem to speak to an anxiety in writers about being ‘visible’, even though what this ‘visibility’ actually entails is rather nebulous. I had been ‘visible’ enough on a list of new releases in the US to be targeted by these scams; around my release date in the UK I didn’t receive anything. What did that tell me about the difference between publishers? Between imagined resources of marketing departments? Even between countries?

Importantly, these scams seem most obviously to reveal the idea that all of the success of your book is based on your hard work alone. As if the right kind of marketing, the most strategic posting deployed and controlled by you, the writer, leads to a bestseller.

Dr Bakare-Yusuf’s comments got me thinking about a wider need for writers of all kinds to have a better understanding of the machinery of publishing - and I’m including myself in this too! Publishing is a team sport and the world your book is released into is not predictable.

In the meantime, I’m sure the scams will continue (in fact, I just received another just now…)

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