Craig Davis's Blog: Craig Davis author blog

Fraud alert: Someone has been attempting to scam authors into paying to have their books featured at book club meetup events.

I received a pitch last week that claimed to be from a book club in Houston. A similarly worded bogus invitation (likely written by AI) came today, purportedly for a book club in Denver. At least one other Texas club has been used in the attempted fraud.

I contacted the Houston club, and apparently other authors did as well. The club subsequently posted on its Facebook page: "If we reach out to authors, it’s to ask about events, not to sell paid promotions."


Here's what the fraudsters were peddling:


Standard Promotion Plan $205

-- Spotlight feature of your book on our Meetup page prior to the event

- -Inclusion in our monthly club newsletter and reading list (nearly 3,000 members)

-- Dedicated social media post highlighting your book and author feature

-- Promotion of purchase links to encourage members to buy your book


Premium Promotion Plan $310

Everything in the Standard Plan, plus:

--Extended promotional campaign with multiple social media features and boosted visibility

- -Placement as our “Featured Book of the Month” on Meetup and in our newsletter

-- A giveaway campaign to drive engagement and excitement around your book

-- Post-event highlight posts with quotes, photos, and takeaways to extend visibility beyond the meeting

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If you receive a come on like this, hit delete. Book clubs do not operate this way.

The Houston club posted on Facebook: "We do reach out to authors for events sometimes, but not as an attempt to offer promotions and CERTAINLY not to get paid to do so!

A fiction writer is limited only by imagination, because by definition the story is fabrication, a made-up tale. But often imagination is inspired by the author’s experiences.

My new novel “Tail of the Lizard” contains influences from 10 years covering the outdoors sports beat (fishing, boating, etc.) in South Florida.

Tail of the Lizard

A central element in the plot of the novel is a mysterious flying boat that travels at speeds unheard of by conventional watercraft.

This wasn’t simply a product of imagination but rather inspired by a newspaper story I wrote in 1979 about an inventor/engineer who had designed a catamaran-like craft to do that very thing — fly across the water.

He explained that the tubes running through each hull were configured according to laws of physics to enable the vessel to lift off the water and ride on rails of air. He called it a surface effect craft, and by eliminating the drag of water he expected it to reach speeds in excess of 300 mph.

He envisioned it would revolutionize transportation and said it would lead to “the second Detroit.”

In “Tail of the Lizard,” the insufferable Edison Hawk III makes the same claim about the P-BJ-003, which he referred as a skimmer, though it did in fact fly on the rails of air. It was designed by the fictional genius inventor Behrent Juergens, who doesn’t appear in the book but was also the creator of the mini-submarine that is also central to the story.

As for the real inventor I interviewed in 1979, Google turns up some patents of his pertaining to hydrofoils. But a couple of the companies he founded appear to have been inactive since at least 1993.

I am glad to have brought his ideas to fruition at least in fictional form.

(Photo of the inventor's rendering of the concept for the flying boat is on my Facebook author page): @CraigDavisAuthor