Support for Indie Authors discussion

I have received a few e-mails since registering at Goodreads in which the writer asks if I'm interested in their review. The way they tell me to contact them for "more information" makes me think these are folks who will want me to pay them for an Amazon review.

Am I misreading their intent? Do you get these e-mails, too? And isn't it against Amazon TOS to pay for reviews?

I've received emails like this too and yes the paid reviews are against Amazon TOS. I'm not sure if they also offer to post their review on their own websites which wouldn't violate Amazon TOS, but unless they have an amazing reach it may not be valuable. I usually don't engage with these emails.

Haven't seen those myself yet, though it's likely to be due to the fact I am not finished with my debut yet.
Anyway, paid reviews are a problem. First, it breaks the rules. Second, you can't even be sure the review will make any sense. They are doing it for the money they get from it, not to genuinely share their opinion with others as organic reviews do. At least that's my opinion on that matter.

When I first published I was all excited to receive such email. Most were not asking money, only a free book, so being eager to get reviews I would send them a free copy. NONE returned a review. So for those I think they just want free books...maybe pirating or whatever but like others said, don't pay attention to these emails. And yes, it is against Amazon's TOS to pay for review.

Let me guess... they said they're interested in your book, but did not give a title or even a hint as to why they're interested.

Stuff like that is nearly always a scam of some kind. Ignore it.

I, too, received a request from a Goodreads member stating they wanted to review my book but did not have Kindle Unlimited. I was asked to email it. I tried to look at the members bookshelf to see if he read my genre, but the account was private. I answered by friend request, and have not had a response.

As I said in another thread, if their profile is private, then hands off. When you can't see their shelves, what they read and how they rate/review it, it's likely they just want free stuff in the better case, get money out of you in the worst.

I've received tons of these as well, not only from Goodreads profiles, but just randomly appearing in my email from random people. Jim. J, Frank T., just weird names like that. I've replied to a couple in the past just to see what would happen and they never even replied.

I'm extremely cautious with things like that. I think some scammers prey on indie authors, knowing how desperate some are for reviews.

Same here, I received a few and, each time, I checked on their profile. All were private and, as said, their message was far too generic. I consider it spam or worse but, because I want to be fair, I am always contact Goodreads, just in case the profile would be genuine.

I replied to one of these and likewise never heard a thing further. Maybe they just want free books?

At last week's meeting of the writing group I moderate, we had a new arrival, seeking a better knowledge of writing. She had undergone a very difficult time in her life, and had received a call from Writers House, saying they were interested in publishing a book on her experience, if she would write it,

Sadly, Author House deals in steering people to self-publishing, and offer to "help" with editing, cover design, and other such supposed services.

Never forget that agents and publishers don't contact you. They already have ten or more times the submissions they need. And money flows to the author, never the other way,

Jay said it right in the last paragraph. In short: If they ask you for money, it's 99% a scam.

Be aware of any paid services from such 'publishing' companies. More so if they ask for hundreds (let alone thousands) of dollars.

Jay wrote: "At last week's meeting of the writing group I moderate, we had a new arrival, seeking a better knowledge of writing. She had undergone a very difficult time in her life, and had received a call fro..."

I've never heard anything good about Author House. I think it was David Guaghran who has written extensively in his blogs about what a scam they are. Be warned!!

At the same time, I think if you are lucky, you might get contacted by an agent or publisher if you are indie. Andy Weir certainly did, and I've known one or two other authors who have. But you really have to develop your audience before that happens.

Yeah, David Gaughran makes a lot of posts about these scams. I've seen his list of those companies, and it was a long one.

I received several of those solicitations in the past few weeks. And what a coincidence? I just published my second novel. How convenient for them. My policy is to not give freebies to anyone in exchange for a promised review unless I either know the person or I've solicited them (such as the Goodreads group where the moderators set up fellow Goodreaders to promise to review books within 4 weeks (not sure of the group--Support for Indie Authors?)

I do think the shysters either want a free book or want to take that free book and pirate it, thereby profiting off my labor. I politely refused the first one. The rest...? Straight into the spam folder!

Chris

I generally give them the free book.

There are more free books out there than you can shake a stick at. At this point I'd rather get read by a reader that wants a free book than not read at all. They could pirate all the books they wanted from KDP giveaways and run out of time to put them up on TPB.

The way I see it, books cost so little these days and are so easily available for free, that anybody asking me for a free copy must be really hard up. I hope that my stories take them away from their drudging existence for a few hours ;)

I've had a few times where a random person emails me about reviews. They usually sound off, and I don't reply.

Sometimes I get emails from people offering to promote my book in some way. If they have a website I'll sometimes visit it out of curiosity. I find with these that they usually sound fairly legitimate, and in fact I don't think they are necessarily all scams (though some probably are). I think sometimes people are genuinely trying to do something to promote books, but in reality I expect you would be paying for a service that doesn't really work. If you are contacted by a website like this the best thing is to google something along the lines of "anyone used insert name of site here" and quite often you'll find other people's experiences, particularly on Kboards there are often discussions about promotion sites.

In terms of being contacted by traditional publishers, this has happened to me, so it can happen.

G.G. wrote: "Most were not asking money, only a free book..."

I just started getting these, too. They seem off somehow—but with no money request, the nature of the scam isn't clear to me. Pirating my book? Seems like a stretch.

Here are red flags I watch for:

- The offer message is very similar to other oddly-vague messages

- As mentioned above, their GR profile is private (seems odd if they're offering to post lots of reviews)

- Their email address looks like [a-cat-walked-across-your-keyboard]@gmail.com

- I Google site:goodreads.com "their-GR-name-goes-here", which finds all references to them on Goodreads, and the only way they've ever engaged with anybody is to offer a free review (doesn't work well for common names)

- If I'm still not sure, I Google the first few words of the message (putting the text in double quotes) and see what comes up.

If I didn't contact them, I don't deal with them. With all the scams and other nefarious things out there, I don't play well with others when it comes to my book. Unless I know you, or have contacted you in some way, your offers are trash.

I got three of these offers in the last week. Thank you very much for the offers, but I'm not falling for whatever scheme they have in mind.

The rule of thumb for me: If I didn't contact you, don't bother contacting me. I'll not do business with someone I don't know or asked about your business. As for reviews, if I get them, it get them, If not, I'll not use any underhanded method to get them.

I'm still getting them but I'm not responding anymore. Can't be bothered to respond to an obvious spam account that doesn't even try to get my name on the email. Not sure what their game is tbh.

I am getting a lot of these also. I am not sure whether to give one a go just as an experiment. But I guess if you have to pay I would be uncomfortable with payment details being provided.

I've also gotten a few - they come in a message with "If you are looking for reviews for your newest book" , i.e. they don't even know what my book is- they probably just work off a list of Author Pages on Goodreads. Also states that they don't have "Kindle Unlimited", just like Kay said.
The profile is private of course. If they mentioned the title of my book I'd be more inclined, but even then I'm not very trusting. Although my book is officially published and I could get them for offering it up elsewhere - that would be a lot of work and I'm certainly not going to make it easy for them.

I've also gotten 3 in the last week. How are they getting our private emails? Spam!

Put me on the list of people who have received these messages. Here's the latest one:

"Hi,

If you are looking for reviews for your newest book, I am willing to read and review it. You can send me a review copy to xxxxxxx@gmail.com. I accept epub, mobi and pdf formats. I am also available as a beta reader.

Please email me your queries at xxxxxx@gmail.com. I don't login to Goodreads often.

xxxxx

P.S. I don't have a Kindle Unlimited account."

The XXXX's are the person's private info. Even though it's probably just someone trying to scam a free book out of me I probably still shouldn't post their name and email address.

I offered one a review copy through Google Play Books. I figured on the slim chance they were legit, I'd give it a shot. In the likely event that it wasn't legit, what would it cost me? One review copy? It wasn't as if they were going to buy a copy if I didn't offer them a free one. Anyway, they disappeared without a trace. A few similar ones I just filed in the Junk folder.

Alex wrote: "Put me on the list of people who have received these messages."

Curiously, I received a bunch of these for about a week after I started posting my prepublication book on a few sites (Amazon, Goodreads, Bookbub, NetGalley, etc.). After that -- nothing. It's been a couple of months.

At first, I was concerned that I'd ended up on an author spam list and would keep getting these. But for me at least, it seems like new listings are what triggered the emails.

Andy, it makes some degree of sense:
If you were about to release the book (If I understood you right, you listed it but not yet released, correct me if I am wrong) - that means your book is ready and the potential scammers would not need to do anything but offer ludicrously-priced marketing packages without pretending to do any other services (such as editing) while still getting to label it as published by them. And, at that stage, it's still early enough to pull the book down for some last-minute adjustments. After it's fully live, there's not that much to do.

Yep. This was 3 months before the pub date, which is still a month away.

The only reason I was (pleasantly) surprised by the ensuing silence is that, with most other kinds of spammers, they just keep sending you offers. Since the book isn't published yet, I feel like I should be a ripe target. I'm just glad they don't see me that way.

I'll shortly sum up what I've been reading about scam-type emails.

Told simply, the first email is to be done in a way that not only baits those they can scam but also weed out those who are too smart to fall for it*. For any kind of scammer (whether it's 'publishing' or a Nigerian prince promising wealth or long-lost cousin or whatever), the worst-case scenario is trading e-mails for months only to get nothing out of it. So, if one does not take the bait on the first try, they move on.
They need to make sure all their people (in several cases outsourced from third-world countries) are working as much as possible on the people they can get money from and waste no time on those they can't get anything from.

That's the difference from spam which keeps sending offers to as many people as possible but those offers don't need any further communication (think advertising spam full of links to whatever they try to sell).

* on a side note, that is why there are spelling errors in the scams trying to get money from people: those who'd not fall for the bait anyway will notice them and will see right away what it is, and ignore it. On the other hand, those who don't notice the critical errors are most likely uneducated enough to fall for the ruse as a whole.

Interesting, I hadn't heard that about spelling and grammar errors as a way to filter out marks. I just assumed scammers just didn't bother to ask for proofreading from a native English speaker...

I've received ones like that, and usually delete them. At first, I'd email them to ask which of my books they want to review, because I've published several across two genres. When they didn't respond, I figured they were fishing for free ebooks and forgot about it. When I get those vague "I'll review your new book!" and they don't know my book title - nope. A legit reviewer knows what they're getting into.

New here, and I think I just fell for this scam, only not a for pay review. She said she had a Goodreads account but does not or "does not log in to Goodreads often." Since I likely fell for this I will not accept any more review requests or send any more of my copy of books to anyone. Usually I am suspicious of this stuff but like I said I'm new here and if the person hands out copies of the book to whoever oh well. It's the copyright infringement that concerns me and the violation of DMCA if they try to change the book. Plus this person said he or she was a beta reader. The more I read these kinds of posts the more likely I will be to not even consider legit review requests legit. Scam me once....

Alex wrote: "Put me on the list of people who have received these messages. Here's the latest one:

"Hi,

If you are looking for reviews for your newest book, I am willing to read and review it. You can send me..."

This is EXACTLY the wording I got, and I fell for it! Scam me once... Oh well, glad I found this out while I am still new.

If you didn't contact them, then delete. We all get them be it from people trolling Goodreads or Amazon, Facebook. Yes they want you to pay them and they only are able to be used as editorial reviews.

Best bet...hit the delete button and put it where it belongs.

I just got the same one. First one for me and I'm glad I looked on here first. I've found my books on websites giving them away in PDF format before and I have no idea how they get hold of them or how they get away with it.

They seriously are giving your book away without your agreement. Is that legal!

I doubt it. They faked the reviews too. All from goodreads readers that have my books on their to read lists but have not yet read them.😠

I got a request for a free book for a review too. First thing I looked at was their profile - it had only 5 reviewed books - that's not encouraging. Then I considered that there is no website associated with this "reviewer". My suspicion besides pay to play is that it would be a great way to get book content without paying that can then be pirated or plagiarized. Be careful out there.

Jordyn wrote: "I got a request for a free book for a review too. First thing I looked at was their profile - it had only 5 reviewed books - that's not encouraging. Then I considered that there is no website assoc..."

My books are on a website called lovebestsellbooks.id and having just checked, yours is on there too Jordyn. I suspect that a lot of Goodread books are giveng away for free on there. Possible with some kind of bug or virus downloaded with them.

This is interesting. :-) There are *lots* of PDFs at lovebestsellbooks.id. Stephen King's The Shining, Terry Pratchett. Even my very very short story. I bet if you've done give away your book is there!

And I never give PDFs away! No betas either. So they got it from a give away years ago or just stole it from Amazon.

You probably already know this, but don't try to download your own book to see if there is actually anything beyond a cover. It's a phony site.

M.L. wrote: "This is interesting. :-) There are *lots* of PDFs at lovebestsellbooks.id. Stephen King's The Shining, Terry Pratchett. Even my very very short story. I bet if you've done give away your book is th..."


I raised this on Twitter a few months ago but nobody had heard of that site. There should be somewhere you can report it you'd think.

For everyone on here: another author blogger on wordpress said on a post last year she had some amazon free sale or something and found out someone had downloaded the free book (sale on weekend) and given it away on some website. so this has been going on for years I guess. Glad I paid Lulu Publishing for a print-ebook package. With a print book registered with LoC theycan still scam you but any legal recourse would be easier if you have a softcover. And this fake bookstore, can they be reported to the FTC? I mean, stealing from Stephen King? Sheesh!

Copyright infringement of this sort is a civil matter unfortunately. That means you can try to sue them, but you need to weigh that against what you'll gain or lose from the entire activity. I don't think even the State Attorney's office would get involved.

Think of these people who steal your work as helping you in advertising your books. Going after them is costly and almost impossible and it isn't worth your time or money. As mentioned above, the site is fake and is only covers. I don't give away PDFs. If they don't have an reader (come on, you can download the app to read mobis on you computer or android, so why do PDFs?

Personally, if all the famous writers are having this issue, it does trickle down. I'm not famous enough, so I'm not going to worry about it at this time. I'm getting sales here and there, so I'm good.

B.A. wrote: "Think of these people who steal your work as helping you in advertising your books. Going after them is costly and almost impossible and it isn't worth your time or money. As mentioned above, the s..."

Correct about giving away PDFs, and I will never give away PDFs again by email and in fact if I feel I need reviews I'll ask for them if and only if the "reviewer" has read/bought book or books. Like the comment part about the advertising part and if the scammer does read the book they just might repent of their behavior. You Know Who works in mysterious ways... The reason I got worked up over this was because the email came "from Goodreads." Otherwise I would not have fallen for it.

Alex wrote: "Put me on the list of people who have received these messages. Here's the latest one:

"Hi,

If you are looking for reviews for your newest book, I am willing to read and review it. You can send me..."

That's good to know, I've gotten 6-8 of these and it's good to know they're a scam for future reference (I haven't given them anything as reviewers should review your book naturally in my opinion)

Allison wrote: "I have received a few e-mails since registering at Goodreads in which the writer asks if I'm interested in their review. The way they tell me to contact them for "more information" makes me think t..."

I've been getting a lot of these emails lately, and yes, they are looking for payment for reviews. Typically, if someone reaches out to me, unsolicited, offering book reviews or anything else of that nature, I just assume they want my money.

I've said this before, If they are contacting you, they want money. Delete and move on. I got one of the ones where they want to make your book in to a movie....for a cool $8000. That is a total scam. If someone wants to make your book into a movie, like publishing with a company, you don't pay, they pay you. I'll admit to be taken in by a a couple of these that cost a lot. If you want reviews, then you need to get your email list to read the book and do the reviews. Kirkus and Blue Ink are editorial reviews. You pay for a few lines that tell you if the liked or didn't like your book. The big share is a quick synopsis of the book. The thing is, you may pay that $400+ for a bad review.

I've gotten quite a few of these requests. One thing I've consistently noticed is that my email is a "BBC". This has become a giveaway that it's spam.

I also received a PM here on Goodreads. I thought this was an actual request to review my novel and sent this person a pdf two weeks ago. Today there was an author question posted by this same person on my profile page saying they would review my novel. I flagged this message as spam for Goodreads to deal with it.

Sharing so others are aware of this problem.

Word of warning for my fellow authors!

There are people sending emails, pretending to be interested reviewing your book. In reality, they want access to your book and information, in order to make it their own for sale. So far these names have made contact:

Cheryl Simmons
Ryan Lawson
Erin K. Ison

Even though they have different email addresses, I traced them coming from the same IP address.