It is still January, so I wish everyone a very happy 2026.
Like every year, however, it will have its good and bad bits. One of the plagues of 2025 has been the rise of the AI-generated author scammer.
In the past few months, I have received many unsolicited emails from “people” with Gmail addresses. In beautiful English, they praise my latest book, Cold War in a Hot Kitchen, and offer to promote it to book clubs or to help me drive sales through Amazon algorithms.
I nearly fell for the first scam because the solicitor didn’t ask for money up front. Each time I asked a question, the scammer replied in a reassuring tone that they understood my caution and would be happy to provide testimonials from real authors. When I wrote to these authors, I received an immediate gushing reply.
Which made me pause. The email addresses provided for these authors were Gmail addresses, which, if they use them, most authors keep private. And these authors had no websites.
Red flag. I played along for a bit until I got to the point of the scammer asking for a PDF of my book to show the book