The Book Club Email That Can Cost You Even If You Say No
Episode 07 of Calling Out the Shadows: A Clarity Over Comfort Podcast

The book club email that can cost you even if you say no. There are a lot of authors, including me, that are getting dozens of these per week. In some cases, daily since late 2025. For me, it's been about the last month. Writer Beware named it the Return of the Nigerian Prince Redux. So the thing here is the target is indie authors, first-time authors after their first release, late-career authors.

And this list comes from scraping Goodreads, Amazon author pages, IngramSpark catalogs, podcast guest lists, conference attendee lists. What the scam is, is it's a friendly cold email and it's generic praise like, we voted unanimously, or your book spoke to us deeply. No specific scene or character. Oftentimes, when they start talking about the book, they talk about it as if it's the information that's already out there about the back cover.

In my case, with Calling Out the Shadows, I've had people say, this really just hit us. And they would name sections that are already out there publicly. And I'm thinking to myself, you haven't gotten through these chapters. The book's not out yet, not in any form. So it was a little bit of a red flag when I first started experiencing it. And then I saw it happen more and more.

And I responded to a couple of them initially. It was, you know, the red flag had gone up. I said, okay, you want to talk about my book in your book club. I'm not really looking to pay anything for that. And from what I recall, with book clubs, didn't ever have to pay in the past. And this one guy, he even came back. He goes, no, no, no, we're not asking you to pay anything, but we're asking for a contribution.

And I just said, that to me is payment. And they say, well, we have to put this together and then we have to put your promo together and we have to do all this stuff to market for the event. Well, if it's the book club and you're all meeting together, I'm kind of having a little trouble with that. So I continued to bypass some of these. And a few of them I responded to, but I found out that once you respond to these, it can end up getting your email into this segment of getting a whole bunch more shot back at you.

So part of the scam, too, is they say, Zelle or Venmo or CashApp or gift cards. And many of these emails, when you look at the email, it's something at a Gmail or at a Yahoo. And there was even one guy that emailed and he was faking being someone that is a genuine book club person. And then I contacted that book club on Facebook, and they said, we have nothing to do with that.

Now, some of the problems that you run into with this is if you unsubscribe, it confirms an address is monitored. The unsubscribe link is bait. So the best thing to do if you get hit with any of these: don't respond, don't say no, block and delete, never click anything in the email. And this whole claim to membership in the hundreds or thousands. These real book clubs are not hundreds of thousands of people. They tend to be 6 to 12 regulars, some of these online 20 to 50 or so active.

So it's just another one of those scams to try to grab money, to try to feed the egos of some of those that are saying, oh, well, maybe this will help me. But in the end, a book club, if they're asking you for money, it's not a real book club. And if you reply just to say no, you've already paid them in a different currency with your inbox and your email. So you can either just delete it and go away, or report it. Add a phishing flag to it. You can send it to the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov, Writer Beware, ALLi Watchdog Desk, or anywhere else.

But the number one thing is you've got to take it seriously with what you have, with what you're doing, and with the people that are coming at you on any given day. So don't let this book club email scam get you or get your money.