I set a trap for a book-marketing scammer (2025) • Hacker News Board

Re: I set a trap for a book-marketing scammer (2025)

#51

Post by tverbeure » Sun, Aug 23, 2026, 5:22 PM UTC

stephbook wrote: post #49

> Some I’d deleted without recording. Some had been auto-deleted from spam after thirty days. Some I’d forgotten about before I started keeping systematic track. > I wasn’t being marketed to. I was being carpet-bombed. Three in a row directly followed by a juxtaposition containing a weird metaphor (shouldn't it be "bombarded" instead of "carpet-bombed"?) Good luck selling books.

“No …, no …, just …”

And more AI-isms. I think we finally found ground zero: the original author whose work was used to train the LLMs.

Re: I set a trap for a book-marketing scammer (2025)

#52

Post by kmeisthax » Sun, Aug 23, 2026, 6:04 PM UTC

bruce511 wrote: post #17

boznz wrote: post #2

Half my spam folder is currently from the same group of people, with similar sales pitches, though one also promised 25 five star Amazon reviews for $200 which is scary if true. The whole blog post just about sums up an indie writers journey, having to become a reluctant marketing person, and fighting the algorithm for recognition; the meme nailed it. Luckily I came to realise after my first book that writing was not…

It's interesting how we seem to go through a cycle. a) There's a gate-keeper who picks winners, and charges money. Maybe book publising, maybe academic papers, maybe music - whatever. b) producers complain - these parasites are sucking all the money out the ecosystem, and adding no value. We need to bypass the gate-keepers. Go to market directly. c) The "indie" scene becomes legit. Barriers to entry drop. Consumers c…

You skipped a step between d) and e) - the stealth reimposition of gatekeepers under the guise of sorting through the crap. On the Internet, this took the form of "recommendation algorithms". The problem with a recommendation algorithm is that, while it is sold as "finding choices you wouldn't have known about", what it's really doing is narrowing the menu. It has to be, because of how the data flow works:

1. Obtain data on what kinds of people enjoy which books, movies, music, etc

2. Train a neural network to predict the sampled distribution. Because that distribution already contains a lot of data for the most popular works, and less for less other works, the model is trained with a bias for already popular works. Conversely, less-popular or niche works may be forgotten completely by the model.

3. Deploy the model. Because the model has a bias to predict certain already-popular works, it will recommend them more often, while the ones with little data in the set are recommended less. This changes the true distribution of the data.

4. Repeat. Take new sampled data from modified distribution and train a new model on that distribution.

As a result of applying this cycle multiple times, the tails drop out. People don't watch or read niche works, so they get forgotten. This is ostensibly fixable, you could bias the model towards less well-known works, but it's more profitable to just make people pay to boost their posts. Bonus points: people who pay to boost are also polluting the model with a bunch of negative data about their work, so they are self-selecting into a class of easy marks who don't get recommended because they keep paying to show in front of people who don't want it.

Re: I set a trap for a book-marketing scammer (2025)

#53

Post by darepublic » Sun, Aug 23, 2026, 6:06 PM UTC

strenholme wrote: post #9

I met a guy who fell for the romance version of that scam over and over again. He was living in an assisted living facility by himself and was very isolated there. He would, as we all do, get those messages via email/Instagram/other chat networks (I get the most of this kind of spam on Telegram, to the point I have disabled Telegram sending me notifications, but the occasional one slips through on WhatsApp; it seems…

need to set up better scams bilking grandad out of money and funneling to a trust for his grandkids

Re: I set a trap for a book-marketing scammer (2025)

#54

Post by kmeisthax » Sun, Aug 23, 2026, 6:10 PM UTC

bambax wrote: post #20

This seems to be limited to the English publishing world, at least for now? I self-published a historical fiction book a couple of years ago, in French, that got a little notoriety (I was interviewed on national public radio in France about it) and didn't receive any one of those scam emails. -- Not "few": zero.

Perhaps the scam hasn't jumped cultural / linguistic borders yet. Pig butchering scams used to be almost exclusively targeted at Chinese users until China kicked out the Triads. The Triads then set up slave camps in Myanmar and started targeting English-speaking users instead.

I wouldn't be surprised if all the book marketing scammers are one or two groups of people that just haven't thought to target French authors yet. But basically any creative endeavor in the Anglosphere has its own attendant scammer ecosystem.

Or who knows, maybe the Francosphere just doesn't have the algorithmic gatekeepers the Anglosphere has.

Re: I set a trap for a book-marketing scammer (2025)

#55

Post by evidaxis » Sun, Aug 23, 2026, 6:21 PM UTC

[flagged]

Re: I set a trap for a book-marketing scammer (2025)

#56

Post by kmeisthax » Sun, Aug 23, 2026, 6:27 PM UTC

liendolucas wrote: post #32

> Authors are desperate because books aren’t selling, traditional marketing isn’t working, and publishers are offering less support per title. We’re feeling pretty helpless about our career trajectories, watching sales numbers decline while wondering what we’re doing wrong. What's wrong? There's nothing wrong. Just people addicted to FaceBook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Netflix, YouTube, etc.

Book publishers have spent the last few decades making a profit off of managing the decline of their entire field of endeavor. Every opportunity to expand the medium was thrown out, and every big fad wound up hurting rather than helping. For example, you know that "generation of readers" a certain YA book supposedly made? What it actually did was destroy graded readers because publishers thought YA books had to go upmarket. The publishing industry is just chock full of short-sighted moves like this.

If you look outside the Anglosphere you see far healthier[0] book publishing, to the point where translations of those books into English are filling the holes domestic publishers are leaving in the market. It started with comic books[1] and expanded into basically all fantasy fiction.

Social media has little to do with this, except that they're also filling a hole publishers aren't interested in filling.

[0] Healthy in terms of sales and audience. The authors of these books are being treated like shit, which perhaps is its own shortsightedness.

[1] It is hard to understate how weirdly pigeonholed western comics are, even after the death of the comics code and the indie comics boom gave authors way more creative freedom.

Re: I set a trap for a book-marketing scammer (2025)

#57

Post by mistersquid » Sun, Aug 23, 2026, 7:34 PM UTC

strenholme wrote: post #9

I met a guy who fell for the romance version of that scam over and over again. He was living in an assisted living facility by himself and was very isolated there. He would, as we all do, get those messages via email/Instagram/other chat networks (I get the most of this kind of spam on Telegram, to the point I have disabled Telegram sending me notifications, but the occasional one slips through on WhatsApp; it seems…

> Everyone close to him, including his family, kept telling him these girls weren’t real, to stop contacting them.

Given he had family, one remedy would have been to establish a guardianship/conservatorship on the basis of mental/financial incompetence.

Re: I set a trap for a book-marketing scammer (2025)

#58

Post by mistersquid » Sun, Aug 23, 2026, 7:37 PM UTC

bambax wrote: post #20

This seems to be limited to the English publishing world, at least for now? I self-published a historical fiction book a couple of years ago, in French, that got a little notoriety (I was interviewed on national public radio in France about it) and didn't receive any one of those scam emails. -- Not "few": zero.

> I self-published a historical fiction book a couple of years ago, in French, that got a little notoriety […].

Was it bad or scandalous, or did you mean “renown” instead of “notoriety”?

Re: I set a trap for a book-marketing scammer (2025)

#59

Post by jorgen123 » Sun, Aug 23, 2026, 8:51 PM UTC

boznz wrote: post #2

Half my spam folder is currently from the same group of people, with similar sales pitches, though one also promised 25 five star Amazon reviews for $200 which is scary if true. The whole blog post just about sums up an indie writers journey, having to become a reluctant marketing person, and fighting the algorithm for recognition; the meme nailed it. Luckily I came to realise after my first book that writing was not…

I'm sorry I only gave you 4 stars on Goodreads. I mostly only ever give 4 stars. But I second the out of the blue e-mail.

For those wondering what book. Here is the trilogy. Free for download: https://rodyne.com/?p=1252

Re: I set a trap for a book-marketing scammer (2025)

#60

Post by buran77 » Sun, Aug 23, 2026, 8:52 PM UTC

kvakerok wrote: post #13

strenholme wrote: post #9

I met a guy who fell for the romance version of that scam over and over again. He was living in an assisted living facility by himself and was very isolated there. He would, as we all do, get those messages via email/Instagram/other chat networks (I get the most of this kind of spam on Telegram, to the point I have disabled Telegram sending me notifications, but the occasional one slips through on WhatsApp; it seems…

Most of the people live in the world they invented, where they are the protagonist, naturally young girls want to talk to the protagonist, even when he's 70. You'd have to dismantle their whole worldview to disabuse them of the protagonist idea, but by 70 it's often too far gone and requires facing a million mistakes they have conveniently swept under the rug with the fairytale they've told themselves.

At that age a lot of people literally don't have the intellectual capacity to deal with this. Their brain is biologically atrophied due to illness, not exercising it anymore, not seeing or hearing well anymore (this has a huge impact), being socially isolated, etc.

They're not inventing a new world, they're not "conveniently" and consciously sweeping anything under the rug, they're not telling themselves a fairy tale. They're just losing much of the world they were living in and have to deal with what's left, holes and all. Why do you think old people are such easy targets for scams and fraud in general? Do you think only the body degrades with age?

If you're young enough to not have seen this in action ever, you'd be excused for not understanding at all what happens and for building such bad faith scenarios. Common sense and some light reading on the topic would have prevented that nonetheless.