Taglist / Mutuals Warning: Scams targeting indie authors 🚨
Hey everyone, dropping a quick heads-up to the writing community here. I’ve been resting up all day because my nerve pain is acting up fiercely, but I dragged myself over to check my email tonight and found a message that immediately set off my alarm bells.
I wanted to share it here before I go and lay back down because these predatory operations usually hit writing communities in waves, and I don't want anyone else getting caught in their net.
I received a cold email claiming to be from Paul Baggaley, an Editor at Bloomsbury Publishing UK, expressing immense interest in my book, Naked Desire (written under my penname, Lydia Larue). On the surface, it looks incredibly flattering and professional, talking about narrative tension, character depth, and asking if I have agent representation.
However, it is a massive red flag/vanity press scam setup. Here is how you can spot it:
Wrong Identity: They addressed me as "Nicole," completely missing my actual penname/writing identity. This means it's an automated scrape.
Sketchy Headers: The email didn't come from an official corporate bloomsbury.com email address. The return path is a masked, lookalike custom domain ([email protected]).
The Trap: Traditional big-five publishers do not cold-email unrepresented indie authors to pull them into their main publishing programs. This is almost certainly a predatory vanity press trying to harvest personal information, charge massive "upfront production fees," or lock creators into terrible, exploitative contracts.
If you write or archive your work online (AO3, Tumblr, Amazon, etc.), please keep your guard up. If you receive an email out of the blue from a major publishing house praising your specific title and asking for your representation status, check the actual headers and the sender's domain. Don't let their flattery override your caution.
Stay safe out there, back up your work, and don't give these people your information. Back to resting for me.
turnnoffyourmind
blakekathryn
vaporwave
jacobvanloon
amandla
germansingergirl
gummygunk
yousharknotpass
