Dear Agatha

Wow. I’ve just read Hallowe’en Party and it blew me away. The intricate way it linked the twin themes of apple bobbing and child murder was so exciting that I wanted to get in touch with you to offer our services. As that book is the thirty-first book featuring M. Poirot, people might not read it, given they haven’t read all of the books in the series so far.

I run a book group on Goodreads with millions of members. If you want to get in touch, we can discuss how we can expand your profile – we could use the first book in the series to introduce Poirot to our readers who won’t have met him before. If you don’t gt in touch, that’s fine, I’ll only chase this email up once or twice.

Look forward to hearing from you

Madeup Madeupname (Ms)

So, I’m going through something of an identity crisis at the moment. The above is a truncated version of the sort of email that I keep getting. Requests to promote a book that I didn’t write, addressed to the actual author of said series. I’ve had three such messages over the last week – I’ve had them before, but they seem to be breeding.

The first almost made sense, if it had been sent to the right person. Despite being emailed to me, it was written to M J Trow, even starting “Dear Mei”, Mr Trow’s name (which did take a bit of Googling to check as it’s a truncation of Meirion). It cited his recent Peter Maxwell book, Maxwell’s Enigma, and suggested that I/he gets in touch in order to discuss promoting the first in the series, which it doesn’t name, Maxwell’s House, where presumably someone drinks poisoned coffee from the seventies.

The message is clearly AI slop – see this paragraph that seems to have swallowed and regurgitated a thesaurus:

You have been writing since 1984 and have built multiple active series simultaneously alongside historical biography and true crime. The catalogue is substantial. What tends to lag behind output at this scale is structured placement in the digital community spaces where today’s cozy mystery readers congregate, and that is a practical and addressable gap.

So obviously I ignored it. I didn’t even contemplate tracking down Mei and forwarding it, but then the next day, I received a follow-up, in case I missed the first email. And oddly, there was a subtle difference.

The message was from the interesting named Grebella Gagnon, a “Book Marketing And Publishing Analyst”, sent from her own email account – I suppose she could be self-employed – but the first email, on the sender ident, there was just a big “G”. On the follow-up, the “G” had been replaced by what can only be described as a picture of an attractive woman.

Did they really think that I/Mei would change my/his mind now I knew what “Grebella” looked like?

“Dear Grebella, I wasn’t going to follow up on this offer of yours, but now that I know you’re a pretty lady, that makes all the difference. Where do I send my bank details to?”

I will admit, I was vaguely tempted to engage with this slop – not because of the pretty picture, but to see how far I could go to bother them like they’d bothered me, but I know that way leads madness…

And then another message turned up which was weirder.

This time, it was addressed to Jonathan Stagge. Another author I’ve reviewed and much more recently than Trow, but there were some really weird things here. It was about promoting Death’s Old Sweet Song, a decent classic mystery, because they’d seen it on Amazon and wanted to get it a higher circulation.

Astute readers will note that:

• I’m not Jonathan Stagge
• Jonathan Stagge was two writers, both of whom are somewhat dead
• Death’s Old Sweet Song is out of print – the only copy on Amazon was a second hand one and had no blurb. So how they were going to increase sales baffles me completely.

But there was something even odder. While the wonders of the book are described in detail, such as the serial killer using the folk song Green Grow The Rushes, Oh, it never actually mentions the book’s title. I worked it out because I’ve read the book, but what was this trying to achieve? BTW, this also had a pretty picture of a lady (a different one) on the follow-up email.

Oh, and I’m also not Marvin Lachman, also deceased, and don’t want The American Regional Mystery – a reference books to US locations in mysteries – promoted either.

I’m pretty sure what these are trying to achieve – when I reply, I’ll get a bill for their promotional expenses and I conceivably could see an author who actually did write the book in question deciding it was worth it for the possible increase in sales.

But why pick dead authors? Why pick books that are out of print? And why email me?

I’ve reviewed Death’s Old Sweet Song but if AI targeted me because of that, you’d think it could scrape the actual title of the book to include in the email. I last reviewed M J Trow over ten years ago and never the Peter Maxwell series. I’ve never even mentioned Marvin Lachman on my blog. And while I do masquerade under a pseudonym, it’s not hard for someone with Actual Intelligence to find my name on any passing Brian Flynn reprint or my copyright notice.

I know authors get plagued with this all the time. I saw a message that Mike Craven posted from “Margaret Attwood” saying how she was a fan of his work, and Mike Jecks mentions them a lot too. But at least they are being asked because of books they’ve written – I can understand how the algorithm targets them.

I could understand it too if I was being targeted about the Brian Flynn books, or even a book I’d reviewed on my blog. So, two questions:

1. Am I the only book reviewer getting slop like this in my inbox?
2. Why (for the tech wizards out there) is something joining the dots between these authors and me?

Genuinely curious – do let me know your experiences and insights. And on the off-chance my AI overlords read this – I’m not going to respond, so please do sod off…