A couple of weeks or so ago I posted a randomly-emailed review of one of my books. At the time I didn’t know why I was getting it; I only knew that it was probably AI.

In the time since that blog post went live, I’ve gotten two more of these, but they weren’t just reviews. They came with a pitch to be my personal marketer of those particular books. One of them even had the subject line:

Time travel, memory loss, AND emotional devastation… and only a handful of readers?

Look, I get it — this guy (it was a man’s name signed to the email) is trying to hustle up some business. But maybe not by trying to market a book that was released nine years ago. I have plenty more books (under multiple names) that have come out more recently; why not try to market one of those for me?

I’m sure if I replied to the guy he would want money, which seems reasonable — he would be doing a job for me, and you should get paid for your work. But I don’t have the money for a marketing agent; if I did, I would have used one for Holiday Heat, which was a much bigger project and one that I would love to get more traction in the world (hint, hint). I know he hasn’t actually read the book, though, because I would’ve seen the stats show up in my Kindle dashboard, and no one read or bought that book in the past couple of months. He got all the information in the email from the Amazon page and the few reviews it has. I bet he even created some sort of AI tool to scrape Amazon for books with fewer than X number of reviews and write emails he can then send to the authors.

It’s always nice to get random positive reviews of one’s work. I just wish they weren’t all sent with an ulterior motive.