"We discovered your book" outreach that never checked what you are

Where these examples come from

The excerpts on this page are from 45 solicitations received at a single AuthorAZ address over a few weeks in 2026. Forty-four of the forty-five came from the same free webmail provider, including every message written on behalf of a book club, a radio station, an awards body or a publishing company.

That volume is the point. This is not a con crafted for you; it is a spreadsheet being worked through.

The tell that used to give it away

AuthorAZ is software. It has never published a book. Twenty of those forty-five messages praised "your book" anyway, and two named a specific title:

• a regional street atlas published by an unrelated map company, addressed to that company rather than to us;
• an academic monograph on European party politics, complete with an admiring paragraph about its empirical treatment of electoral competition.

Neither has anything to do with AuthorAZ. Both arrived with the confident warmth of someone who had read the thing. The first even opened "Dear [map company]" — the mail merge substituted a different organisation entirely and sent it anyway.

Nobody had checked. Nobody ever does, because checking does not scale and the economics only work at volume.

Personalisation is not evidence

The uncomfortable half of this is that some of them had read the website.

Several correctly described the product — a local-first vault, no cloud, no AI, no subscription — and one quoted a statistic from the homepage back at us. That is genuinely what a real approach looks like, and it is now cheap to generate at scale for every address on a list.

So personalisation has stopped being a signal. What still works is the direction of the exchange: who is being asked for money, and when.

The ask is deliberately deferred

Almost none of these first messages mention a price. They are warm, admiring, and free. What they want is a reply:

If you're interested in being considered, simply reply to this email, and we'll be happy to share the full details and next steps.

The fee lives in "the full details". By the time it appears you have already been told you were selected, shortlisted, or admired — and declining now feels like losing something rather than avoiding a purchase.

Knowing this changes what you look for. Do not scan the first email for a price. Ask instead what happens if you reply, and notice that every path leads to the same place.

Check the sender, not the prose

We used to suggest replying with one question — which part of the book stayed with you? We no longer do. A language model can answer it in a sentence, and asking means replying, which is what the first message was written to get.

What still works happens outside the email:

• Find the organisation yourself. Search for it, or use a source you already trust. Never use a link, phone number or address supplied in the message.
• Match the domain. If the sender claims to work there, the email should come from that organisation's own domain.
• Ask the named person directly, through the contact details on the organisation's own site, whether they wrote to you.
• Decide before you reply whether you would pay for this if it were real. If the honest answer is no, there is nothing to verify.

If you cannot confirm it that way, do not reply. Delete it, block the sender, and mark it as spam.