Making it Big: My First Scam

I didn’t start writing to make it big. There were no dreams of being famous or seeing my name on some best-selling list. The truth is, before I wrote the first words of The Shore, I was doing a lot of driving and listening to a lot of audiobooks. And after a while, I thought, “I could do that. I could write a book.”

Not that I thought it would be easy. I never thought that. But I did think it would be fun to pop into the world of fictional characters. I thought it would be me controlling them. I was wrong. I learned very quickly that my characters liked to talk to me. Tell me what they wanted. Kind of like a toddler.

There was one particular night when I was sitting in the den, staring out the window to the woods behind the house, and Cody talked to me. Or rather, Laura did. The love and loss he endured before Ryan came back to the shore. I had no intention of taking Cody’s story where it ultimately went. None at all. But that night, he led me down his own path.

That’s happened several times while writing these books. It’s fantastic when it does happen. And later, sometimes years later, I still sit back and think, “Where in the hell did that come from?”

At any rate, that’s not what this post is about. What it is about is…the heart-pounding moment that I thought someone might actually be interested enough in my books that they could potentially become best-selling novels. That maybe my name would be recognized in certain households. I mean, it’s not such a crazy idea, is it?

It was a quiet Sunday morning, and I had just sat down to go through the onslaught of garbage that barrels into my inbox overnight. And there it was. An email from someone I’d never heard of. Never asked to hear from. Hadn’t even considered.

“What If the One Person You Never Expected to See Again Was Your Only Second Chance at Love?” That was the subject line. Now, I’m a single girl, but I never thought that maybe someone was reaching out in that way. Instead, the sentiment felt oddly familiar…something I had written at some point about The Shore. Intrigued, I opened the email.

The Associate Managing Director of a publishing company was reaching out to me. ME. I mean, way stranger things have happened? Maybe?

They talked about the kind of book they had been looking for. (Wouldn’t you know it? The Shore hit every mark of their search!) Then they proceeded to tell me all the wonderfully emotional aspects of the story that “captured their attention.”

Yeah. That’s when I knew the shit was getting deep…

Did I have an agent? They’ll only work with agents, but they’d be happy to help me find one if I needed the assistance!

And so on…and so on.

Being me, because I couldn’t just take what I was seeing at face value and hit the delete button, I started to investigate. The publishing company? It really does exist. And the website I found had enough detail, enough content on it that it seemed legit. The “Associate Managing Director”? They even had a LinkedIn profile I could peruse. On the surface, everything checked out. Even the social links matched up.

Then I looked further. The title this person used in the email was “Associate Managing Director,” but the title in their signature block was “Managing Director.” The address in that same signature block? The actual address didn’t exist on the website…or in either of the maps apps I checked. But the biggest red flag (other than the fact that they were reaching out to little ol’ me to help promote my book, of course), was the email address the communication came from, and the one used in the signature block.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that when I do business with a company, I’ll look at them a little cross-eyed when they present a gmail account (or similar). Maybe I’m just old school in thinking the corporate brand they’d want to portray would be their domain, not Google’s. Help make them look legit.

But this email was coming from a supposed top-notch, international publishing company. With an extensive website. With hundreds of books plastered across their pages. The address they were using came from a free service, and it wasn’t even a Google address.

So…that heart-pounding moment thinking that maybe, just maybe, my books might start taking off? Dashed.

On the upside, because there needs to be one, right? The upside is someone, somewhere, thought enough of me and/or my book to warrant me valuable enough to try to scam me. It’s not the win I was hoping for, but I’ll take it.

I’ll probably never be famous. I’ll probably never make enough to live off the books’ royalties. And I’ll probably never have a legit agent or publishing house on my speed dial (okay, now I’m just dating myself). And that, that’s okay. It was never the reason I started creating fictional people and places in the first place.

But it was fun to dream.

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The Shore

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