I’ve written a few books and it’s lovely to get feedback on them – especially positive feedback (but negative feedback sometimes makes me smile too!).
Recently there has been a wave of positive feedback and offers of help. Emails, of various sorts have arrived to tell me how brilliantly well-written are my books (so true!), how riveting they are (of course!) and how I should be making a fortune from them (I wish!). It’s difficult not to agree with these but it’s difficult to believe that suddenly the world has recognised my genius and is beating a path to my door.
I have to admit that the first of these, a few months ago, did get my attention. It was well-written, quite detailed and seemed to show a certain amount of knowledge about A Message from Martha. It offered help in promoting the book in various places and sounded quite plausible. But, of course, I was expecting to be asked to pay through the nose for any help and so I wasn’t exactly gagging to get involved.
I used LinkedIn to look up the name of the person contacting me, and there were several of that name, but one had the same photo as the person who contacted me. the LinkedIn profile made no mention of this book promotion malarkey. So, I just played along for a while and asked some questions. I asked for contacts I could reach to check the track record of my correspondent and was sent some email addresses. One of these was a well-known fiction author and it seemed to me very unlikely that someone who had worked closely with her would be interested in working with me. I found the address of the agent of this well-known female fiction writer and asked her whether her client had worked with the person contacting me. I got an almost immediate response from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean to say ‘Hell, no!’.
This wave of interest appears to come from book clubs, publishers, agents and other authors but in fact there is a lot of scamming going on – click here.
The characteristics of the approaches made to me are;
- almost all from the USA
- almost all well written, mention one or more of my books by name, notice that I write for magazines and don’t have spelling mistakes
- a small subset get my name wrong and are poorly written – the same errors in my name appear in multiple emails from people with different personas
- don’t ask for anything up-front.
Examples of what they say about my books:
Remarkable Birds:
“Remarkable Birds manages to be both intellectually serious and emotionally memorable”
“Visually extraordinary, intellectually serious, and written by one of the most credible conservation voices in the UK“
A Message from Martha:
“you transformed the story of the Passenger Pigeon from a historical account into something far more immediate and personal”
“I was deeply moved by your storytelling“
“the kind of narrative that deserves to reach every reader who cares about conservation, environmental stewardship, and the lessons of the past“
You could buy my books from Bookshop.org and I have set up a booklist to make that easy through this link https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/MarkAvery Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase
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