In this week's episode, we warn against six different scams targeting indie authors. I also take a look at my advertising results for September 2025.
This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Cloak of Wolves, Book #2 in the Cloak Mage series, (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) at my Payhip store:
WOLVESAUDIO
The coupon code is valid through October 20, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook this fall, we've got you covered!
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Update
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 272 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is October 10th, 2025, and today we are looking at six common scams that target indie authors. We'll also look at my advertising results for September 2025 and some changes I will make because of that. But first, let's start with Coupon of the Week and a progress update on my current writing projects.
First up, Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Cloak of Wolves, Book #2 in the Cloak Mage series (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy), at my Payhip store. That coupon code is WOLVESAUDIO, and as always, the coupon code and the link to my Payhip store will be available in the show notes for this episode. This coupon code is valid through October 20th, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook for this fall, we have got you covered.
Now an update on my current writing and audiobook projects, I'm pleased to report the rough draft of Cloak of Worlds is done at 107,500 words. I think it's going to end up being about 30 chapters or so once I finish editing and I'm going to start editing very shortly. Before I start editing, I am going to write a short story called False Iron set in the world of Nadia and newsletter subscribers will get a free ebook copy of False Iron when Cloak of Worlds comes out, hopefully before the end of the month (if all goes well). I am also 11,000 words into Blade of Shadows, the second book in my Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series that will be my next main project after Cloak of World is published.
In audiobook news, Ghosts in the Siege (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) is done and it's processing through the various platforms. I believe as of right now you can get it at Payhip, Kobo, and Google Play and then hopefully it should be available at the other stores within a few weeks. Brad Wills is starting work on the audiobook of Blade of Flames. In early 2026, I believe we should have the final audiobook from the Stealth and Spells series from C.J. McAllister. So that is where I'm at with my current writing and publishing projects.
00:02:18 Ad Results for September 2025 [Amounts Mentioned Are in USD]
Now let's take a look back at some of my ad results for September 2025. First, the big changes. I am going to either give Facebook ads a rest for a while or more likely continue them in a very more limited way with a more focused strategy. As I've mentioned before, Meta has been shoving all this Advantage Plus AI stuff into Facebook ads and it just doesn't work. The key for online advertising, especially with books, is to narrow your target audience as much as possible and the Advantage Plus AI stuff all goes for a broad audience.
To test that out, I did a couple of experiments. I didn't advertise Frostborn with Facebook ads in August, but I did advertise them with Facebook ads in September. The end result was I actually made $20 less from Frostborn in September than I did in August, but I also had the advertising expense for the month of September, so I made less overall.
I also tried the reverse of that experiment. I advertised Cloak Games and Cloak Mage in August with Facebook, but not in September. The end result was that Cloak Games and Cloak Mage made about $200 less in September, but without the cost of advertising, that meant the profit was substantially higher. So I'm not sure if Facebook ads are effective or as effective as they used to be any longer (thanks generative AI), but in the [interest of] full testing, it'll experiment with it a bit more.
I did try one ad campaign entirely with Advantage Plus this month and it was objectively terrible. I do not recommend using Advantage Plus for anything if you are advertising anything on Facebook. I probably will end up doing Facebook ads in a more focused way, similar to the way I do my BookBub ads, where I will set a time limited ad for one of my permafree books for four days or so and then shut it off when it's done because BookBub ads tend to work well the first three days and then lose their punch after. So I might end up doing something similar with Facebook ads, but we will report more on that in November once we finish with October's advertisement results.
Meanwhile, Amazon ads did a lot better. Here are some of the campaigns I ran. Remember, for an Amazon ad to be successful, it needs to generate a sale or complete Kindle Unlimited read through for every six through eight clicks.
For Demonsouled Omnibus One, I got back $2.44 for every dollar spent, with one sale for every 1.41 clicks.
For Half-Elven Thief, I got back $1.31 for every dollar spent, with one sale for every 2.48 clicks.
For Half-Elven Thief Omnibus One, 48% of the profit came from the audiobook for that one. I got back $10.13 for every dollar spent, with one sale for every 1.26 clicks.
For Stealth and Spells Online: Creation, it did really well, with $24.01 for every dollar spent, with one sale for every 0.66 clicks. That was still enjoying the halo result from the release of Final Quest earlier this year.
For Cloak Mage Omnibus One, I got back $3.64 for every dollar spent, with 65% of the profit coming from the audiobook and one sale for every 0.61 clicks.
For Sevenfold Sword Omnibus One, I got back $3.47 for every $1 spent and one sale for every 2.42 clicks.
For Dragontiarna Omnibus One, I got back $13.40 for every dollar spent and one sale for every 1.2 clicks.
Out of all my campaigns. I only had one campaign that lost money, but it lost a grand total of $1.48, so that was good. So we can also see that omnibus editions definitely do very well with Amazon ads, especially if they have attached audiobooks. It turns out finishing Stealth and Spells Online made it a lot easier to advertise. A finished series is a lot easier to advertise than an incomplete one (who knew?). Though if I really want to kick up Half-Elven Thief, I need to write another book in the series, which I plan to do later this year. Once Cloak of Worlds is published, I will start on that.
As I mentioned earlier, I'm also [doing] a variety of BookBub ads for my permafree books on Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play, and Apple; these consistently do very well since it's a lot cheaper to get clicks through the non-Amazon stores for books when you're advertising them on BookBub.
So that's where my ads are for September 2025. As I mentioned, I'm going to experiment a bit more with Facebook ads in October and November, but the end result (even if I have good results) is I'm going to use them a lot less than I used to moving forward because targeting is somewhat harder. That means it's time to start thinking about other marketing ideas. There is precedent. I resisted using Facebook ads for four years before I started experimenting with them in early 2020, so maybe it's time (after dragging my feet on the idea for five years) to start playing with short form video in 2026. That seems to be where all the growth and all the eyeballs seem to be.
You may have noticed that the previous episode of this podcast, Episode 271 was the first one that was on YouTube, and it seems to have been a good idea since that doubled the amount of views an episode usually gets. So I may have more video experiments coming soon, but we'll see, and as always, thank you for reading, everyone and it would be pointless to advertise the books if people didn't want to read them, and that is a fact for which I am very grateful.
00:07:26 Main Topic of the Week: Six Scams Targeting Indie Authors
Now on to our main (and to be honest, somewhat less enjoyable) main topic this week, six scams that are targeting indie authors. The old saying was, "there's a sucker born every minute", but in the year of our Lord 2025, I think it's more accurate to say there's an AI powered scammer born every minute. As you might've gathered from my tone about this, I admit to being pretty annoyed by how many scam emails I get related to writing and indie publishing. These days it's pretty constant and they tend to cluster around when I have a new release. Some bot (or more realistically, a whole bunch of bots) is presumably scanning all new releases and then turns out a bunch of scammy emails when it detects a new book.
I despise these people because they prey upon the vulnerable for money, which is wrong. Imagine a 75-year-old who just self-published the novel he or she has been working on for the last 30 years and finally decided to finish in retirement. Then they get a ChatGPT generated email from "John Grisham" praising their book in detail and asking for some money for marketing services. A lot of people would have absolutely no mental defense against this kind of scam, like someone from modern earth encountering a wizard who can cast illusion spells.
Unfortunately, scamming is endemic everywhere these days. It is a constant debate how much the [US] federal program Medicare gets scammed out of every year. One of the local drug stores where I live has numerous signs warning about gift cards after so many local seniors were getting scammed into buying gift cards. Then there were a recent chain of text messages telling me I owed money for driving on toll roads in the state of Illinois, which was amusing because one, I haven't been to Illinois since 2022. Two, I was a passenger in someone else's car at the time, and three, the last time I was on a toll road in Illinois in a vehicle I actually owned was in 2017. As an amusing aside, when I mentioned this on Facebook, a frequent commenter and reader mentioned that he lives in the UK and he still got a bunch of text messages about toll roads in Illinois, even though A, he lives in the UK and B, he doesn't actually have a driver's license.
Unfortunately, it is the truth that the internet makes scamming so easy, that constant vigilance is required these days, and with that in mind, here are six different kinds of scammy emails writers (and indie publishers) can expect to get.
#1: ChatGPT. One of the reasons (you know if you've listened to the show before) that I'm very down on generative AI is that generative AI is a scammer's paradise.
Lately, a new trend is that a scammer will feed a pirated copy of a book into ChatGPT and then use it to generate personalized pitch letters. These personalized pitch letters will also be littered with emojis and the tone will vary from warm and sycophantic to encouraging and edgy. Here's a quote from a recent one I got for Blade of Flames:
"Talembur wakes in a forgotten catacomb, sword in hand, memory shredded, enemies sniffing blood in the dark. That's a hook so sharp it could flense an orc. Blade of Flames reads like classic, grim-and-gorgeous sword-and-sorcery with a hunger for blood, mystery, and very satisfying blade choreography."
In fact, I got two more just like that this morning before I started recording. This is an effective illusion for a scam because it seems like the scammer read the book and liked it and is making personalized compliments about it, even though that's the result of a ChatGPT or a similar bot.
However, the rest of the email is a hard pitch for various marketing services that don't actually exist. I admit I fell halfway for this one the first time. I got one of those very detailed emails and I thought it would respond with a polite refusal since it seemed like a lot of work had gone into it. However, after responding, I think I then got five more emails in rapid succession, all of them pushing for the purchase of dubious marketing services, and I realized the whole thing was a ChatGPT powered bot. So watch out for these very personalized emails, especially the ones that appear instantaneously or very quickly after you publish a book.
#2: Fake book clubs. This one is sometimes tied in with the ChatGPT scams. Sometimes the book club people use ChatGPT to generate their emails. The way this works is you'll get an email for someone claiming they run a large book club or reader group on Goodreads (or Facebook or whatever) and they think your book would be a good fit for their reader group and have a few questions about it.
However, if you respond to this email, you'll start getting pressure for payment. Turns out the reader group or the book club doesn't actually exist and this is yet another scam, so watch out for emails that talk about the "5,000 member reader group" or something along those lines. By good luck, one of these emails arrived while I was writing the notes for this episode, so I thought it would quote it here.
"I'm Jason, and I organize Book Club NYC, a community of more than 3,300 readers across New York who gather to read, reflect, and connect through books that challenge perception and spark deep conversation.
When I discovered Ghost in the Siege, I was immediately struck by its layered power, a story that confronts truth and deception, morality and survival, within a world both haunting and familiar. It's the kind of book that doesn't just entertain; it lingers, asking questions about justice, humanity, and what it means to stand alone in the face of decay. That blend of atmosphere and insight makes it exactly the kind of story our members love to explore together. We'd love to feature Ghost in the Siege as part of our upcoming event on Wednesday, October 15th.
Here's what that experience will look like:
Quiet Reading & Reflection: members immersing themselves in your world, letting its tension and themes unfold in silence.
Open Discussion: exploring the moral and psychological dimensions of corruption, redemption, and resistance."
And blah, blah, blah. It goes on in this vein quite a bit. You notice that if you actually read Ghost in the Siege (and I'm actually quite fond of Ghost in the Siege as a book), I don't think it would be fair to say that Ghost in the Siege "isn't just the kind of book that entertains, it lingers, asking questions about justice, humanity, and what it means to stand alone in the face of decay."
That is the kind of generic nonsense you can expect ChatGPT to spit out for this kind of thing. Now, as we mentioned, of course this book club doesn't actually exist, and if any of these good Goodreads or Facebook groups or whatever even exists, they'll be full of bots under the control of the scammer, and if you respond, the book club organizer will start talking about fees for having your book read before the group. As ever, if you pay, the scammer will either immediately disappear or continue to pressure you for more money.
#3: "John Grisham" wants to promote my book. This type of email is just a straight up catfishing or identity theft attempt. You'll get an email allegedly from a famous author (for myself, I've gotten emails from "John Grisham" and "Colleen Hoover", among others), and they'll offer to help you promote your books. Obviously, this is very fake. The actual John Grisham and Colleen Hoover (among other famous authors) have better things to do with their time than emailing random indie authors like me for marketing collaborations. If you respond to these emails, you'll get a request for payment, and if you pay, the scammer will promptly disappear and stop responding, or of course, ask for more money.
#4: Meta Ads has a new dashboard. I've gotten this one quite a bit this year, allegedly from Meta. This email claims that Facebook is rolling out either a new ads dashboard or a new mobile app for managing ads, and you've been invited to participate in the beta test for the new dashboard or the new app. Just click on the link and start installation. I admit I ignored these at first because there's no way I'm ever installing any Meta apps on my phone because they're so intrusive and halfway to being spyware. Also, the current version of the Facebook ads dashboard is annoying enough and complicated enough to use it as it is, and I don't want to play with any half-baked beta features.
So I ignored these emails, but then I realized I was getting surprisingly a lot of them. So I checked the senders and realized they weren't coming from an actual Meta address, but from a variety of different Gmail addresses, which meant they were in fact phishing attempts. Facebook ad phishing, alas, is a serious problem. The basic scam is that a hacker finds a way to gain control of your ads account and then uses it to advertise various scam projects, usually involving cryptocurrency. Since Facebook's customer support is so notoriously bad, it's very difficult to get this kind of situation resolved. So if you are using Facebook ads, be wary of any emails you get from Meta since they could be phishing attempts.
#5: Bad tax news or payment failure. This one tends to be common around tax time or the end of the year. You'll get an email allegedly from one of the publishing platforms claiming that there's a problem with your tax information or that one of your payments failed.
The email will include a link you can click to resolve the situation, which is of course fake so the scammers can capture your account and personal information. I've gotten a couple of these lately and some of them, to be honest, were quite good. I got one from Spotify claiming that my tax information was out of date, which was baffling because my tax information hasn't changed in the entire time I've had audiobooks with Spotify. I was suspicious, so I logged into my Spotify dashboard and checked that everything was in fact, okay. Then I realized the scam: the email had actually come to a different email account than the one I actually used for my Spotify dashboard. It was an exceptionally well done phishing email, but thankfully, years of ingrained caution against clicking email links served me well.
So if you do get one of these, don't click on any links. Instead go directly to the dashboard of the platform in question and see for yourself. If there actually is a tax or a payment problem, there will probably be a notification of some kind on the dashboard, and of course if the notification email comes to a different email account than the one you actually use for that platform or service, it will obviously be fake.
#6: Fake publishing services. There are a variety of fake publishing services out there offering a range of alleged benefits like more Facebook followers, more readers, more email subscribers, et cetera, or someone will offer to get your book into Publishers Weekly or something like that in exchange for a payment. Some of these blend over with the scammy sort of vanity publishers. Granted, I think that all vanity publishing (which is "you pay us and we publish your book") is a scam, but some of them are worse than others.
At best, if you engage with these kinds of services, you'll get some new followers from bots or so forth, which is useless for selling books. At worst, nothing will happen at all. The scammers will take your money and disappear. At the absolute worst, they'll pester you forever for more money or find a way to steal more personal information from you.
Generally, if you get an unsolicited email from book marketers, it is almost surely a scam. If you're unsure, asking about the company in question in a Facebook group like 20BooksTo50K or Wide For The Win will help identify whether or not they're legit, but they're probably not legit.
In conclusion, I'm afraid one has no choice but to exercise constant vigilance in the Internet world these days, especially if you're a self-publisher. Be extremely wary of any unsolicited emails. Never click on a link in an email. If a message claims there's a problem with one of your publishing platforms, don't click on the link. Go to the platform directly in a different browser tab or a different browser and see for yourself. Before spending money on anything, do some research and check that it is legitimate and not a scam. It's easy to fake legitimacy these days, so it's worthwhile to do a little investigating before spending money on anything.
So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful and a helpful guide against some of the scams you might encounter in the wild. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.
