The Snake Oil Salesmen Preying on Writers

The Snake Oil Salesmen Preying on Writers

Today I received my 204^th spam email, praising my work to high heaven and offering, for a small fee in an email that comes only later, to be part of a new book group, a new podcast, a new review that will bring my brilliant work to tens of thousands of new readers.  Of course, I think my work brilliant, as do all writers, and that it should be read by tens of thousands—since we are in a fantasy world, make that millions.

When I got the first email, my wife and I were taking a late summer vacation up in Maine.  The day was almost sinfully gorgeous, the sort of Maine day that lures you into thinking summer will never end and you will never grow old.  I recall sitting on the deck of our rented house, my laptop in front of me, and opening an email that mentioned a novel of mine that had sold the least.  That book was like a quiet, studious, painfully shy child of yours, one who didn’t make friends easily and you were always trying to push him forward. The email’s subject line, like a fly dropped in front of a hungry rainbow trout, said something like “Your novel Resting Places (https://michaelcwhite.com/project/resting-places/ ) deserves more attention.” Bang!  I fell for it hook, line, and sinker.  It went on to praise my book’s deep insight into a woman’s loss and grief after the death of her child.  It spoke of the countless readers yearning to read such a book.  Though vague, it gave me just enough in the way of details about the book to make it sound credible.  I even read the email to my wife, and we both agreed that my brilliant book deserved more attention.  At the end it said I only had to reply that I was interested.  Interested?  I thought, where do I sign up.  Attention and acclaim for my shy little book.  Are you kidding?

Luckily, when the subsequent emails came, asking for just a small upfront fee for “organizational” purposes, I had in me enough of my father’s no-nonsense Yankee farmer background to be suspicious.  So I did some digging.  It was only then that I found out I wasn’t so special after all, that this same scam was being perpetrated on a grand scale, to tens of thousand of writers.  Their strategy, an extremely clever one, I might add, is to appeal to the two fundamental V’s that all writers share: vanity and vulnerability.  In this schizophrenic world we inhabit, we are both vain enough to think that our work is brilliant and at the same time vulnerable enough to think it should be thrown out, like Gregor Samsa, with the next trash.  Writers, like all artists, exist in this twilight world of belief and disbelief, of overestimating our work and then underestimating it.

As a teacher of fiction for many years, as well as an MFA director, I saw this first-hand in my own students but also in my colleagues.  And of course, I saw it in myself.  Like most writers, some days I look at my work and think, Boy, that’s absolutely, positively brilliant.  Send me a contract.  Get out the prizes.  Twenty-city book tour, here I come. And two days later, I’m just as tempted to do what Eugene O’Neil did when he was dying: to burn one’s work.  The same novel, viewed from two opposing parts of me.  It’s perhaps in the DNA of all writers, I guess, hard-wired into us at birth or whenever we decided to become a writer.  We are like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, two different writers inhabiting the same body.  We writers, the ones who survive anyhow, learn to exist in this conflicted world we’ve chosen.  We need somehow to find our way to this point: the work is good, but not quite good enough, which makes us strive to make it better. https://michaelcwhite.com/what-would-you-sacrifice-for-your-art/.

I’m much wiser now about these charlatans, these 21^st century snake oil salesmen.  I know what they’re up to.  And yet with AI, these predators are even more slick, more nuanced, more detailed about my books, and therefore more able to weasel their way into my always-conflicted feelings about my work. When I read one of these emails, I still want to believe that my book is as good as they say, as moving and powerful and revelatory.  But I also warn myself not to believe all of it, that it’s just them preying on my own vanity and vulnerability.