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It seems as if almost every other day I receive another one, a somewhat convincing personal pitch to help me promote my 2023 book “In Defence of Copyright” to readers and thus potential purchasers. The pitches come from various sources but are almost always signed by a woman for some reason. The writer professes a strong interest in wanting to help me promote the book. “Amelia” (attractive picture), an “author success partner” was particularly committed to getting me on board. She talked about the many attributes of the book, its timeliness and potential and the importance of the topic. After she had immersed herself in my book, she began building a customized marketing strategy to help the book find its audience because, after all, “This book deserves to reach creators, policymakers, educators, and anyone concerned about the future of creative work in the digital age”. How flattering! What was this strategy and how much would it cost me?
A “Visibility Plan” was prepared that had a range of options, ranging from a few hundred dollars to a couple of thousand. At the basic level, the plan would “fix the storefront” by optimizing its profile on Amazon and Goodreads and inserting keywords and category positioning language. This “campaign” would last for 15 days. The next step, at roughly double the price, was to deal with “reach, momentum and carriage” would include Amazon KDP (Kindle Digital Publishing) advertising, Amazon best seller positioning and book club distribution. But the granddaddy was Option Three, at roughly double the price again, to include everything included in the first two levels plus Amazon short book trailers, author website design and social media management. Not surprisingly Option Three was recommended.
Another unsolicited pitch opened with the following, “Congratulations on the sharp insights, critical acclaim, and timely necessity of In Defence of Copyright, it is an extraordinary feat to craft a work of legal and cultural commentary with such a fierce, compelling hold on its readers.” Gosh, even more flattering. This service offered an eclectic range of services that included ”A bespoke, deep-dive narrative review sent directly to our community of dedicated readers”, a dedicated live online session focused on the book, an “exclusive, behind-the-scenes summary of anonymous reader insights on your book’s thematic impact”, what was called “C-Suite and Curator Introduction” which would apparently introduce the work to a private network of literary curators, book club syndicators and collection builders and, finally, “tailored promotional artwork” which could, if I wanted to pay the freight, include a 3D image of the book and long-term placement within a curated collection for the remainder of 2026.
What these pitches and a number of others I have received have in common is that they are specific to my book. They include multiple references to the content, themes, analysis, case studies etc. to the point that if one wanted to suspend judgement, you could almost be convinced that the people behind the promotion had actually read the book. But we all know that is not how it works. “In Defence of Copyright”, like hundreds of thousands of other copyrighted books, has been scraped and ingested by AI, without my knowledge or permission. The AI is then used to produce a reasonable summary of the book in support of the sales pitch. The website Writer Beware is a great source of information about the cruel world out there, particularly the blog post “Return of the Nigerian Prince Redux: Beware Book Club and Book Review Scams“ , which goes into some detail as to how the promotional offers actually work (or don’t). My experience with these promotions is fairly recent (perhaps I should be flattered that I have finally “joined the club”), but it has been going on for a couple of years, if not longer.
I am not saying that in some cases the services offered would not be provided. Possibly some promotional tweaking would actually take place, probably using some sort of automated system, but whether this would produce any noticeable bump in book sales, and whether the investment in these promotional efforts would pay off, is quite another question. The buyer has to decide this for themself. The business model employed by the book promoters is not dissimilar to automated cold calling with promotional offers; most recipients will simply ignore the messages, or they will go to spam. However, a certain number of people (me included, out of curiosity) will engage. An even smaller number will be converted to paying customers. However, if your initial outreach is AI driven and automated, even a one percent conversion rate can make the promotion worthwhile.
In my blog post last week, I talked about collective societies or CMOs (collective management organizations) as one possible solution to enable individual authors to have some control over how their works are used and to get compensated for that use. I believe that the “ART principles” (authorization, remuneration, and transparency) should apply, but this is not happening. Not only are authors getting no compensation for the use of their work in feeding the AI machine, but the unauthorized ingestion process is being weaponized against them by highlighting AI-driven analysis of their work to convince them to engage with automated promotion services.
The automation of the process can produce some amusing outcomes, however. Even though an AI platform may be adept at summarizing a work, it can still make rookie mistakes such as the pitch I recently received to promote “The Cambridge Companion to Gay and Lesbian Writing”, allegedly a work I had edited. Like the pitch on “In Defence of Copyright”, it contained flowery language about what an important work it was (in the field of queer literature), citing some of the key features of the work while pointing out how a bit of promotion would help it reach readers who really counted. A bit of digging revealed that this work was indeed edited by a namesake, Hugh Stevens, who is apparently an expert in this field and a senior lecturer at University College London. However, not only did the AI wrongly attribute Dr. Stevens’ work to me, but it couldn’t even differentiate between Hugh Stephens and Hugh Stevens, an annoying blind spot for many people that I have been fighting against all my life. Perhaps in this case the AI platform was not to blame; just the careless human being operating it?
Anyway, all I can say is that all the promotional spam I and other authors receive daily or weekly is annoying. Reaching out to book clubs and getting your work prominence on Goodreads are no doubt useful things to do, although in my case I don’t think many book clubs are interested in the ins and out of copyright (although a group of budding authors might find a quick overview of the topic to be useful). But I would submit that you can do a lot of your own marketing, with a good website and active outreach. While the spam is annoying, even more outrageous is the fact that it is a regular reminder to authors that their work has been copied and used to feed the AI machine without permission or compensation.
© Hugh Stephens, 2026. All Rights Reserved.