Everyone gets spam, and people who write books get specific kinds of spam, offering them various services, from book marketing to copy editing to ghostwriting.

Some of these are in a sense "genuine": it's someone who found your contact details and wants to offer you actual services, but they're too lazy and unprofessional or ignorant and impolite to do cold emailing properly.

But sometimes these spammers are actual scammers, whose primary intention is to cheat you in some way.

For example, their intention may be to convince you to pay for a service they will never deliver.

Or, they may be trying to get personal security information from you, for example, or your credit card details.

If you're curious what these scams look like, here's a great article from Victoria Strauss of the Writer Beware blog on some popular scams related to Book Clubs and Book Reviews.

The number one rule we recommend is to treat all spam messages as scam messages.

Don't try to figure out if it's genuine or not: to paraphrase a great movie line, if there is any doubt, act like there is no doubt.

First, never answer a spam message. Whether it's an email or a text or a voicemail a direct message, if it looks at all fishy, don't answer the communication.

Second, mark it as spam or report it as junk if you can. Don't ever worry about missing an opportunity or anything like that: no one who knows what they're doing will ever look spammy or scammy. Anyone who really represents an opportunity for you or who has something of value to tell you will find a legitimate-looking way to contact you.

Third, let us know about it if it is somehow related to your Leanpub books or courses. You can just forward emails to us at hello@leanpub.com.

That's how we found out about a phishing attempt targeting Leanpub authors:

We do sometimes reach out directly to authors with offers.

These offers may include a revenue share offer for our CourseAI service, for example.

Or more typically, it will be Len reaching out to invite you to do a Launch video or a Leanpub Podcast interview.

These offers will always come from an @leanpub.com email address, from Peter or Len directly.

You can learn more about how to confirm if a message is from Leanpub here:

If you have any questions or feedback for this article, please email the Leanpub Team at hello@leanpub.com.

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