A very flattering email
by Chris Hamilton-Emery
Someone wrote to me a few days ago to say that my poems have an abrasive musicality, and that they were struck by the tension between spectacle and reality in my work. They said my perspective as a poet, editor and independent publisher gave me an unusually informed view of how contemporary writing reaches its readers.
They were an editor at a distinguished London house. Or rather, they were not. They were writing from a Gmail account with the publisher’s name wedged into it, and the person whose name they had borrowed does not commission poetry, does not work on that list, and has no idea any of this is happening.
I mention it because we are now getting scores of these forwarded to us, and because I want to describe how the thing works. Not to be clever about it – the emails are good, and the reason they are good is precisely why they are difficult to shrug off.
What they get right
The old scam was clumsy. Bad grammar, a Nigerian prince, an offer so preposterous you laughed. The new ones are written by a language model that has read your website, your Nielsen listing, your reviews and whatever sample poems are indexed, and has produced four paragraphs of intelligent, specific-sounding appreciation in about eleven seconds. It costs them nothing to do this five hundred times a day.
And here is the difficult part. Most writers have never had four paragraphs of intelligent, specific-sounding appreciation from anyone. Poets in particular publish into a silence that can last years. When someone finally appears to have read the book closely and to have understood exactly what you were attempting, the reasonable, sceptical, world-weary part of the brain is not the part that answers. The scam does not work on gullible people. It works on people who have been waiting a long time.
What they get wrong
Read one carefully and it starts coming apart.
It never quotes a line. It praises rhythm, imagery, musicality, thematic tension – all of it at one remove, none of it anchored to a single poem you could point at. This is because the machine has not read the book. It has read around the book, and it cannot risk a specific claim that might be wrong.
The address is wrong. Nobody at Granta, Faber, Bloomsbury or anywhere else corresponds from a free webmail account, least of all one with the company name grafted into the local part.
The role is wrong. They pick a real name because a real name survives a cursory search, but they don’t check what that person actually does. An editor of a magazine is not a commissioning editor of books. A publicity director does not acquire.
And then, quite early, come the two questions. Do you have an agent? How do you handle international rights? No genuine editor opens with those. They are qualifying questions. They establish whether there is a gatekeeper in the way, and whether you look like the sort of author who might be persuaded to pay for one.
Where it goes
Nowhere good, and rarely quickly. There may be several friendly exchanges first, sometimes over weeks, sometimes with a plausible contract attached. Then a fee appears. A referral to a tame agent. A rights registration charge. Legal costs against a film option. An escrow payment to release an advance that does not exist. The sums are calibrated to be painful but payable – enough to hurt, not enough to make you stop and take advice.
The rule is absolute and it is the only one you need: in legitimate publishing, money flows to the author. Never from them. Not for reading, not for assessment, not for contracts, registration, translation, marketing or legal fees. If you are ever asked for money by a publisher, an agent or a producer, the conversation is over, whoever they claim to be.
What to do
Don’t reply, even to say no – a reply confirms a live address and moves you to a warmer list. Verify sideways: if you want to know whether an approach is real, ring the company’s switchboard or write to an address you found on the company’s own website, never one supplied in the message. Report it to Action Fraud, and tell the house whose name has been misused, because they are being defrauded too and will generally want to know.
If it concerns a Salt book, send it to us. We hold the rights and can tell you in a sentence whether an approach is genuine. We would far rather look at fifty harmless emails than have one of our authors lose money, or worse, sign something.
We’ve put a permanent note on the site setting out how Salt actually works – we do not recruit by email, we do not approach writers with offers to publish, and the only route to being published by us is the one described on our submissions pages. It’s there to be linked to, and to be pointed at whenever one of these arrives.
There is something bleak in all this beyond the fraud itself. The scammers have identified, correctly, that serious attention is the scarcest thing in a writer’s life, and they have worked out how to counterfeit it at industrial scale. The remedy isn’t to become unreachable or suspicious of every kind word. It’s to know what the real thing looks like – slower, more specific, and never, ever asking you for money.