RHYS BOWEN: Dear Reds and Readers, I'm happy to report that after years of hard work and struggle, I have finally made it to the top. I am officially a writer of stature! An A lister!
How do I know this? Because FAKE RHYS BOWEN has been contacting other writers, just like fake James Patterson and Fake Julia Quinn. I only learned this because fake Rhys Bowen happened to contact my friend Lee Goldberg. Of course he contacted me with great glee. He posted on Facebook saying "You've never said that you'd love to share about your creative journey, what inspires the worlds and characters you create and how you keep your storytelling fresh and engaging when working with complex or layered material."
He added, but you did once throw yourself down a flight of stairs and get medi-vacced out of a hotel just to avoid talking with me! (that was when I fell and broke my pelvis!)
No, in real life we talk about the latest place he's found to eat on Oahu. I don't think real writers talk much about our creative journeys to each other. I know we Reds don't. We talk of more mundane matters like sick dogs, children and occasionally publishing gripes.
If you're a fellow writer you have probably been contacted by fake famous person. I'm not sure what they hope to get out of it. Would someone be expected to pay five hundred dollars to talk to fake Rhys Bowen?
I get daily scammers offering to bring my book to book clubs, get more visibility on Amazon etc. Occasionally I reply, as when they offered to take the German version of a Molly book to a book club in Manhattan. Mostly I ignore. Sometimes I write back to the book clubs and say that I'd love to meet with them and my usual fee is $2000. I don't hear back.
Lee, with more time than me, does engage in a most amusing way. He wrote back to fake Tana French, if I remember correctly, saying he was amazed she still wanted to talk to him after what happened. He was still in prison but the rape charge had been dropped. To a fake famous guy he replied, "You have a nerve to contact me after what you did to my wife."
The stupid thing is that these scammers don't seem to realize that we writers know each other! But I wonder how many self published authors do take the bait?
So dear Reds and Reddies, have you been getting these annoying scams? Do you just ignore and delete or try to respond?
The audacity of people never ceases to amaze me [of course, no one wants to pretend to be me, so this is the first time I've ever heard of this brazen thing] . . . it's easy for me to say "ignore it" [especially when it isn't happening to me] and I realize that's a difficult thing to do when someone is running around pretending to be you, but I do think that is what I would do if I were in that situation . . . .
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