“Genuine book clubs don’t ask for money from authors.”
One operation in Cebu ran a fake US publishing company for seven years and took more than $48 million from over 800 authors. There are an estimated thousand more outfits in Pakistan impersonating Penguin and Amazon, and the workers inside say their families were threatened if they missed quota. The marks are self-published writers desperate for any sign someone read the book. Fake Zoom book clubs full of people reading from scripts. It works because the real publishing industry already trained authors to pay for attention.