'I look forward to reviewing your proposal and learning more about The Quest for Pie.'

     Scams suck. You don't even have to be taken in by them. Just the fact of their existence. They're so depressing.
     It was such a beautiful fall afternoon Sunday. We took my sister to the Chicago Botanic Garden and just wandered around. The air was fragrant, the light, golden, the colors varied, the crowd, happy.
     Yet I was grimacing, mulling over an email I had gotten the day before. It began:

In Drunkard: A Hard-Drinking Life, what stands out is the refusal to treat recovery as a simple turning point between a troubled past and a better future. Your account of loving your work and family while remaining attached to alcohol captures the contradictions that make addiction so difficult to confront...

     Do you see the markers of AI in that? The lack of a salutation. Using the full title, including sub-title, of the book. The generic summation of the book's reception — in 2012. I should have just deleted it and kept going. I've received a number of similar book marketing scams before.
     But this wasn't a shill for book marketing. It was, supposedly, from the executive publisher of a London imprint. Another sign. Why would someone that high up be trolling around for mid-list authors to sign up? Over the weekend. They wouldn't. I should have just deleted it.
    But hope is a funny thing. I checked online, on the publisher's web site. She was a real person. Only this email wasn't from that person. I was fairly sure of that. The email ended in .gmail. Another giveaway. I wrote back:

      Thank you for your kind note. There are so many AI scams related to book publishing, I       

      hope you don't mind my asking you a question: how did "Drunkard" come to your attention?        Thanks.

  
     She wrote back, beginning:

I came across Drunkard: A Hard-Drinking Life on Amazon, and I was drawn to the candour and perceptiveness with which you examine addiction, recovery, and their effects on personal and family life.

     The "u" in candour was good. English spelling. And here I did the part I'm embarrassed about — I took 10 or 15 minutes and composed an email about where my career is at, and what project I'd like to see published — the memoir I wrote about going out West with my boys, "The Quest for Pie." That means a lot to me. I sent it Sunday morning. She wrote back immediately.
     Another tip-off. What publisher is writing to anybody Sunday morning, or Sunday evening, assuming she's in England? Which she — if it's a "she" — is not.
     I'll spare you the rest. I made it clear I'm not paying for anything. "There are two things a man should never pay for," I wrote. "One of them is editorial direction." She said that was fine. 
     But as I walked around the garden, I realized. "This isn't real. This is someone in Ghana using AI to mimic an editor." I should have known that. I did know that. Yet I proceeded anyway, on the slimmest, most pathetic hope. What really bothered me, I think, is that I couldn't figure out what the scam is. Maybe this is like a romance scam, only targeting authors. We'd go over the book for six months and then she'd spring the trap. 

     That might have been what really saddened me. The knowledge that this is the future, being forced to. decide, again and again, if something is real, is human, or just another attempted rip-off, a little better disguised than the previous attempts. Email has become a street jammed with pick-pockets and muggers, with fewer and fewer actual pedestrians in between. The ability to see through this, to decide who's who, to determine if something is the work of humans, or not, is going to be more and more important. My gut told me: this isn't right.

     How did I know for sure? Because in 34 years since I've published my first book, no publisher has ever reached out to me with this kind of query. When something has never happened before, the odds that it is happening now go way, way down. Fuck hope. Anyhow, I wrote back, and said what we need to do is set up a Zoom call and discuss this further. I assume that will be the end of it.