Friends save you money and heartache

So many times I am grateful to know so many authors and belong to so many groups.

I have a small group of writers I'm in regular contact with, whom I know personally.

I follow bigger groups of writers on facebook where we share information with each other.

I am also a member of a nation-wide group of writers called the Romance Writers of Australia and attend conference each year (and for the past few years I've fun the Indie Bookstore with fellow author Catherine Bilson.)

Through knowing and working with Catherine, I suggested we collaborate on a novel. (Which became four novels and a novella, and those books are the most successful of my career so far.)

On top of that, I have a membership of ALLi, which is a global organisation for independent authors. (They help me keep track of global trends and issues.)

And every day, without fail, I will see in one of these groups provide a "heads up" about the publishing industry. Which organisation provides the best distribution, who's charging how much for their services, and what scam is doing the rounds. By far, the scamming stuff makes us laugh and shudder in equal measure. Also, this is by far our biggest annoyance and time slurp.

This is where 'belonging' truly pays off. If I were an author doing my best on my own, I might be inclined to think the email that arrived, full of glowing praise about my book being an excellent choice for a book club read, might actually be legitimate. I might reply to it, and might even be tempted to pay them to have my book talked about (which is how the scam works. It's always about parting with money.)

Because I belong to so many groups, I keep seeing these scams, or variations of them, and I am more than alert to them when they land in my intray.

Authors who are out there by themselves have no idea about these things. I read this article below (it's a long read) a few weeks back and my heart sank. I couldn't help thinking that if they belonged to a few groups, even small ones, they might have received a warning ahead of time.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2026/mar/12/ai-book-scams-publishing-fraud

Of the groups I mentioned above, the first two don't cost me anything. They're friends I've met along the way. The other two do have annual fees, but they're not that high and do become tax deductible.

But also, belonging to groups big and small has kept me alert to scammers, in all their incarnations. From the early days of alerts about vanity publishers to the latest scammer incarnation (they've fed our book blurbs through AI to write the most glowing praise you've ever seen!) belonging to groups where people give a heads up to the latest scams has saved me a fortune.

And it's saved my sanity.