A year ago, this message might have impressed me. It refers to one of my books, understands its genre and identifies a genuine need: more exposure and more readers.
Today, I receive several like it – every day. I have trained my mailbox to classify them as spam.
The services offered are legitimate. Amazon optimisation, Goodreads promotion, email campaigns and book-club outreach may all have value. What undermines the message is the claim that the sender has carefully identified my book as especially suitable for his services. The language feels personal, but the approach is obviously AI-generated and repeated at scale.
This illustrates a growing problem with AI-based prospecting.
A method may appear effective when only a few people use it. Once everyone adopts the same tools, structures and flattering phrases, the advantage disappears. Personalisation becomes imitation, and relevance becomes noise.
I can buy the services described in the email from thousands of providers, often at surprisingly low prices. The reason is simple: the needs are genuine and the value proposition is based on activity rather than results. I would be paying for keyword research, outreach design, campaign setup and profile optimisation – not for additional readers or book sales.
I understand that activities must come before results. However, I have already tried many of the standard activities offered by external service providers, and the outcomes have been disappointing. When every author uses the same marketing practices, targets the same audiences, and optimises for the same platforms, those practices lose much of their effectiveness.
However, some of these activities are almost mandatory, but here is the real question: could they be carried out faster and more effectively with AI?
Yes, they can and I have found many ways to do so. However, I do not share those tricks, because a marketing best practice often becomes a worst practice as soon as everybody copies it.
The message to service providers is therefore straightforward: use AI to discover how an author can improve the revenue generation side of her business. Do not merely use it to sell outdated, standardised activities to more hungry and hopeful authors.
Postscript
After receiving the message, I searched for a Frank Wilton offering the services described. I found no credible public presence connecting that name with author promotion, Amazon optimisation, Goodreads marketing, email campaigns or book-club outreach. Nor could I find a business website, portfolio, client references or independent evidence of results.
That does not prove that the sender is fictitious. It only mean that the identity and professional track record behind the message are not readily verifiable.
The apparent personalisation is no substitute for credibility. Everything needed to produce it can be extracted from a publicly available book description and assembled by AI within seconds. A few accurate references to the plot may create the impression that someone has carefully studied the book, but they do not demonstrate that the sender has read it – or that he can sell it.
For authors considering such offers, the key questions are therefore not how well the message summarises the book, but who is behind it, which authors they have helped, what measurable results they achieved, and whether payment is tied merely to activity or to meaningful outcomes.
