advertising fail

I have spent a lot of time with Facebook, Amazon, and Bookbub Ads over the years, trying to get better at them and improve my understanding of the platform. My email newsletter is also a form of advertising. So I’ve thought a lot about how to most effectively advertise.

Which means it’s sometimes hilarious when you encounter someone who isn’t trying at all.

I get a lot of unsolicited email from companies that are just starting up – usually book promotion places, Chinese webnovel places that want to serialize my stuff, or various podcast promotion sites. These pitches, as you can imagine, vary widely in quality, and some of them are out-and-out phishing scams designed to steal financial information.

The one I got today offering to promote ELVEN HONOR was pretty good.

In the sense of failing epically:

“Dear Darren Hultberg Jr,” the email began.

This was a surprise, because I have never been addressed as Darren Hultberg Jr, or ever referred to myself as Darren Hultberg Jr, or indeed ever heard the name. A quick search revealed that Darren Hultberg Jr is in fact a fantasy author who appears to focus on Cultivation and LitRPG style stories. So either they 1.) confused me with Darren Hultberg Jr., 2.) intended to email Mr. Hultberg, and emailed me by mistake, 3.) or messed up the mail merge function. None of these inspire confidence.

The next line was even better.

“Open your Book to your specialty crowd with our kind explicit advancements.”

Oh, dear. Is “advancements” something different from “advertisements?” Also, “explicit advancements” sounds like either a content warning for a certain kind of media, or the sort of thing you can get fired for. (“Employee made explicit advancements to a co-worker, specifically offering to ‘open her book to his kind explicit advancements’. Termination of employment recommended.”)

The email also touted that the service had “400k Plus adherents on Twitter.” Not followers. Adherents. Is this a book advertising service or a cult? Or maybe both? A cult that has gone into the book advertising business, maybe to pay off the legal settlements involving the leader’s explicit advancements?

“Your Book will be prescribed to our 1600+ Facebook Fans.”

Not to gloat, but I have 2,200.

“Your Post Will Be Featured on the Leading Facebook bunch.”

I know Facebook is constantly rotating features in and out, but I am reasonably sure that Facebook has never had a feature called “Facebook bunch.”

As a final red flag, the email didn’t actually come from the domain of the service in question – it came from someone’s personal Gmail account.

I know I’ve just spent 400 words amusing myself about this, but it’s pretty obvious what happened – some overseas operators slapped together a book promotion site to turn a quick profit, and probably used Google Translate to help along the process of selling their kind explicit advancements. It’s also possible it’s a more serious scam, one designed to steal credit card details.

So it’s good a reminder that there are a lot of shady operators on the Internet, and it’s always best to investigate everything thoroughly, take things with a grain of salt, and only spend money at businesses with established reputations and good word-of-mouth.

-JM