In the past 18 months, AI technology has triggered a pandemic of scams in the publishing world. According to Kelly Burke, a leading Guardian Australia investigative reporter, both mainstream and self-published authors have fallen prey to increasingly sophisticated book publishing and publicity scams leveraging AI to lure aspiring authors to part with their money.

Fake publishers that seem real, fake websites that copy mainstream publisher sites to a “T,” and fake book marketers who target authors with virtually flawless solicitations and “guarantees” of best-seller success: It’s all part of an evolving, uncontrolled scamming multiverse. As many as 2500 scam publishers were identified last year by Writers Weekly, a long-running US website for freelance writers. Scammers have bilked authors of hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees for meaningless services. These include vanity media placements, low-viewership interviews, phony book-to-film contracts, advertising and placement in book fairs that don’t exist, and procuring positive reviews on major retailer sites – illegal in many jurisdictions.

“The new wave of artificial intelligence-fueled publishing fraud…lifts directly from the lonely hearts playbook,” Burke writes in The Guardian. “Rogue publishing schemes – most operating out of south Asia, the Philippines and Nigeria – have become the new romance scams, substituting the promise of true love for the dream of literary recognition.” (https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2026/mar/12/ai-book-scams-publishing-fraud)

In this ASJA must-see webinar, join four of the world’s leading investigators of publishing scams, Burke among them, who will tell you how to detect and protect yourself from on-line scammers and seek legal resolution if you have been scammed.