I also encourage you to do whatever you can to influence the elections — knocking on doors, making phone calls, writing postcards, donating to candidates.
While three of my four novels feature an election, in Bones in the Wash the election is the primary story, and one thread through the story is the “fraud of voter fraud.”
A “page-turner with a conscience,” Bones in the Wash is a political thriller, family soap, and murder mystery set during the 2008 presidential campaign in New Mexico. Ambitious Albuquerque Mayor Tomas Zamara is charged with doing “whatever it takes” to deliver the state’s five electoral votes for John McCain, and that means shutting down voter registration drives and accusing the Democrats of stealing the election, charges he knows are not true. Challenging him every step of the way is fierce, young Sierra León of the Democracy Project, who calls on him to listen to his better self and reject his party’s dirty tricks. Both protagonists, knee-deep in politics, face as many or more crises with their romantic relationships and fractured families.
I reread the book several years ago, which was thrilling — to enjoy my own book as if I were a reader — and I found myself rooting for both protagonists, even though they were working against each other.
What was also eye-opening was that even though the novel includes dirty tricks and unfounded allegations of “voter fraud,” Bones in the Wash seemed so innocent compared to today’s world. The seeds were there — the voter suppression efforts — but I didn’t expect they would grow into something so malignant.
Of course, attempts to disenfranchise voters are not new. Before 1964, when the 24th Amendment was passed and later that year, when President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, in large swaths of the South, Black Americans had to pay a poll tax in order to enter the voting booth or had to pass a literacy test.
I was reminded of this last month when I read the news about the Supreme Court’s ruling that sided with the Trump administration, allowing it to move forward with its plan to use a centralized database to verify voters’ citizenship and immigration status, another example of a “solution” to an almost non-existent problem.
Over and over again, the claim that non-citizens are voting have been found to not be credible, but the accusations have only gotten louder.
Fortunately, current law prevents registered voters from being removed from the rolls with less than 90 days before a federal election, so the ruling should have no impact on the midterms. But who knows what other dirty tricks might be unleashed.
Years ago, I remember talking with one reader of Bones, from Canada, who loved the book, but said the voter suppression tactics and dirty tricks didn’t seem realistic. I assured him that, though they were fictionalized, all the tactics and tricks in the novel were based on real and recent events, though not necessarily all in New Mexico. If he read the book today, he would not consider it unrealistic.
When I was writing Bones, I suffered from the delusion that as allegations of voter fraud were exposed as lies to justify disenfranchising voting that the false narratives would fall apart. The opposite has happened. These days, politicians even say the silent part out loud — “we don’t want ‘xxxx people’ to vote.” I underestimated the power of the big lie.
Here’s what some readers have said about Bones in the Wash.
It’s seductive. Or it was, before I realized it was a scam.
Here’s another, from a “book club.”
Most of these emails promised some sort of promotional support, sometimes very specific, like “targeted reviewer outreach to 75 to 100 active Goodreads reviewers.”
Though they started out fawning, some segued into some variation on “you’re invisible on the internet and here’s how I can help you.”
At first, I was curious. I looked up the senders. Most of the time, they didn’t exist. Their names were made up. They promised visibility and sales and reviews, but they had no website. If they were a real human, they were also operating in full witness protection mode. Any successful marketing expert with clients would contact me from their business domain, not from so-and-so-marketing-specialists@gmail.com.
To their credit, rarely did they say they read my book. They said they “came across it” or it “caught my attention.” More often than not, a healthy fraction of the flattering language was scraped from promotional material I wrote. No wonder it was flattering.
Before I Wised Up
Earlier this year, I responded to one email, allegedly from a Dallas-based book-group leader, who told me my novel, When I Killed My Father: An Assisted-Suicide Family Thriller, had been chosen by her group because of “its emotionally complex premise and the profound ethical and relational questions it raises.” She promised a zoom Q & A, members posting honest reviews on Goodreads, and more.
In my email to her I asked if this was for real — I said I received a lot of AI-written solicitations, often from people who had no presence on the web.
She replied that she was a real human being and her book club was part of Meetup. She followed up with more promises, claimed there were no marketing fees and — you can guess where this is going — her next response included an “author profile submission form,” and there, in small print, the kicker: VIP registration fee: $125. Not to mention a bank in Delaware and an account holder with a Nigerian name.
Lesson learned. Nothing lost but time.
Book Club, Literary Festivals, and Famous Authors
The emails evolved. Last spring, I received an email from Kate Bolick, an actual author, inviting me to participate in the Newburyport Literary Festival in Massachusetts, an actual literary festival. I was intrigued enough to check. And of course, the sender was not the real Kate Bolick and the participants in the festival had all been selected months earlier.
Two other variations have shown up recently, invitations to book clubs and personal letters from best-selling authors like Suzanne Collins, Stephen King, and the like. Suzanne Collins’ email included her book Hunger Games in the signature, but could not have been more generic. The sender’s email address gave it away — contact.suzannecollins01@gmail.com.
Some were admittedly clever.
Others were obvious scams like this one that they forgot to finish. (I highlighted the last sentence.)
I have probably received two or three hundred such emails in the past six months. Many raved about books I did not write. Others appeared, at a glance, to be solicitations from traditional media, like BBC Radio and actual movie production companies.
To Complicate Things
Because I’ve been inundated by these scam emails, I am suspicious of any stranger reaching out, but just this past week, I got a legitimate email that I ignored. It was from a TV reporter in San Francisco who’d been assigned a story about the history of Sausalito from World War II to the present, including the houseboat scene. Which I know a lot about. His email address was @cbsnews.com, and there was no flattery or mention of my book, but I was still hesitant and I was traveling, so I didn’t respond until two days later. He emailed back, said he’d already filed the story. Alas.
There are legitimate book marketers, some of which I’ve used — like Fussy Librarian or Bargain Booksy or BookBub. They essentially sell ads, and, for me, I usually earn less than I spend, but they do generate sales and it’s an inexpensive way to reach new readers.
I’m Not the Only One
I’m a member of BAIPA, the Bay Area Independent Publishers Association, and at our meetings, we’ve discussed these scam solicitations. Many other authors also get them regularly. There’s also a lot about these scams on the Writer Beware website, a project of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association. Writer Beware has been around since 1998, long before these AI scams started, but scams targeting writers, like vanity presses, have been around for even longer.
Arguably we writers, often solitary creatures who work in obscurity and wish for fame and fortune, are an easy target, especially when we get an email full of hyperbolic praise and promise of greater visibility and sales.
The solicitations themselves should be suspicious enough — after all, reputable publishers, literary agents, radio stations, literary festivals rarely contact authors — and the flattery is over the top, but what author doesn’t like praise?
Writer Beware lists a number of giveaways: excessive flattery, language that is clearly lifted from your own book descriptions and reviews, buzzwords like branding and metadata and visibility and optimization, no website, and instead of company email domain like so-and-so@literaryagency.com, the email comes from so-and-so-literary-agency@gmail.com.
Writer Beware’s cautionary post “Return of the Nigerian Prince: A New Twist on Book Marketing Scams” tracks with my experiences. These AI-generated emails often spell out proposed services in great detail, like “updating key words” and “pitching books to top book bloggers” or are vague and fake-friendly like “I’d be delighted to discuss this further with you.”
Here’s a list of dozens of specific scams from Writer Beware: Book Marketing Scams
As is the case with other kinds of scams and spam, most of these operations are built on volume, so even if only a few authors get fooled, the scammers can make money.
And while there are plenty of homegrown scammers, like the Dallas-based book-club leader I corresponded with, most scams are operated by organized crime syndicates in places like Nigeria and and the Philippines, and the people doing the grunt work are often victimized or even enslaved. Though these days, because of AI bots, there are allegedly fewer actual humans behind these scams.
Last month, I walked down the hill to The Junction, a beer garden in Tam Junction, to join a hundred or so Deadheads for a free “Dead At The Junction” concert hosted by Alex Jordan. I ran into some friends who are regulars at Dead-adjacent concerts and I also chatted with three strangers, all of whom knew who I was.
“You’re the crossing guard guy,” one said.
I am a bit famous, arguably infamous, in my small community of Tam Valley. Primarily because I’ve been a crossing guard for seven years, on Shoreline Highway, kitty corner from Good Earth Natural Foods, for those who know the area.
Of course, I wear a fluorescent yellow vest, which says “CROSSING GUARD” in bold black type on the back, and a matching hat. Plus my stop sign. So I’m very visible.
I am also known for doing exercises on my corner. Every shift, morning and afternoon, I do six sets of bicep curls with a red resistance band with black handles, plus two sets of lunges. A passer-by who teaches at a gym once praised me on my technique!
Here I am at my corner on Halloween in 2023, wearing a prop from “Sausalypso Houseboat Wars Murder Mystery,” the play that I adapted into the novel, Pirates of Sausalito.
I am also frequently spotted walking to and from my corner, to pickleball at our local park, or to the Tam Valley Community Center, for murder mystery rehearsals and performances.
I’ve achieved a small bit of fame as an actor in these murder mystery plays, as well as a writer and director — we perform our show four times each year and usually sell out, so that’s an audience of about four hundred every year.
Over the years, I’ve also volunteered at Creekside Friday, serving beer and wine, or preparing buns for burgers and hot dogs. Three or four times, I’ve volunteered for the Crab Feed, a couple times for Oktoberfest.
In short, I am famous, or at least well-known, in my community, primarily for being a crossing guard, but also to a lesser extent, for walking, acting, volunteering, and playing pickleball.
What I am not famous for, alas, is writing novels. I’ve written four novels, but that’s more of a secret than I’d like it to be.
True, there are dozens of friends and acquaintances who know I’m an author, and many have purchased or read or listened to my books. Or come to my author events. And now and then I hand out bookmarks promoting my books or upcoming events.
Of course, the main reason I’m not famous for being an author is that I don’t write in public, but in my teeny-weeny book-lined study that used to be a storage shed.
Here I am tabling at Maritime Day in the Park two years ago, right where some of the true events Pirates of Sausalito is based on took place. I’ll be there this year on August 1. It’s free, with live music and food and drink. Come and say hello.
And I don’t walk around the neighborhood with a fluorescent vest that says “AUTHOR.” I could.
I do have a book bag that says “ASK ME ABOUT MY BOOK” and I have draped it around my neck at festivals and book fairs.
I am writing another book, which I hope to publish next year, and who knows, after that I might not only be famous in Tam Valley but worldwide. A guy can dream.
Albuquerque Mayor Tomas Zamara is charged with doing “whatever it takes” to deliver the state’s electoral votes for John McCain, including suppressing voter registration efforts, though those efforts will seem tame compared to today. Zamara’s also grappling with a fierce opponent, a volatile new woman, and a demanding family. When a flash flood unearths the skeleton of his long-missing wife, investigators zero in on him as a suspect.
Wasted: Murder in the Recycle Berkeley Yard is set in the gritty and malodorous world of garbage and recycling, and explores rich and resonant themes of reinvention, transition, and discarding that which no longer serves us. Wasted is part mystery, part love triangle, and part political satire, plus it’s a gentle mocking of Berkeley, where I lived for thirty years.
Berkeley reporter Brian Hunter investigates the “recycling wars,” finds the body of his friend Doug crushed in an aluminum bale, and hunts down the murderer, all the while trying to win the heart of Barb, Doug’s former lover, now a suspect in his murder.
I hosted more than a dozen book launch events in 2014, 2015, and 2016, when these two books were published, but that was years ago, and times have changed. I wrote those books as “contemporary” novels, but now they’re practically historical novels. About times that seem innocent by today’s standards. Like watching “West Wing” reruns — oh how sweet, the president cares about integrity.
I imagine one or more events in Marin, where I live, and one or more in the East Bay.
I recently helped a friend with his book launch and one of his events was a house party, hosted by friends of his in Lafayette, open to friends of the author as well as the hosts, and that was a lot of fun.
Let me know what you think of this relaunch idea. Might you come to an Election Season Thrillers book launch event? Would you like to host one? Let me know by email or in the comments below.
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