Being an independent author comes with certain expectations. You expect to spend long hours writing, revising, researching, formatting, and occasionally wondering whether anyone outside your immediate family will ever read your book.
What you may not expect is the steady stream of strangers arriving in your inbox, each claiming to possess the one service your literary career has been desperately missing.
Some have allegedly read my books. Others have merely “come across my work.” A surprising number represent prestigious organizations using Gmail addresses. There are editors, marketers, literary agents, book clubs, publicity experts, event organizers, and mysterious publishing professionals who appear deeply invested in my success—provided, of course, that I eventually pay them.
The emails range from elaborate promotional proposals to astonishing feats of minimalism. Some praise books they clearly haven’t read. Some misunderstand the genre completely. Others borrow the names of legitimate companies while overlooking minor details such as spelling, grammar, professional credentials, and plausibility.
After receiving enough of these masterpieces, deleting them no longer seemed sufficient.
They deserved recognition.
And so, I am proud—or at least highly amused—to announce The Book Crook Awards, an ongoing celebration of the most entertaining, incompetent, audacious, and unintentionally creative unsolicited emails sent to independent authors.
Each contender is judged according to several important criteria, including originality, fictional authority, manufactured enthusiasm, research avoidance, grammatical adventure, and the ever-popular complete failure to identify what my books are actually about.
Every featured submission receives The Daily Flush, our customary acknowledgment that its journey through my inbox has reached its natural conclusion.
The strongest contenders earn a place in the official standings, where they compete for the highest distinction the Book Crook Awards can bestow:
The Golden Flush.
This is a living competition. Rankings may change whenever a new challenger demonstrates a previously unimagined level of incompetence. Former champions can be dethroned without warning, and no position is safe. Somewhere, even now, an aspiring literary marketer may be composing the email that changes everything.
The contest has already produced some remarkable performances, including false familiarity, questionable identities, imaginary professional affiliations, spectacular genre confusion, and one landmark achievement in minimalist incompetence.
You can read the rules, meet the contenders, and follow the current standings on The Book Crook Awards page.
The competition is fierce. The standards are appallingly low.
May the worst email win.
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