WWe’ve had contact from a few authors who have received unsolicited emails purporting to come from Peter Oxley at Burning Chair but not from the official Burning Chair email account.
These all have the email address format: <name>.uk.edu@gmail.com
Please not that these are not genuine communications – we would never use gmail.com or similar platforms for our official communications – no offence whatsoever to any of them, but unless the email you receive uses the BC email suffix, treat it with extreme scepticism. By all means do check with us if you’re not sure, and thanks so much to those who have flagged it with us already.
This sort of thing is unfortunately becoming more and more common – we are receiving quite a few emails every week, usually from a gmail account, or something which looks almost-but-not-quite like an official publisher’s / agent’s / marketer’s account. The giveaways are usually:
- The email address
- The unsolicited nature of the email – if you have not approached them previously, or if you don’t have any connection with them, that’s usually a reason to at least pause and check.
- A long, AI generated, blurb which summarises your book in glowing terms – usually almost regurgitating the plot / back cover description and telling you how amazing it is, how they can help make you the next Stephen King / JK Rowling / Lee Child…
So if you receive one of these emails – either purporting to come from us, or another publisher / agent / PR, even from someone claiming to be from a Harper Collins or NY Times, or even Jeff Bezos himself, you should treat with extreme caution. Be sceptical, go to the purported sender’s website and check with them direct.
And if you are in any doubt at all – never ever click on a link, or attachment!
While we all dream of the lottery win of an unsolicited contact from a big-hitter who is going to change our worlds forever, those things are unfortunately rare in the extreme in real life. Always pause before getting carried away and ask yourself: “is this too good to be true?”
If it feels too good to be true, unfortunately it usually is…
And before deleting, please flag these pesky emails as spam so the email providers can do their magic and block them – so that you don’t get bothered any more, and hopefully others won’t receive them in future. It is a game of whack-a-mole with these spammers, but if we all work together we can at least make it a lot harder for them to target people.
Stay safe everyone!
