James Patterson popped into my inbox
I got an email from James Patterson's team last week. They'd read my book. They loved the part about plucking chickens before becoming a writer. They referenced my podcast, my USA Today bestseller, my Become a Writer Today brand. Here's what he opened with: > "My name is James Patterson. I'm perhaps best known for my thrillers Alex Cross, the Women's Murder Club, Michael Bennett but what fewer people know is that I've spent decades thinking about productivity, about how to get things done without burning out, about the rhythms that make creative work sustainable. Which is precisely why This Is Working landed on my radar and why I'm still thinking about it years after its 2019 publication." James Patterson aside, the email asked me to "confirm a few details" before a potential collaboration. Classic phishing pattern. But the quality of the research was unsettling. This wasn't a Nigerian prince template. Someone, or rogue agent, scraped my entire Amazon profile and wove it into a perfectly personalised pitch. Two years ago, a scammer sending personalised outreach to 10,000 authors would need a team. Now they need one prompt. The irony? I've coached people to use AI for email marketing. I've written about personalisation, subject lines, hooks. The scammer was using my own playbook. Here's what I noticed: The research was flawless but the ask was vague. Real collaborations lead with specifics. "We want you for episode 47 of X show." Scams keep it open-ended. The tone was too polished. Real cold outreach from a publisher has typos, awkward phrasing, cc'd assistants. This was magazine-quality prose. The email came from a domain that looked right but wasn't the publisher's actual domain. The uncomfortable truth for anyone building an email list or doing cold outreach: your subscribers are getting emails exactly like this. Every day. And they're getting better. What this means for your content: Trust is the new moat. Not reach, not cleverness. Consistency beats novelty. Your subscribers can spot your real voice after 50 emails. A scammer can't replicate that. Verify before you click. Every time. Even when the research is perfect. I've been writing daily emails for months. The scammers are catching up to the quality. But they can't catch up to the relationship. Want to learn the exact prompts and workflow frameworks I use to get more from AI tools? Check out my Prompt Writing Studio course |