Exercises in Futility— Self-Publishing in Today’s World of Online Scams

As a self-published author, I can’t help but feel like the deck is stacked against me. Have you experienced this? It feels like the system is rigged for the little guy to fail. The last few weeks have been like a lot of 2020—fulfilling, but intensely frustrating. Lately, the frustration has overtaken any other emotion, leading mostly to a sense of failure, anger and depression.

If you’re an author, self-published or otherwise, please read the following and let it serve as a warning to you.

So, what is all this frustration about? I guess it starts with when my book, Timberwolves, was first published. That was a happy moment because I’d achieved one of my major goals, but then the reality set in. Sales were nowhere near my expectation. I paid to run ads on Amazon. They ran (and continue to)—and while they’ve generated a few clicks, they’ve resulted in ZERO sales. I couldn’t even find people to review it properly. So, you can understand my excitement when I was contacted by someone through Good Reads who offered an honest review in exchange for a copy of the book. I felt like this was agreeable and fair, so I agreed. She then said that for a cost, she would feature my book on her Youtube page and make a review video. It seemed a little time consuming, and work was involved to create the video, so I agreed to pay her. As soon as the money was sent, she blocked me on Good Reads and Twitter, and I learned the hard way that this was all a scam, apparently. (As an aid to other authors, this scammer goes by Fantasyryus on Good Reads and Syryus8 on Twitter—avoid her).

Sales started to trickle in, and I got one review, 5-Stars, which was amazing and you could tell the reviewer actually read the book. It was intensely gratifying to read and know that someone had enjoyed what I created. I tried to spread word about the book. I went to Reddit, and created an AMA (Ask Me Anything) where people can come in and ask questions. Some people were participating, and it was fun to connect with people who were interested in my work. Then, like a child crushing ants with their thumbs, the Reddit AMA moderators shut down the thread and deleted it because, in a nutshell, I wasn’t “famous enough.” The irony wasn’t lost on me (but it is apparently on them), that by deleting the thread they are limiting my exposure and how "famous” I could be. So that was a major frustration.

I continued tweeting things on Twitter as I have for several years, and even though I have 1500 or so followers, I regularly only get one or two interactions per tweet—sometimes less. It feels like I’m just micro-journaling to myself, and like the title of this post, it feels like an exercise in futility. A fellow writer suggested that I might have more luck on Facebook, so I heeded the advice and created an account.

At first, I was amazed. I was gaining “friends” quickly and many of my posts, whether about art or literature were met with around 20 interactions. (Although, it’s probably telling that the post with the most interactions—about 3 times as much as the others— was a New Year’s Harambe meme).

Lord of the Rings and Harambe—c’mon, you know that’s pretty funny.

I joined several writing groups on Facebook and began friending the others in the groups. Anyway, this is where the trouble began. I created an innocent enough post (I thought) with links to my book on Amazon, my blog, and my art page of my website. I paid Facebook to promote the post, just to get me some more exposure in the writing community. Facebook denied the ad because their algorithm thought I was trying to scam people or something (irony again, I know). But Facebook sent me an email claiming that after some investigating, they found that my ad was blocked in error (duh!) and I could promote the post once again. I went and tried, but it didn’t work. In fact, on everything that I posted on Facebook was a little button that told me I wasn’t able to promote anything because that function of my account was still disabled because of violations.

Oh well, no biggie, right? In the meanwhile, I continued adding friends. Did I know each person I added? No, but I don’t think this is uncommon. I was adding people in the groups I was in—people with similar interests and tastes, and friends of those friends. I believe this is a fairly common practice. In a few weeks, I had about 2,000 Facebook friends, and to my delight about 600 of those had followed and liked my dedicated author page—Frank Nix-Author and Artist. Things were going about as well as a self-published, hardworking author could hope. I discovered that I could create an online Facebook store, so I did, spending a few days creating a replica of what can be found at www.franknix.com/art where people can browse and purchase prints of my digital art, and that store was in the review process.

Then, Facebook decided not only to disable my account, but they also deleted my author and artist fan page. WHAT!? After working hard to build that network, and finding a smidgeon of success, they just swooped in and stole it away. Since they did so, according to my website analytics, my page views has dropped from about 60+ per day to around 5. Obviously this is affecting my exposure, and therefore, my business. They emailed me and said that their algorithm thought I was bot, (which I’m clearly not). They requested that I record a video message of my face, which I did. Ok, I took a nervous breath and assumed all would be restored properly after they saw that I was, in fact, not a robot. However, the next time I tried to log-in, all evidence of my account seems to have disappeared. The link I had to that fan page at the top of frankix.com is now a broken link. I’ve messaged them on email and on Twitter, and have heard zero response. After a few days, I began to get desperate, and desperation breeds stupidity.

So what stupid thing did I do? I sent another scammer some money. A while back when my account was first disabled, a few people contacted me (I assume they’re all part of the same scamming network) and suggested I give this guy a try on Twitter— @CyberAGOfficial. He claimed, and others backed him up, that he could restore my Facebook account. There were “screen capped” testimonials, which I assume now were all fabricated by him, of all the others he’s helped in the past. Anyway, long story short, he promised he could get it done, and if he couldn’t, the amount would be refunded. As soon as the money was sent, he then claimed he needed more to buy more tools. That’s when I knew something was up. He then blocked me on social media, and once again, I was scammed and had to learn the hard way.

I’m angry at both @CyberAGOfficial and @Syryus8 for scamming me, but I honestly get it. They’re doing what they can to hustle in this system that’s been created by these huge corporations like Facebook and Reddit, not too different from how self-published authors have to try to hustle for every little click or like they can muster. A huge part of me just wants to scream…

FUCK FACEBOOK! FUCK REDDIT!

…from the mountaintops. I feel depressed that these people are able to take advantage of others so easily, while at the same time, my account is deleted because it’s assumed I’m trying to scam people just because I want to share something with them that I’ve worked on for a decade. Writing community, what can we do to change the system, where hard-working authors don’t have to rely on hackers, scammers, or luck to make it in today’s publishing climate?

Let this be a warning to you, so you don’t make the same rookie mistakes I made during these early days of my novel publication. And if you know anyone who actually works at Facebook, please tell them to contact me on Twitter @FrankNix or message me here so we can remedy this horrible situation.

Oh, and I get the irony (lots of that going around, huh?) of me screaming this into the void where likely one or two people at most may ever see this. Ugh. Is 2021 over yet?

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Cheers.