Writer Beware

Four days ago now I received an email solicitation claiming to be from Spine Story Hub, and even including what appeared to be their contact address (support@spinestoryhub.com), purporting to want to do an “author feature” on In Flux.

There’s several things about this that are suspicious.

• First, In Flux is not among my top-selling books… but it does happen to be my most recent.

• Second, the message did not come from a spinestoryhub.com address; it came from a gmail box.

• And third, the sender identified themself only as “HAIZ” (the username on the gmail box is hello.haiz.o.glenn).

Additionally, much of the message reads like LLM-generated boilerplate. Stock phrases, zero specific references about the book.

Well, Spine Story Hub is easy to find online. So I did the obvious thing. I found their Contact page and sent them a query about whether this “HAIZ” person is a real person associated with them.

What did I get back?

CRICKETS. (No, not the Chhrt’ktk’t. The insect kind. Silence. Nada. Zip.)

So I looked in more detail at Spine Story Hub. They have a convincing-looking presence, they have a lot of posted interviews, they have a page of books they’ve reviewed… the first author there I’ve ever heard of is Frank Herbert, and the DUNE book cover image is clearly AI generated. The next one I recognize by name is Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary; but that is not the cover of Project Hail Mary. It looks AI-generated again.

So now not only am I highly dubious about “HAIZ”, I’m now pretty certain that the entirety of Spine Story Hub is a predatory scam in the first place.

Writer Beware.