Book spam

[nwhyte]

Has anyone else been spammed by someone calling himself "Kenneth J Harvey", with an email message pimping his latest novel, accompanied by laudatory squibs from J.M. Coetzee, Alistair MacLeod, and Joe O'Connor

Comments

[nwhyte]

Well, my email address is pretty public knowledge; there's a link to it from the bottom of every page of my own website and on the infor page of this livejournal.

But I bet he was spamming this list which features you, me, and other luminaries (including, at a casual glance, sbisson, marykaykare, peake, pnh, pnh, drplokta and shsilver). I shall email the maintainer of the list; perhaps he can chip me in for a share of his $500 charge.

[dougs]

Presumably "pnh, pnh" is "pnh, tnh"?

[nwhyte]

Er, yes!

[dougs]

He's a crook, a domain thief: he's known for registering domains using various trading names, trademarks and company names which he doesn't own, with the intention of selling the domains on at a premium to the legitimate owners/users of those names.

He has judgments against him in favour of a number of companies in the UK, USA and Canada, most famously with WalMart. He uses false aliases and false addresses in various non-English-speaking countries to do this. He has a long record as a cyber-squatter. He's famous amongst the DNS Registrars for it.

I don't think this has any impact on his abilities as an author, of course. But the man's a tosser of the first order, and I would go a long way out of my way to avoid dealing with him in any way.

[coalescent]

did you ever get around to it?

Er, not as such, no. I know which pile of books it's in, though, if that helps ...

[nwhyte]

Don't bother on my account!

[pnh]

I did indeed get it, but I thought it was just another person who thinks the way to get an editor to read their book is to send unsolicited email to their personal email address. I didn't realize he was spamming the world.

[nwhyte]

You must get plenty like that. But even in the weird world of aspirant authors, it must be a bit unusual to try and flog your book to an editor after someone else has already published it!

[pnh]

You'd think, wouldn't you? But in fact I get lots of those.

I don't make a big deal out of it, because occasionally it turns out that I do want to know about the book being promoted.

[peake]

I did read and review Harvey's novel last year, and was fairly complementary. I actually think it is a very effective and interesting piece of work, which doesn't quite hold together in the end but still has some powerful and novel moments along the way. There was certainly enough there to whet my appetite, and I'd be interested in anything else he wrote.

Almost immediately after my review appeared I got an email from Harvey to thank me. This didn't bother me, my email address is fairly widely known, and I found it surprisingly and unusually polite. I was a bit more taken aback to find another email from him this weekend, clearly promoting the paperback, but given his earlier message it didn't surprise me too much.