Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam. . .

Many moons ago I posted about a spam query letter I got. (Not to be confused with the spam book promotion I received recently.) Just to reprise, the query was about "A Best Seller waiting to be published - Discover the Revolutionary New Way to Heal Yourself!..."

Needless to say, the first mistake was confusing a writer with a publisher. But our spammer was not one to make such fine distinctions. Anyway, I posted, I vented, and the tale thus ended.

Or did it?

I was just checking traffic to my site and discovered a new referring link from the Doubtful Muse blog. It seems that our spammer has finally gotten around to spamming editors. Yep. She's still at it. And, yep, by the pronoun I have a gender. You see, the recent post at Doubtful Muse gave me two tidbits of information I didn't have before (or I just wasn't up to Googling for at the time.)

Tidbit one is a post or two at the The Rejecter blog. Apparently this poor employee at a literary agency got the same spam around the same time I did. The response reached a snark level that equaled if not exceeded my own:

Fortunately you have magic cards to heal yourself from the emotional trauma when you don't get published because you pissed off potential agents and publishers by randomly spamming their emailboxes instead of submitting your idea in the proper format, which can be found on the very page from which you got my email address.

But wait, there's more! The second tidbit was the fact that the proprietor of the Doubtful Muse was able to Google the mysterious website only alluded to in the spam email. This was a dangerous thing to let me know. Apparently, our spammer is a woman named Christina, who operates out of the UK. Saying she doesn't "get" the publishing industry is an understatement. Here's some quotes from the site:

The ideas for these manuscipts [sic] are born out of many situations, if you have an idea worthy of development, please contact me for an informal but confidential discussion.
[...]
Therefore, the role of the editor is to save the writer from the embarrassment of presenting poor quality workmanship. Once an editor has proofed and streamlined a manuscript by strengthening any weak areas, the manuscript will then be ready for market.
[...]
I hope to fulfil certain criteria:

- to produce excellent, professional novels worthy of publishing
- an original plot idea
- to appeal to the a broad market place - with enough potential for the book to be commercially viable
- to continue to produce novels and I as an author stand the test of time

I won't link to the site, but feel free to Google it yourself. The woman has invested a lot in web design, but could have done a lot better by actually submitting proposals. I really don't know what makes her think some publisher is going to surf her site and solicit her for a book proposal. Not only that, but Christina is paranoid about "revealing" her "secrets." She has synopses up on her site, but they're password-protected MS Word documents. She has the spammed proposal up on its own domain that's unlinked to from her author site, and insists you e-mail her for chapters. She has sample articles up, but no publishing credits listed. None.

However, we know she's a certified published writer. How, you ask? Because she has this:



How can you argue with that?