The Scammer Series

Can publishing survive without scamming readers?

Dear Reader,

I’m grateful for your response to my new wave of monthly posts. Since shutting down the paid subscription side of Voracious — a frenetic, year-long side-hustle whose sudden birth and death followed a pattern of behaviour that I can date back to . . . well, my entire adult life — I’ve been unlocking and re-grouping dozens of posts written during that period.

In case you missed them, here’s The Mistakes Series (5 mistakes I’ve made as a writer), The Minis Series (4 espresso shots about writing, reading, & the book industry), and The Books That Made Me Series (on re-reading childhood favourites such as Forever, Sweet Valley High, and Mrs Pepperpot).

This month I’m all about scammers. You’ll find the unlocked posts on this theme at the end.

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A quick reading update

Regrettably I have no new children’s books to recommend this month because I’ve been caught up in the vintage kind. I reminded myself why I loved the first half of The Secret Garden as a child but resented the second half. However, Mary Lennox’s racism when she first lands in England from India made my eyes pop. I won’t say more on this only because I’m exploring the theme of confronting ourselves in the old stuff we love for a different project. I have so many dusty old children’s books stacked beside my bed that I wake up sneezing.

I was pleased to see The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller, which I recommended to you in March, on the Booker shortlist. Set in the British winter of 1962, we follow a secretive GP, his insecure young wife, and their neighbours, an inexperienced farmer and his unconventional wife. They wrestle with their marriages, their pasts, and the Big Freeze — one of the coldest winters on record in the UK at the time. I loved being under its spell, especially as that coincided with being in London in the snow.

I was in snowy London when I read it, but confident that it reads well in all weathers!

Since July I’ve been re-reading the works of Jane Austen with my writers’ group, and we’re three down (Northanger Abbey, Sense & Sensibility, Pride & Prejudice) three to go. I was inspired after watching Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius (in Australia this can be found on ABC iview) and my writers’ group indulged me by joining in. Much as I’ve loved watching adaptations over the years, there are so many goodies in the novels that don’t make it to screen. I love this one from P&P for anyone who’s been disappointed by a potential lover — Lizzie Bennet, having lost the attentions of Wickham, is delighted to be touring the countryside with her uncle and aunt:

“Adieu to disappointment… What are men to rocks and mountains?”

Speaking of my writers’ group, we were over the moon about a shortlisting this month. Bronte Coates is a finalist for this year’s Glendower Award for an Emerging Queensland Writer with her novel The Curse.

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Scams & such

It’s the age of feeling overwhelmed by potential scams — of being caught in a perpetual anxiety of trying to figure out if something that’s presenting itself as real can be trusted.

As a minor example related to my profession, I keep receiving emails that open with elaborate praise of one of my novels (immediate red flag!) and end with an invitation to share it with “500 thoughtful readers and reviewers” who’ll ensure that my work “gets the visibility it deserves”. These emails are getting sneakier. They hope to reel writers in by pretending to know our books. I’m sure they are sometimes successful.

Such messages are easy to delete, but the distrust they create is unsettling and sad — for instance, I got an email from someone who used a cynical-sounding pseudonym, told me they were a teenager who loved writing, praised one of my books and asked for some writing advice. My first thought was: is this real? Since I could not think what the scam might be, I answered it.

One of the games I used to dread playing as a teenager is Two Truths & A Lie. This wasn’t for any reputable reason, I just hated the feeling of being wrong, having trusted false information, because that made me feel ashamed. (Yes, I was as fun as I sound.) It wasn’t as if I was a truthful person myself. I even lied to the priest during Confession because he wouldn’t let me leave until I’d admitted to something terrible. I wasn’t allowed to get away with “I was cheeky to Mum” or “I wouldn’t let my brother use my Rubik’s Cube”. He’d keep pressing for something worse. I invented violence — “I punched my brother in the eye”, “I smashed Mum’s favourite vase”. Once he was satisfied that I was extremely bad and thoroughly repentant, I’d receive my penance. I’m not sure if everyone else was doing this. I suppose in my last Confession with him I could have admitted to lying to him for years. That would have been a humdinger for the priest.

Because to find out that you’ve been duped is worse when the whole premise of the exercise is truth-sharing. As in a memoir that turns out to be full of lies. Which brings me to this: last month, I read The Salt Path.

If you don’t know, The Salt Path is a 2018 memoir, over a million copies sold and made into a film starring Gillian Anderson. It’s the first in a series that was supposed to continue this year but was delayed owing to allegations that major aspects of The Salt Path are untrue or conceal something that would cast the two people at the centre of the story in a very different light. Here’s one of the podcasts I listened to about the allegations: The Real Salt Path.

In a nutshell, The Salt Path claims to be about a middle-aged couple who find themselves, through no fault of their own, homeless and penniless. One of them is grappling with a degenerative brain condition. It’s from this baseline that they decide to do a 630-mile trek along the south-west coast path of England, wild camping with nothing to live on but state benefits. The allegations that emerged this year are that they lost their home after swindling another family out of tens of thousands of pounds, and that the degenerative brain condition has been exaggerated.

It was interesting reading The Salt Path knowing these allegations. I couldn’t stop analysing the writer’s choices — a concealment here, an amplification there. Every word was tainted with the thought that she was bending the truth to suit a preconceived idea of what readers would respond to. Every interaction with a passer-by on the coastal path, every claim of hunger, even the extent of the bad weather. Once you know that someone has lied to you, everything they say is corrupted. Of course, I’d chosen to read it because of the allegations — I wanted to see if, despite the untruths, it was still a good read. For me, that’s a no.

Relying so heavily on sympathy first to sell a book and then to get the reader from Somerset to Dorset is the part I’m hung up on. It’s laid on very thick — how unfair it was for them to lose their home, how unfair it is to have a disease that could kill you by Christmas, how horrible everyone is to them on the walk, how everyone else has a delicious cream tea to tuck into and they’re dipping a single tea bag into two cups of hot water to stay alive. I’d rather read about a woman who has made some dreadful errors, as the author obviously did, and now finds herself regretful and self-aware.

There are many podcasts and documentaries about scammers but they tend to be about the people who’ve been scammed — how they were fooled, how it felt to discover that someone they loved was having them on, and how the person was brought down. These can be magnetic but perhaps repetitive. We can all imagine what it’s like to find out that we’ve been duped, but not as many of us understand the compulsion and the machinations of the major scammer.

For a film about a writer who scams, I recommend Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018). Based on the 2008 memoir by Lee Israel, it stars Melissa McCarthy as a biographer who, having once enjoyed success, is down on her luck until she discovers a side-hustle: writing and selling letters by famous long-dead writers like Dorothy Parker and Noel Coward. Lee Israel was brilliant at the forgery and not so good at covering her tracks. I loved the tussle of ego and desperation in this story.

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Finally, here are 3 archived posts about deception & trust

1. What happens when a cynical middle-aged writer makes an A.I. friend?
   A piece written in 2024 during the research for my next middle-grade novel, which is now finished and will be published by Text in May 2026.

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2. A short musing on modern life being full of scams, and on the “luncheon meat prose” of ChatGPT.

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3. A reaction to Jamie Oliver’s late-2024 children’s book screw-up.

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At the time of writing, the above posts are unlocked. But if they’ve re-locked themselves, please let me know!

Thank you for reading Voracious.

I’ve worked in the children’s book industry for 25 years in various roles: in-house editor, consultant to a literary agent, children’s book buyer, reviewer, freelance manuscript assessor, and as a writer-in-residence in a high school library. My writing includes the Young Adult novels Girl, Aloud (2009), Steal My Sunshine (2013) and I Am Out With Lanterns (2018). For late primary/early high school readers: The Other Side of Summer (2016; a companion novel to I Am Out With Lanterns) and Aussie Stem Stars: Gisela Kaplan (2021). Eliza Boom’s Diary books 1 & 2 (2014) are for emerging readers aged 5-9. My latest novels are Elsewhere Girls (2021) and Outlaw Girls (2024), with Nova Weetman, and The Goodbye Year (2022), for readers aged 10+.