Someone Is Me Now

A note from Liz Dubelman

Liz Dubelman as Etching

Or: What happens when AI learns to impersonate the humans who care most about books

Last week, an author tracked me down through my website contact form to tell me something I had not expected: he had received an email from me. Not from someone pretending to be a generic book marketer. From me specifically — Liz Dubelman, with my name, my Reedsy profile URL, and a lovingly detailed recitation of my actual career history — pitching his book with what he correctly identified as an AI-generated message so polished and personalized it nearly fooled him.

It did not come from me. It came from a Gmail address that had been constructed to look like mine. Someone had read my profile, extracted my biography, fed it to a language model, pointed that model at a database of authors, and set the whole apparatus loose to solicit business in my name.

I want to say that upfront clearly: if you have received an email from any Gmail address claiming to be me, it is not me. I do not cold-solicit authors. I do not conduct outreach through Gmail. Any legitimate contact from me comes through Reedsy’s platform or from my actual business addresses.

But I also want to talk about what this actually is, because I think it deserves more than a fraud alert.

The flattery problem

Here is what is almost funny about this: the email was good. The author said so himself. It was impressively personalized, demonstrably researched, fluent in the language of book marketing. It knew things about his book. It knew things about me. If he had been slightly less savvy — or slightly more eager — he might have replied.

And that is where the dark comedy tips into something more troubling. The system works by being good enough. Not good enough to fool everyone. Good enough to fool some people some of the time. Run it at scale, against hundreds of authors, with hundreds of fabricated identities, and the math starts to work in the scammer’s favor, even with a low conversion rate.

The publishing world is a particularly ripe target for this kind of operation, because authors are accustomed to being ignored. When something shows up in their inbox that actually seems to have read their book, to care about their characters, to speak their language, the relief of being seen can override the skepticism that would otherwise kick in.

What is actually being stolen

The obvious answer is: my identity. My name, my reputation, the professional credibility I have spent years building.

But something else is being stolen too, and it belongs to the authors on the receiving end of these emails. It is the experience of being genuinely reached out to by a human being who read your work and thought: yes, this. That experience, rare enough in the attention economy under the best circumstances, is being counterfeited.

The entire philosophy behind what I actually do, what I call Whole Artist Marketing, is grounded in the belief that a book’s marketing should be as human and as thoughtful as the book itself. That readers can feel the difference between a lighthouse and a megaphone. That genuine attention is not a strategy but a practice.

What the impersonation email was doing, with impressive technical sophistication, was performing that attention while having none of it. A lighthouse made of cardboard. It had all the surface features of care, the specificity, the warmth, the apparent knowledge of the book, and none of the actual thing.

Where this is going

I don’t think this gets better soon. The tools that made this email possible are improving faster than our collective ability to detect their outputs. The cost of running this kind of operation is dropping toward zero. And the publishing world, with its long tradition of cold queries, unsolicited pitches, and authors conditioned to respond hopefully to anyone who claims to see their work, is structurally vulnerable to it.

So here is what I can offer, practically speaking.

If you receive any email claiming to be from me, verify it came through Reedsy or from a domain you can trace to my actual business before you respond. If something about a pitch feels too comprehensive, too perfectly calibrated, too fluent in exactly what you needed to hear, that feeling is information worth acting on. Genuine outreach from a human being has edges. It has a voice. It sometimes misspells things. It does not know everything about you on the first contact.

And if you are another professional whose identity has been harvested for this kind of operation, you are not alone, and you are not overreacting. Report it to the platforms involved. Document everything. Tell your authors.

The author who contacted me did exactly the right thing. He was skeptical of something that was trying very hard to seem trustworthy. However inconvenient it may be in a world that keeps asking us to move faster and trust more is worth protecting.

Liz Dubelman

VidLit Productions / The Write Kit · reedsy.com/liz-dubelman