marsaumell
Does anybody know how to get rid of these artists and illustrators who self-advertise in my books without consent?
SeraDrake
@marsaumell - You don't. Wattpad has no way of blocking chatbots from creating accounts. You report and block them, and then another chatbot spammer pops up, and you report and block *that* one. Ad nauseam. Ad infinitum. If you're a professional indie writer, you'll get a different variant of these spammer bots: emails and direct messages on social media offering to promote your books in book clubs, optimize it in Amazon searches, insert it into "specially curated" Goodreads lists, and, of course, provide you with a cinematic book trailer and "professional" book cover to help it "really shine." The bots are effusive in their compliments, saying how impressed they were by the quality of your writing - and if you have Amazon or Goodreads reviews, funny thing, the bots will have regurgitated their talking points. Some of the bots pretend to be real authors or literary agents. As if Stephen King would write you directly... According to Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware! this is the 2020's equivalent of the old Nigerian prince scam. https://writerbeware.blog/2025/08/01/return-of-the-nigerian-prince-a-new-twist-on-book-marketing-scams/ The bots offering "fan art" and webtoons and the like seem to be a part of this. After all, hobbyists on Wattpad, Inkitt, Inkspired, etc might be gullible and have money to burn, too!
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OnceUponALily
@marsaumell They're annoying. Most of them, if not all, are spam. Probably bots. I see them commenting on random books, such as book review books and book clubs, saying the same thing: the story is engaging, and they want to create artwork for it. Those are random books. They don't need cover art. I'm not sure where they come from, but they multiply rapidly.
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