I Received A Creative Email Threat

 Here is an email I received yesterday:

WE HAVE ACCESS TO YOUR BOOKS Diner Girl and Lies and Love. WE GIVE 24 HOURS TO VANISH. IF YOU DON'T STOP, WE WILL RE-PUBLISH THEM USING AI TECHNOLOGY. INSTEAD OF YOUR NAME, YOUR BOOKS WILL BE 'AUTHORED' BY ONE OF US. AN EXACT REPLICA OF YOUR BOOKS WILL BE SELLING ON AMAZON UNDER OUR NAMES AND YOU WON'T LIKE IT! AMAZON CANNOT DETECT THIS TECHNOLOGY YET AND YOUR LAWS CAN'T HARM US! 

I never open emails that seem to come from suspicious sources without first Googling them, and here the sender is "Sendity", which is an anonymous email service, itself a red flag. In fact, my first stab at Google at least gave me that tiny bit of info, but when I entered it as a search term the second time, Google insisted on only giving me results for "density". I'm wondering how much clamor there is for an anonymous email service, and most importantly, why. Well, I obviously know why; that was a rhetorical question.

The question here is, what does the sender expect to get out of this? "If you don't stop" ~ don't stop what? Apparently I'm currently doing something that I need to stop, and that could be a lot of things. I do need to stop smoking and I need to stop eating sweets. I wish the sender had been more specific.

Of course I initially panicked. It was probably the block letters that did it. I've read tons of articles about authors' works being stolen.

Had I calmed down for a moment, I would have realized that, for one, Lies and Love isn't even "live" on Amazon yet. It's still on pre-order, so if Mister Anonymous happened to get hold of it, that's a pretty awesome feat. 

Also, the "warning" is obviously a copy and paste job. Everything is in block letters except for my book titles, so I'm supposing thousands of authors have been the recipients of this same missive.

"We give 24 hours to vanish." Me personally? I think, first, that my spouse would notice if I suddenly vanished, and I have no way to go about doing that. I seem to have misplaced my magic wand.

As someone on Reddit pointed out, why would the sender need AI to republish my books? I mean, they're already written. Just steal the exact words. 

Once I thought this through, there is one thing that bothers me, though. How did the sender get an email address that I only use to send out my author newsletter? I'm not registered on any sites with that address; I've only used it otherwise to send out a few requested ARC copies. I mean, the sender obviously knows I'm an author and even mentioned two of my books by name. Both of those titles, by the way, have been included in my previous newsletters. I'm not going so far as to point fingers, but...

On the other hand, my spam folder does contain a bunch of messages from people offering (paid) reviews of my books, so they had to find my email address somewhere. I'm not worried about "stopping" some unspecified action on my part, and I'm obviously not going to "vanish", but it certainly would be nice to know if someone is selling or giving access to my author email address. Who has it, other than Google and MailerLite, three or four ARC readers, and of course my newsletter subscribers? Again, no finger pointing ~ I'm just pointing out the only folks who have access. 

I'll be checking my spam folder now (I never did before) and I'm hanging onto the friendly little message. Maybe this is just the start of things to come. So be it. Hey, at least someone's recognized me as an author!