The notification sound: "Exclusive Proofreading Opportunity: William Books Publishing." I remember thinking that the name sounded professional. William. Like William Morrow or William Collins. Prominent publishers sound like that, don't they? Not flashy or trying too hard.
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It was during one of the pandemic years, 2019/2020, just a normal day for me. You know how proofreading jobs were so in demand, prior to the chatGPT boom and whatnot. I remember I was wearing one of my favorite sweatshirts, gray-colored, I still have it up to this day, the one with a hole right next to the left shoulder that I kept meaning to repair but never got around to doing.
The email was neat. Professional fonts, proper spacing, no obtrusive typos. "We're a boutique publishing house introducing a bold new literary series," it said. "Your portfolio demonstrates just the attention to detail we require." They'd found my portfolio, they said. Which one? I had profiles scattered over three different freelance sites, Fiverr, Upwork, freelancer... name them.
The pay was what sent my dopamine levels off the charts and through the roof, perhaps that's why I did not sit down to rationalize, I strongly doubt I was even thinking at all. Sixty dollars a manuscript; three times more than any other job I'd ever accepted before that. "Upon completion of the full batch," they wrote, "we'll process payment through PayPal." Batch? That should have made me concerned, but I was already calculating in future tenses. Five manuscripts would be three hundred dollars. Ten - six hundred dollars. I went on like that, then convert to Nigerian naira?? please! I was on my way to being a big boy.
I remember the excitement felt dangerous. Like when you're going down stairs in the dark and you misjudge the last step, that stomach drop sensation before your foot lands on solid ground. But this time my foot landed on air.
The first manuscript arrived as a .doc document. 20,000 words or so from one person's novel about... what was it? A detective in a small town in Georgia? A woman at home? The plot is shifting in my mind, probably because I read so many novels with such similar plots that year. They all blurred together: loss, secrets, redemption, small towns with dark cores.
I leaped in. God, I leaped in. Up till 2 AM, 3 AM, going over inconsistencies and forced dialogues. The name of the title character flipped back and forth between Sarah and Sara. The weather would alternate between rain and snow half-way through the chapter. Basic mistakes, the kind that make you wonder if anyone had taken the time to read the thing before submitting it.
But that was reasonable. Most of my clients turned in first drafts. I was used to fighting the tide of bad writing, fixing what could be fixed, making what couldn't be marked. This felt real. Too sloppy, but real.
My contact was Jennifer Walsh. Or Walsh Jennifer. The name is reversed in my mind now, but it didn't occur to me then to wonder. She responded quickly to my questions, always professional and polite. "Thank you for your diligence," she'd tell me. "The author will be thrilled with these changes."
The second manuscript came a week after. Then a third. Then a fourth. I started seeing a kind of pattern, the same clunky sentence structures, same character tropes, plot points, as if copied and pasted from manuscript to manuscript. But I told myself that's just how small presses are. Small budgets, same readership, house style leanings.
I was eating noodles most of the nights, stretching my coffee pods. The marketing agencies had cut their copywriting budgets. Everyone was waiting for things to go back to the way they were.
So when the pay email finally appeared in my inbox, I clicked on it so fast that I nearly spilled my coffee cup. The PayPal receipt glowed on my screen. Proper format, official-fonted text, my name spelled correctly. A Very paypal-ly $1,200.
Twelve hundred dollars. I stared at that figure until it started to feel strange, like when you repeat a word so many times it becomes meaningless. Twelve. Hundred. Dollars.
It did feel off, though, like completely off. Like when you're jogging and your shoe is loose but you don't know if you imagined it. Maybe because I got no notification from my PayPal app.
I have no idea if I was driven by curiosity or merely skepticism, I automatically moved my cursor over the sender's email address. paypal something@gmail.com.
And I was like... Gmail?? PayPal was sending me official payment confirmations through... Gmail?
I'd never really paid attention to what PayPal email addresses were like before. But Gmail? That did not sound. no, that was wrong. PayPal would have their own domain, wouldn't they? Paypal.com or something? I checked anyway and confirmed.
I felt this cold feeling running through my heart and stomach, a very sick kind of feeling. But I didn't let it bother me. Maybe I was overthinking. Maybe PayPal outsourced some of their--
Then came another email. "Your PayPal account is under some restrictions. Contact PayPal Resolution Center immediately at paypalresolutionscenter@gmail.com for emergency assistance."
Gmail?? Again?!
And that's when the glittering started coming off, slowly, piece by piece, like cheap nail polish. PayPal Resolution Center @Gmail. PayPal transactions @Gmail. William Books Publishing with no website, no physical address, no telephone number. Jennifer Walsh who always replied in hours but never answered directly regarding timeliness or company history.
I sat there staring at my computer screen, as if I was seeing myself from outside my own body. All those nights. All those hours. All that meticulous labor; rewriting paragraphs, fact-checking historical data, researching proper use of commas in dialogue tagging.
For what? For nothing. For deception dressed up in official-sounding jargon and professional-looking word processor templates.
The worst part wasn't even the money. I literally felt so dumb. How desperate I must have appeared to them, some freelancer desperate enough to work for weeks unpaid, trusting enough to believe that a "boutique publishing house" would find my portfolio amidst thousands and declare me to be precisely what they were seeking.
I closed my laptop. I remember that moment almost exactly. I didn't reply to Jennifer. Didn't demand my money or say I was going to report them or send furious emails demanding to be told what was happening. Why bother? They'd probably moved on to the next bunch of freelancers, sending the same polite messages, making the same promises.
I couldn't even figure out what their exact scheme was. Were those manuscripts true or false? Did they really need my service? Or was it simply groundwork for something further down the line? I had no clue.
But I learned. Good God, did I learn. No more working for free. No more clients without verified business locations or information.
And verifying email addresses nowadays? That's an automatic process for me. Every single time.