When Your Marketing Email Assumes Nobody Will Actually Read It!
In the past 2 days, I got an email from a “publishing company” telling me how much they loved my book. How they had read it multiple times. How impressed they were with my storytelling, my voice, my structure. It was warm, specific-sounding, and completely fake.
I have not sold a single copy of my book to anyone. Not one. So unless this company has a time machine or a very active imagination, nobody there read anything I wrote.
This kind of email is everywhere right now, and it is worth talking about, because it is not just annoying. It is a preview of what happens when businesses treat AI tools as a shortcut around honesty instead of a shortcut around busywork.
What actually happened here
Somebody, somewhere, either wrote a template that gets sent to every author in a scraped database regardless of whether the book exists yet, or ran a prompt through an AI tool that generated a “personalized” pitch without ever checking the actual facts. Either way, the email assumed one thing: that I would not read it closely enough to notice the claim did not add up.
That is the real problem. Not that AI was used. Not even that it was a cold pitch. The problem is that nobody checked whether the words they were sending were true before they hit send.
Why this matters beyond one annoying email
If you run a business, a brand, or a side hustle and you use AI to help write outreach, this should make you pause. AI is useful for drafting, brainstorming, and speeding up the parts of writing that used to eat your whole afternoon. What it is not good at is knowing what is actually true about the person on the other end of that email. It will happily write “Came back to Duct Tape and Grace a few days later, this time sitting with the poems and prose woven through it. The way you mixed those forms to capture growing up in that unconventional household felt raw and honest in a way straight memoir rarely does. Has me wondering what a second book would pull forward from that same voice.” because you asked it to sound warm and specific, not because it verified anything. By the way that quote is straight from the email.
When you send that message without checking it, you are not just risking one bad email. You are training your audience to distrust everything you send after it. Once someone catches you in an obviously false claim, they stop reading your next email closely. They assume the next one is fake too. You lose the thing that made outreach worth doing in the first place, which is that someone believed you enough to open the email and take you seriously.
The line between efficient and dishonest
There is nothing wrong with using AI to draft a cold email faster. There is something wrong with sending a claim you have not verified because the tool made it sound convincing.
A few examples of where that line sits:
Using AI to write a clean, professional template for outreach and then filling in real, checked details about the specific person you are contacting is fine. That is efficient.
Using AI to generate a “personalized” opener that references something specific about the recipient, then sending it without confirming that detail is actually true, is not fine.
Saying “I read your book” (in so many words) when you have not is not a style choice. It is a false statement, and it does not become less false because a tool typed it for you.
What to do instead if you are the one sending outreach
Before any marketing or outreach email goes out, especially one that claims to know something specific about the recipient, run it through one simple filter: could I defend every sentence in this email if the person emailed me back and asked me to prove it?
If an AI tool drafted a line claiming you read their work, admired their results, or followed their business for years, and you cannot actually back that up, cut the line or make it true first. It takes thirty extra seconds to swap “I’ve read your book multiple times” for something honest, like “I came across your book and wanted to reach out,” and the honest version will actually hold up if anyone checks.
Also worth remembering: people can tell. Vague, oddly specific praise that does not match anything real about the recipient is one of the easiest tells that an email was mass generated and never reviewed by a human. It reads as spam because, functionally, it is spam, even if a person technically clicked send.
The bigger picture
AI tools are not the villain here. Sloppy, unchecked use of them is. The publishing company that emailed me did not get caught because AI wrote their pitch. They got caught because nobody on their end bothered to read what they were sending before it went out, and the message assumed I would extend the same courtesy in reverse.
If you are building a brand, a business, or a following, your credibility is the actual product. Every email that claims something false chips away at it, whether a human or a tool wrote the sentence. Use AI to move faster. Do not use it as an excuse to stop checking your own work.
If you have gotten one of these too, you are not imagining it. It is a pattern, and it is worth calling out.