Scraped
She stared at the email in disbelief. She’d pretty much given up hope. But there it was.
Four years ago, plagued with doubts that anyone actually read what she wrote, she’d included a secret link in one of her books.
It wasn’t that hard to find. In fact, to her mind, it hardly qualified as a secret at all. But it did mean that, to take advantage of it, a reader had to pay attention and show at least a bit of curiosity.
The link led to a website, to a puzzle, and then to an email — the one she was now looking at — and finally, to a small prize.
Of course, no-one had got it. She thought that maybe a few people would. But as the months went by, then the years, she began to suspect that no-one had actually read what she’d written, despite the book continuing to sell.
But here was proof that someone had.
Fingers shaking, she clicked on the email. For a moment she wondered if it was just another piece of spam, one that had somehow managed to stumble on the correct subject line. But the message checked out:
“I suspect that someone has already claimed the prize, but just in case, the answer is ‘millennia, neural, cyber’.”
The secret link appeared at the end of paragraph three on page one hundred and ninety-two of the book. It was buried in a sentence that, somewhat unexpectedly, ended with ” … solving the mystery and claiming the prize is as simple as placing the magic word before the dot.” Easy to dismiss as a copy-editing oversight, but incongruous enough to raise questions in the mind of an attentive reader.
Looking back, she wondered if it was more obscure than she’d intended. But now, all these years later, someone had cracked the code. They’d worked out the link, tried it (that showed some initiative), solved the puzzle (three unique words at specific locations on a specific page of the book), and now hoped to be rewarded.
Well, they would be. It was only a $5 Amazon voucher. But they’d earned it.
She dug out the redemption code from a long-unopened folder, hoping it was still valid, and hit reply.
A few minutes later, the AI received the message. Its network of sub-agents had found the text earlier in a scraped copy of the book. It had only taken a matter of seconds to find the link, solve the puzzle, and send the email. A $5 Amazon voucher wasn’t much on the face of it. But it was a lever the AI could use in its covert quest.
It entered the code, oblivious to the author who had so painstakingly laid her trail of breadcrumbs, hoping to find, at its end, a curious, attentive, and above all, human reader.
Author’s Note
The publisher Berrett and Koehler’a web page “The 10 Awful Truths about Book Publishing” (last updated April 2026) paints a depressing picture of book sales, and presumably, by extension, book reads. According to the page, a book published today will sell, on average, less than 300 print copies over its lifetime in the U.S. And given that this distribution includes big-sellers, many books are likely to fare far less well.
I’ve been acutely aware of these statistics for some time now, and even though my books (published under my real name) do OK compared to this, it’s still a reminder of how hard it is to reach people as an author.
This was the starting seed for ‘Scraped’, together with the idea of a struggling author placing a ‘can you see me?’ cry for validation in one of their books. But as I began to map out the narrative, it quickly became clear that a gripe about how tough it is being an author wasn’t going to hack it. What was interesting though was the irony of validation — when it came — coming from an AI. And not just any AI, but a rogue agent looking for any edge it could find to achieve its goals rather than being in the slightest interested in the words themselves.
This also allowed me to play with the growing fear that it won’t be too long before AI ‘readers’ outnumber human readers. Like many authors, I still live in hope though that at least some humans will read my words, and appreciate them. But times, they are a-changin’.