Dear Friend,
We're putting on a thing and we would love you to join us! Our thing will be lame and sad if people don't come. Plus, we're under a lot of pressure from our funding agency/higher-ups/other to show how popular we are, and we can do this by having a successful thing. We're hoping if you come to our thing, we can eventually get you to like/follow/add us on social networking and thereby be on our lists for future things.
We realize that you have other items on your to-do list, including getting on with your life. But without Real People (tm) at our things, we will cease to exist, and that will make us very sad. You wouldn't want that to happen, would you?
Sincerely,
Tireless Organizer
Dear Scholar,
We've started up a weird journal that sounds like a respectable one, and we're hoping you'll be confused into submitting something. We wrote this email to sound vaguely like you have been targeted by our community of researchers because we found your work interesting, but really that's just wordplay; in fact we sent identical emails to millions of people.
We're new and we're open access, so we're hoping it takes you a while to figure out that we're in this to make money in ways you didn't even know were possible in publishing. For example, maybe if your article is accepted, we can charge you a fee to get it published, and you'll pay. That would be awesome for us.
Maybe you're wondering about the people listed on our editorial board, whose names you've never heard and whose universities seem obscure. Don't waste your time thinking about it. We don't know what their deal is either.
Hoping to con you in one way or another,
Sketchy Open Journal of X
Dear Blogger,
We hear you have a blog! That is awesome! We are a PR company representing a person who had an experience and then made a thing. We all know that having an experience and then making a thing means nothing in today's world without fans, so we are reaching out to you. We're so excited you have a blog where you could talk about this thing!
We realize you are one tiny blogger with a very tiny readership, but we are so desperate for the crumbs of attention that you might be able to give us that we are emailing you directly. Given that you are on our list, just imagine how deeply into obscurity our list goes! We are just hoping against hope that if the right person can just give a shout out, we can go viral with this amazing story. And since you are on the internet, you might be that person!
In fact, we're so excited about the possibilities, we're willing to offer you a live interview/meeting/viewing/lunch with the creator of this thing, so you can tell your readers first hand about its awesomeness.
Please, please, get in touch!
Best wishes and hope to hear from you!
Desperately Seeking Any Publicity Whatsoever
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