Daily Rant – Don’t Be THAT Writer
I believe in shameless self-promotion as much as the next self-published writer. Hell, I probably believe in self-promotion as much as the next seven writers. Don’t believe me? Ask the seven other writers I invited to join me in the Genre Underground, a little group of small-press and self-published writers I gathered together specifically so that we could promote each other’s work. So, yeah, I’m completely on board with writers promoting their work.
That being said, you can go a little overboard. Hell, it’a actually pretty easy to go a lot overboard.
I’m speaking specifically to the three self-published writers who spammed me links to their books from twitter on Christmas Day. These were not generic posts by writers I follow. These were tweets directly targeted at my twitter handle @mgallowglas by people I don’t follow and who don’t follow me. The gist of these tweets was “Just in case you got a Kindle today, here’s a link to my book’s Amazon page.” Curios about this, I checked out each writer’s Twitter feed, and guess what? In all three cases their “Tweets” page was a list of these same tweets targeted at specific people, with links to amazon. By the time I saw this for the third time, I had decided I was going to rant about this, but my righteous fury had died down a bit and a bit of pity for these writers had leaked in. Did they have nothing better to do on Christmas day than spam links to their books? In the third instance, the writer had been going on long enough before getting to me that other people had begun to call her out on this behavior, to which she attempted to defend herself by stating that her writing career could not afford to pass up this opportunity to market her books to all those people who got new Kindles in their stockings.
1) Any family that gives Kindles as stocking stuffers probably isn’t going to be on Twitter on Christmas. I got a new Kindle Booklight from my wife this year, but it certainly wasn’t in my stocking. Even the smallest, least-expensive versions come with a price tag that I imagine promotes them out of the stocking and to a spot under the tree. I’m not saying that all families like me, but seriously, if you know a family that does this, please tell them my family and I are ready to be adopted.
2) If your writing career is such that you feel that you must spend Christmas day hunched over your keyboard and spamming the far reaches of Twitter hoping to get that one extra sale, your career is in bad shape already. I’m doing okay in my writing career. Not great, but okay. The last few months have slowed down, and I’m aware of some of the reasons for that, but I have enough self-respect to not spend Christmas pestering people to buy my books. AND, I’m aware enough that my career doesn’t need that level of poor self-promotion, because I know I’m never going to even look at one of those writers’ Amazon pages, much less purchase one of their books. (I wonder if I’m the only one who reported these writers for spam.)
Now, I can remember back to the days where I did sorta spam Twitter and Facebook with links to my book’s pages. I’m pretty sure all new writers go through that phase. But even in those days, I never did anything like what I saw two days ago. Self-promotion is a necessity for any writer, no matter who your publisher is, but it’s possible to go overboard. In fact, it’s fairly easy to go overboard. I’ve done it a few times. I’ve been called on it when I have, on Facebook, Google+, and Goodreads, and I’m glad those people did call me out on it (even though the individual on Google+ was a little over the top.) I learned from that, and used those moments as object lessons as how NOT to be in promoting myself.
What do you think about writers and self promotion? It can bee a very fine line between getting your name and your books out into the publish eye and irritating the crap out of people. I’d love to hear your thoughts. Where is that line? How much is too much?
