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?
I love hearing about new books from authors I love – or books that are *like* those and hence might like. I don’t like being blindly spammed by someone I don’t follow and who doesn’t follow me – and I get that “getting the word out” is vital – so yea, it’s a fine line. That said, I must not be on the right lists, as I don’t see that often at all. I can only think of a couple of hits like that.
I’m still trying to find that line, so I try to think about what I don’t like on Twitter and Facebook and go by that. I don’t like when the only posts/tweets from an author are spam. Every single post/tweet is about their book(s) with little or no personal interaction. I also dislike the auto DM/tweet on Twitter where an author’s account is set up to send you book links as soon as you hit the follow button. It’s important to build relationships. It is okay to send out book/blog links, but don’t make them the only thing your followers/friends see.
Twighlight2000: This is the first time that I can remember such a thing as this happening to me, which wouldn’t have been a big deal, except that it occurred on Christmas, three times on Christmas no less. That struck a cord. I wonder if we’ll be seeing this trend increase as more and more people start self-publishing and get desperate to have people noticing their books.
M. E. Franco: I am proud to say, I’ve never and will never use an automated service to post to any of my social media. The first few weeks I was on Twitter, I used to DM new followers links to my books, but stopped that once I started getting the same from other writers, and the practice irritated me. I think you’ve hit on something with building relationships. I’ve encountered some pretty cool cats, writers and readers both by just engaging in conversations through Facebook and Twitter (especially Twitter.)
I can relate to this in terms of my art. I just recently started doing regular portrait commissions and to get the word out I attacked facebook and Twitter relentlessly trying to drum up at least one more portrait or illustration. All it did was create irritation in everyone else learned to be more tactful and just started spamming my own timeline with my current works and let it show up in everyone’s feeds. Seemed to work a bit better. And at a time when on Christmas day this year I had three dollars to my me with art needing to be sold to help make it to next payday. Would you like to know what I did….good (I was gonna tell anyway.) I taught my daughter how to use her new bow and spent 7 hours playing minecraft with her. I guess to me it’s a Mayer of priorities.
It’s a fair question. Is it ok to self-promote? I want to talk about narcissism because my mind naturally goes in that direction. that is all i can think that is on your mind when you ask. however, i don’t know what you are thinking. but, i’ll say this: the fact that you asked means you have nothing to worry about. also, speaking out loud does not mean that you value yourself more than anyone else. your confidence has shown and will show the amount of expression that you need to provide. i believe that your talent is apparent enough that as you engage in vocal or written conversation, if you just talk about what is on your mind, the conversation will go in the direction that will nourish your success.
I got hit with a couple of those direct links myself on Christmas Day. Ignored them. Frankly, I felt about the same as you did, although I figured that they had to be pre-programmed in advance and just fired off by one of those auto-Tweeters on Christmas Day. If they really were sent directly by the author(s), I feel bad for them.
This is really interesting to me. What kind of guidance is really out there for authors to promote their work online? Are there reputable, reliable sources who can give best practices and tips? I ask this because in the internet marketing world, those kinds of people exist. I am considering doing some work in the next year to provide that information to authors in a way that makes sense. (Since I’m an internet marketer in “the real world”).
As an unpublished author, I have nothing to promote except myself. That means I’m spending time getting to know people, reading blogs, checking out their profile pages. I’m establishing connections and getting my voice out there, and not selling a thing. When the time comes, when I do have something to promote, I’m still deciding exactly how I’m going to go about doing that.
We live in a weird workshop. We have all of these amazing tools and gadgets, but we don’t necessarily know how to work them all. And we certainly don’t know the repercussions of using them incorrectly.
My day job affords me a lot of insight into these gizmos, now I need to figure out how to get the instruction manuals into the right hands….
I think that’s exactly it – you read others, you talk about your life – you aren’t a “spam machine” for your new almost pub’d work (or freshly pub’d or whatever).
I think it’s the spam from folks we’ve never interacted with and whose account does nothing *but* spam the new work that is the real problem for most folks.