#Authors – Why Many Book Promos are like Driving a Car

Posted on by Chris The Story Reading Ape

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Many authors do their book promos as if they’re driving a car.

The most common way is the ‘Drive everywhere at high speed’ author.

(Post everywhere as fast and often as possible)

Another (probably related) seems to be the ‘Jumping the red STOP lights’ type of author.

(Sending friendship / follow automatic greetings of BUY MY / LIKE MY regardless of the other person’s feelings, intentions or the fact that their only crime was to express an interest)

Finally, the latest growing craze is to ‘Park illegally’.

(Posting their book adverts under other people’s posts, especially on Facebook)

The authors who do any, or all, the above just don’t seem to realise that they are nothing short of being STUPID (expletive deleted) PESTS – and more seriously (for them) HAVE LOST MANY MORE SALES THAN THEY GAINED…

They’ve also been driving like maniacs through heavy traffic and left a lot of casualties in their wake – Other authors who have been promoting in a more civilized manner (Driving within the speed limits and being considerate to the other road users and pedestrians).

Please forgive this little piece of soapbox protestations, but I’m getting SICK of having to DELETE and REPORT them to Twitter and Facebook…

But BE ASSURED I will continue to report and delete these IDIOTS…

 

 

61 thoughts on “#Authors – Why Many Book Promos are like Driving a Car”

  4. I have never bought a book because I was badgered into it – and I never will. If someone has no manners, what makes you think their writing will be any good? They are probably clodhoppers in their writing, too. I doubt I’m unique in my reactions.

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  6. Oh dear! I do hope I’m not one of the offenders! I’m trying to promote my books in a civilised manner, in fact I find it really difficult to push myself or my books forward, but I do try to. Please let me know if I try too hard!

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  7. Then we have driving on the wrong side of the road, changing lanes without looking, and… 🙂 The way I see it is we can’t afford insurance, so we better drive our book promotions safely so that we can keep driving for many years to come. That way, we might actually get somewhere.

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  9. Chris, you’re my hero. What a timely post! Some of the rules being violated are unspoken rules of etiquette and courtesy. Some of the rules being broken will get you kicked off Facebook and Twitter. People are losing tolerance and are quick to hit the “report” button. I’m sure some of these authors have good intentions. Some are just new to the game and don’t know the rules. (Others are just mean jerks) Unfortunately, Facebook and Twitter don’t care about an author’s intent or lack of knowledge. If you don’t want to run the risk of losing your account, you need to learn the rules and learn them fast. If you don’t, you’re only hurting yourself (and your book sales). Thank you for this post, Chris!

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    • Welcome Tricia – my own repeats of any post or tweets are days apart, except for the author posts which get automatically uploaded when they go live at 01:00 am London, UK time,, then are manually uploaded by me about 8 hours later 😀

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  10. That third one drives me nuts and is one of the reasons I don’t do Facebook as often as I used to. I tried to go back this week, but it started up again and now I think I’ll do it every other day. Though I still think I fall into the first category with Twitter. What’s your opinion of people who post a lot of book tweets, but also do a lot of retweeting for other authors?

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      • Interesting. I was doing that way back with a morning, lunch, and evening post. I didn’t get anywhere until I did stuff every 3 hours. Switched up the books a bunch, which might have helped. Yet that ended up helping me get a better audience than the 3 times per day. I think part of the problem was that people had such busy feeds that one tweet would vanish rather quickly. Same went for if a person retweeted a lot. The speed of the platform does make for a challenge. So I wonder how one could combat that with only 3 tweets per day.

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        • I suspect Twitter were trying to slow down the amount of spamming Charles – but you’re right – tweets will get lost very quickly unless you have dedicated followers who go to your twitter page to see what you’ve sent out 😀

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          • Good point. They probably did try to slow it down. Adorable that they think they can control the monster they created. 🙂

            Funny thing is that it was once suggested that each of the 3 posts be pinned. I thought it was a good idea and did that for a bit. Then I realized something that might not be as well known. The Twitter phone app doesn’t do pinned posts. It has the tweet where it was originally put and nothing is locked at the top of a person’s page. There are a lot of authors out there who seem to do one tweet, pin it, and then reblog for a week or more. So anyone using only the Twitter app may never find anything other than retweets.

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          • Good point Charles – I pinned only one article – ‘You Read but do you Leave Reviews?’ and it gets retweeted quite a bit when people decide to call over and follow me on twitter and even by followers (authors) who like the message enough to call over an re-retweet it lol 😀

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          • I’m the same way. I get into a few conversations, but it’s weird having a limited chat in public. I can’t figure LinkedIn and Google+ out very well. FB is just . . . I remember when it was fun and social.

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