Twitter this. Tweet that. Twitter, twitter, tweet, tweet. Tweety Bird wants a cracker.
No?
Okay, then: like my Facebook page; like my most recent review about my most recent book release. Like me; like me; like me. Rah, rah, rah. Sis, boom, bah. CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW? Meow.
Don't get me wrong. As an independent novelist myself, I fully understand the need for authors to do their own marketing with the traditional publishing world being in total disarray these days. But as the old adage goes: people like to buy but not be sold.
Recently, I interviewed Italian scholar and writer, Leila Tavi, on my podcast blog at 2012writersALIVE. Google her name. You won't find much information about her. Yet despite this, our conversation netted a record two hundred page loads within days. How is it that someone who has virtually no web presence attracted so much attention? Doesn't she know that you've got to be out there in cyberspace constantly promoting how great your book is ad nauseum? Disgusting! She doesn't even write in English!
This leads me to the conclusion that she is immune to BS (short for BSP, or Blatant Self Promotion Syndrome. Let's examine this counter productive malady briefly.
It starts with a tweet. And then another. And another and another. Commonly, the illness corresponds with another condition which I call FU, or Facebook Undermining.
Get somebody to like your page and the Mother of All Social Networking sites starts tracking you whether you know it or not. Sure. You can waste an hour fiddling with privacy controls to stop the bleeding but, like me, you just eventually give up and surrender to the inevitable.
Stage Two of BS starts when authors start emailing everybody in their contact list promoting their work just in case you haven't seen anyone of their zillion tweets. Nothing makes my day more than opening an email from someone who I thought was a friend only to be faced with a generic greeting (if there is one at all), followed by information about them and their book that I already knew. Now I'm convinced that the last thing I want to do is to buy their book.
Article comments
1 - Liz Crowe
wow. so true, but yet, so flipping ..... true. well said. (go blue) I own a brewery in Ann Arbor AND write and I think we should get together..........