Please Cease and Desist

Dana Kaye

You all know I'm a positive person, right? So you won't think less of me if I take this Friday morning to kvetch a bit?

Lately, I have noticed some growing trends amongst authors, seasoned and newbie, that want to make me jump through the computer, wring their neck and say, "You just lost a reader!"

Authors, I understand you have pressure to promote. I know you want to sell a million copies. I know you wake up every day with anxiety: Am I going to sell through? What if I get a bad review? Am I not doing enough? But often, in these times of panic, you end up over-promoting and becoming a nuisance and, in the end, lose potential readers.

Top Ten Things Authors Should NEVER Do To Promote Their Book

1. Send Facebook Page suggestions every day. Send one suggestion, if they want to become a friend, they will.
2. Update Twitter every day with contests, hashtags, and links to buy your book. Think of Twitter as a conversation; updating with interesting tidbits or questions will engage your followers. As I've said before, it's a conversation, not a soapbox.
3. @ Reply in that spammy way that's just to get people to look at your post. @ reply if you're talking to me, don't post, "My book is now available on Amazon, @Dana_Kaye". It's obnoxious.
4. Post your promotional material on other people's walls. I log on to FB one morning and find someone had posted a photo of their book cover and a link to their website on my Kaye Publicity page. That page is for my clients and he isn't one of them. I de-friended him and certainly will never buy his book. If your friends want to assist in your promotional efforts, they will. But don't invade their space.
5. Steal e-mail addresses for your mailing list. Just because I registered for a conference or post my e-mail on my website, does not give you the right to take my e-mail and add it to your list. If we've conversed a few times via e-mail or Facebook, ask if I mind being added to your mailing list. Any newsletter I receive that I didn't sign up for gets marked as spam and the author is on my "Do Not Read" list.
6. Use forums and listserves as your personal opportunity for self-promotion. Forums like Backspaceand the ITW Debut authors forum are meant for authors to ask questions and build an online community. They are not an audience for your promotion tactics.
7. Use other people's blogs as your personal opportunity for self-promotion. Fortunately we don't get a lot of this here at Hey, Dead Guy, but other blogs aren't so lucky. Comment on posts where you have something to say, but don't comment on every single blog with a link to your site or Amazon listing.
8. Post every single review you've ever gotten, good and bad. If you get a rave in the Times, post away. If a blogger said something particularly cool, go for it. But I don't need to see every single review, most of which are old and out of date. And why are authors posting negative reviews? Do they really want to bring their shortcomings to my attention?
9. Badger book critics. So they didn't review your book or they didn't give you a good review. So what? They don't have a personal vendetta against you, what good is it to confront them? Professionalism goes a long way.
10. Waste money on ad space. I'm seeing this more and more, authors buying blog and facebook advertisements for their book. Don't waste your money. Your much better off guest blogging or doing an interview on a blog than purchasing an ad. And Facebook ads? Focus on beefing up your presence on Facebook organically. Honestly, when was the last time you bought something because a Facebook ad told you to?

My apologies if my list is blunt, bordering on bitchy. But if you are an author and using one of these 10 tactics to promote, please do yourself a favor and stop immediately.

Is there anything missing from my list?

Comments

[Julie Kramer]

Amen, Dana.
Especially the part about sending repeat Facebook Page suggestions. They are cluttering up my inbox.

[Lartonmedia]

Agree with all of these, Dana! Numbers 5 and 9 are my bugbears. Often I have to tell a writer that we can't review their book, for whatever reason -- and then discover they've added me to their damn mailing list!

[Joan Swan]

Great article! Those are all quite obnoxious methods and will result in me avoiding an author's work, not buying it.

[George H. Sirois]

Reading this almost made me want to sink into my chair a bit, since there are a couple items in the list that I can say I'm guilty as charged of doing. Fortunately, I didn't do EVERYTHING on the list and the things I have done weren't done every day as you stated. But yeah, I'll make sure to tone down the over-aggressive promotion...

[Jane Steen]

How about: use book review blogs as a platform to publicize your book. Drives me nuts.

Great post.

[Kevin R. Tipple]

Love the list. Would add two more....

I don't do FACEBOOK and yet I am bombarded by requests from so called friends to join. My real friends know I don't do FACEBOOK.

The other thing is I am on a reader/writer list that I get in digest form. One "author" who claims to have more than 50 books published (none of which are carried in my local library system which says a lot) takes nearly every post as a way to promote his own books. So, he writes these annoying posts that start off with "When I wrote--insert title here--I used--insert topic here--to tell the story about--insert plot here." Follow with a couple of meaningless sentecnes explaining the topic and how great the author was in the book which is also avalable from Amazon and has been reviewed very positively. Of course, several of the reviews come from the same small group of people he has a business relationship with and are payback for reviews he has written for their stuff.

When called on this nonsense publicly, he stops for about two days and then slowly starts back up. Within a week he is back in full bore. This despite the many folks on the list who have said publicly they will never read his books because of his actions.

K

[David J. West]

Was paranoid I'd have one or two-but luckily didn't have any.

[Amanda]

I came here via SFSignal.

Thanks for the reminder. I'm all for organic growing on a fanbase/readership. If people like you, and you're good enough, they will come! Be a nice a person, how hard is that?

These suggestions are pertinent to the music industry too. I recently "unliked"/de-twittered a particular rock star because all they used FB and Twitter for was ridiculous self promotion and inciting of their fans to do the same...much along these lines you talk about.

[jjmcgaffey]

Looking at #9 - my immediate thought was, if I didn't have a personal vendetta against you before you started badgering me, I'd be developing one pretty fast...

(I review books, but mostly for my own use on LibraryThing. I don't, yet, have a book review blog.)

[Lauren]

Great article! My favorite one was the one about the not sending facebook suggestions that you "become a fan" to the same person over and over again. I have a friend who keeps doing that to me with her photography business and it's driving me crazy.

[Diane Farr]

Thank you, thank you. As an author I belong to soooo many listserves and whatnot that are full of other authors -- and I get mighty sick of the barrage of promotion. Don't these people realize that their books are utterly uninteresting next to mine? LOL!

Seriously, I've been totally intimidated by the contests and giveaways and relentless invitations to look at this, look at that. I can't imagine how these authors ever find time to write. I don't do any of that stuff, and can't help but feel anxious when I see everyone around me doing it ... because hey, if it works, shouldn't I be doing it? So I'm glad (and relieved) to hear you say it doesn't work.

Diane
http://www.dianefarrbooks.com

[Katrina Lantz]

I agree with all, except for #10, as I do, in fact, buy from links on facebook ads. Buying ad space is a perfectly legitimate way to market. That's self-promotion in its proper place. Plus, those ads are targeted to people based on their interests, which is why I often end up buying what they're selling.

I'm not even agented yet, so don't worry about me. As a consumer, though, I strongly disagree with that last one.

[martha hart]

Thanks - love the bluntness, and being direct is not being bitchy. Good stuff!

[S.]

As an acquistions editor, I could add one to the list. Don't market too aggressively before you get a publisher, please. It's disheartening to find a manuscript that might be worth pursuing and find it plastered all over the internet, crappy title and all, with a slant that really doesn't match what we'd like for marketing.

And be careful how you present yourself on your personal blog. Whiny, angry or childish aren't very appealing attributes for a writer who is looking to impress an acquisitions editor.