There's a guy who lives around the corner from my house who likes to play bongo drums.
Stay with me, now.
Every weekend (weather permitting), we know that sometime around noon, the sound of bongos will begin to emanate from the house around the corner. It's a way our neighbor, who is a very nice person and a friend, likes to blow off steam. And that's fine.
For the first hour or so.
The problem is, the music being generated goes on for longer than that. In some cases, a LOT longer. And if you've never heard bongos being played for five or six hours on end, trust me that after a while, the process becomes a commercial for headache pain relievers. Another of our neighbors, during one of the first performances, walked over to me and asked at what time the human sacrifice was scheduled to take place.
We don't complain about the drumming because our neighbor IS a really nice guy and nobody wants to begrudge him his outlet. But I know we have subtly rescheduled some weekend errands to coincide with the bongo blast just to get out of the area. Nobody wants him to stop drumming so much as we want him to stop drumming quite so much.
The bongos are what I think of when I see some authors posting to Facebook or Twitter.
When all of an author's messages to readers can be simply reduced to the plea, "Buy my book," the bongo concert has gone on too long. It's not that readers don't want to know about your book, it's that they don't want to know ONLY about your book. They'd like some sense that to the author, they are something other than statistics on sales sheets.
One author I know is also a very nice guy. He's actually helped me out with marketing on more than one occasion. But the only times I see him post on social media, it's to advertise his latest book, or the one before that, or the one from three years ago. He rarely, if ever, posts about anything else, and so my eyes gloss over when I see his name on a post, and I rarely read past the headline.
Sometimes readers will forgive certain favorite writers because the books have been a source of enjoyment for years. Sometimes the reader knows the author personally, or has met him/her at a conference and knows the author to be a good person. So some slack will be cut.
But when the ratio of ads to posts becomes too high, I would stop reading things from my own mother (Happy Fabricated Holiday, Mom!) after a while.
The constant barrage can be understood when a new release is very near (I will personally bother people to death in early October and December of this year, and you can set your calendars by that), but 365 days a year is too much. Once in a while, post an opinion. Write about someone else. Show a picture of your cat, if that is absolutely necessary.
But mix it up. Remember that if you're not interesting to a reader, the reader won't care about your message. And just think how thrilled you'd be with a TV channel that only showed commercials. After the first 10 minutes, how often would you tune to that station?
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Exactly.
Yes, I know several authors that only post BSP. I don't dislike BSP in general, it is often how I hear that a favorite author has a new book coming out soon. But, if it is the only type of post, ever, then I get tired of it.
Posted by: Patty | May 13, 2014 at 10:35 PM