Amazon Author Haters

I'm not understanding what's going on here. In that link someone's going on about authors promoting their work outside of Amazon...?

I know there are some who have issues with purchasing from Amazon for various reasons, but this seems separate...

It read to me like they want people to stop spamming threads that are not meant for self promotion?

Indeed. As a person who uses the Amazon forums I find the authors who spam thread to be an embarrassment. Just because it is a store doesn't mean you can spam forums, post fake book reviews, bad mouth the competition and do anything to try to get a sale. There is an ettiquette in place and authors should respect it.

So Amazon has a set aside place for their authors to promote their own work and still, some go about acting like trolls, giving everyone a bad name in the process... ?

LMC,

Its not about hating authors, its about authors who spam their books in places they should not.

This spamming (self propomtion as many authors call it), is everywhere these days and is even giving good authors a bad name. They remind me of info commercial pitch men, no matter how good their books are.

This is not new or only found on Amazon. Myspace and Facebook are loaded with drive by authors hawking their latest CreateSpace and Kindle books. I belong to a Chess forum and we get Romance and Erotic authors spamming our group all the time. Thank the gods we have a good moderator who gets rid of that crap asap.

I used to go searching for samples of the books these authors spammed. After about a year, I stopped, they were all the same, and the quality was just not there...

I think the best thing to do is just what you're doing here; getting to know people & being part of the community.

lol--a mess, indeed. Amazon as a whole reminds me of a store with too narrow aisles & signs all over the place. I have a hard time focusing once I'm there.

Promoting in the wrong place is spamming. If you do it here at AW and are warned and continue to do so, chances are you will get banned.

It's allowed in sigs here. There is also the option to turn off sigs and avatars on AW.


There is a huge difference in having something in your sig then going into a thread and asking people to buy your book(think telemarketer or door to door salesmen).

I don't and never will frequent Amazon forums. The few times I have looked in, the trolls have turned me from ever wanting to participate. I will agree however that if you are chatting about a certain topic and people wander in just to say buy my book and flash a link, it gets old fast. And from what I know there are threads on Amazon for promotions, so I don't know what all the fuss is about.

brainstorm77 said:

I will agree however that if you are chatting about a certain topic and people wander in just to say buy my book and flash a link, it gets old fast.

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like getting hit in the face with a snowball. it's not even fun the one time...

RedWritingHood said:

like getting hit in the face with a snowball. it's not even fun the one time...

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Yes. It's totally annoying.

I have been a member of many writing and book forums and I can tell you, after a couple thousand of these, the moderators can't keep up. It can cause people to agrue and otherwise leave good forums...

The way I look at it, authors doing this type of self promoting (anywhere and everywhere) are the same things as the idiots sending spam on how to get Viagra through the mail. You never know what you are going to get...

http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=34 And you can promote in this thread

Lmc71775 said:

Just worries me to think people would bash you or your book for promoting it. It is how to promote it, not so much as where to promote.

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Honestly, I don't think it's too hard to figure out where's a good place to promote and where isn't. As a general rule, imagine any given thread like a conversation at a party, and your post as what you're saying in that conversation.

If the conversation is about chess and someone butted in to go "HEY so you like chess, but have you considered reading my paranormal romance novel??" you would probably think them rude. Unless their book involves chess in some integral way, anyway. If it's a romance novel about ghosts playing chess, that's at least somewhat on-topic! Butting into a thread and derailing it to advertise -- "self-promote" -- your own books is basically the same thing.

Similarly, if you poke into one conversation and go "Buy my book!" and then zip out to another conversation and go, "And YOU should buy my book!" and so on around the room, people are quickly going to get somewhat cheesed off.

The signature line is more like your nametag at a gathering. Sure, you're self-promoting, but people can ignore the nametag (turn off signatures) and focus on the conversation if they want. But if you run through the conversation waving your arms and shouting, "MY BOOK! YOU MUST BUY IT! YOU WILL LIKE IT! I WROTE IT! BUY IT NOW! IT IS MY BOOK! OVER HERE! FOR SALE NOW!" when they're trying to discuss, say, which the best variety of local apple cider is? Then that's much harder to ignore, and considerably more obnoxious.

The same forum users also make threads specifically for promoting books of certain types. So there is carrot as well as stick.

This is a huge problem with Yahoo groups, too. I'm the moderator of an almost-3,000 member group for children's writers and illustrators, and we've had to institute big restrictions on self-promotion. There are people who, if allowed, will post every day regarding their book or their blog. These people join every Yahoo group they possibly can and spam-spam-spam.

In my group, active members are allowed one self-promotional post per month. To make it easy on themselves, quite a few of those who like to avail themselves of this have chosen 'the first' as their day to do it, so we get a lot of self-promo posts on the first, but as long as they stick to once a month, it's fine.

Also, in my Yahoo group, 'announcements' don't count as self-promotion. That is, if you've just made a sale or a book has just been released, given an award, had foreign rights sold, and so on, you can announce that at any time, regardless of your monthly alloted self-promo post.

Also, if something about your book is relevant to an actual discussion, that doesn't count as self-promo, either. For example, if someone asks about, say, whether it's all right to write occult-oriented books for middle-graders, it's fine for members who've published this kind of book to mention them, since it's an actual answer to an actual question.

But folks who come in and never participate in threads but just post messages to try to drive traffic to their blog or get members to buy their books? They're asked to stop, and if they don't, they're banned. The group is there to talk about writing and illustrating for children, not to be a captive audience to someone trying to sell something.

It is still a problem if you have a yahoogroup specifically for promoting books. Then you get people who promote the wrong genre, flood the group with two many posts and generally just don't bother to read how the group is being run. And don't get me started on some of those so-called promotion professionals. I used to email people when they crossed a line even though we have only three rules and they are not complicated, but after several nasty email replies now I just ban them. Sorry. But people get in a negative frame of mind for a reason.