I could have sworn we already had a thread for this lot, but maybe I didn't follow it up the first time they spammed me. Anyway, they've spammed me again.
First red flag: "my book" is actually an anthology wherein I have a single short story, making it rather obvious they nothing about "my book" other than my name is attached to that title on whatever site they're scraping their info from.
Both of those links lead to the same page, wherein they explain how many Twitter followers and FaceBook likes they have, and how they can promote your book to their many dedicated readers, before getting down to the nitty gritty: normally you can have all this for the low, low price of $59.99, but there's a 50% discount and you can have it for the even lower price of $29.99. Quite the bargain, really.
I'm not going to dissect their FaceBook thing, but when you look at the details of the Twitter promotion, they're promoting through "our Twitter allies", a list of 15 Twitter accounts whose mission in life to blast promo Tweets. Apparently when you add up the followers of all those accounts, you get the claimed 700k followers. Having looked at a sample, they have the profile of a bot account that auto-follows any account with a vague interest in the subject at hand, in the hope of getting an auto-follow back and swelling the apparent readership. It would doubtless be instructive to compare the follower lists of the accounts and see how much overlap there is, and how many distinct accounts follow the group. (It might also be amusing, had I the programming skill and the time, to analyse some of these things and see how many of them are bots blindly following each other...)
The Twitter accounts are a useful exercise in "look at this with your reader hat on". It's a tempting thought, all those readers seeing a tweet about your book. But pick an account and look at that account through a reader's eyes. Look at how many promo tweets it's putting out every hour over the course of a week. If that account followed you, would you follow it back and keep it in your main view of accounts you read all the time? If you did, how long would it be before you either binned it or stopped noticing the tweets? Well, if you wouldn't actively read it for more than a few days, other people will feel the same way.
First red flag: "my book" is actually an anthology wherein I have a single short story, making it rather obvious they nothing about "my book" other than my name is attached to that title on whatever site they're scraping their info from.
Both of those links lead to the same page, wherein they explain how many Twitter followers and FaceBook likes they have, and how they can promote your book to their many dedicated readers, before getting down to the nitty gritty: normally you can have all this for the low, low price of $59.99, but there's a 50% discount and you can have it for the even lower price of $29.99. Quite the bargain, really.
I'm not going to dissect their FaceBook thing, but when you look at the details of the Twitter promotion, they're promoting through "our Twitter allies", a list of 15 Twitter accounts whose mission in life to blast promo Tweets. Apparently when you add up the followers of all those accounts, you get the claimed 700k followers. Having looked at a sample, they have the profile of a bot account that auto-follows any account with a vague interest in the subject at hand, in the hope of getting an auto-follow back and swelling the apparent readership. It would doubtless be instructive to compare the follower lists of the accounts and see how much overlap there is, and how many distinct accounts follow the group. (It might also be amusing, had I the programming skill and the time, to analyse some of these things and see how many of them are bots blindly following each other...)
The Twitter accounts are a useful exercise in "look at this with your reader hat on". It's a tempting thought, all those readers seeing a tweet about your book. But pick an account and look at that account through a reader's eyes. Look at how many promo tweets it's putting out every hour over the course of a week. If that account followed you, would you follow it back and keep it in your main view of accounts you read all the time? If you did, how long would it be before you either binned it or stopped noticing the tweets? Well, if you wouldn't actively read it for more than a few days, other people will feel the same way.
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