Sunday 3 August 2014

Why are so many authors making things difficult for themselves?

Making things difficult
I periodically return to my list of authors and go through it to add genre and location to my spreadsheet. I also add other authors I come across. I'm amazed at the number of authors who make things difficult for their readers to find out information.
  • Lots of authors don't have a website or blog
  • Lots of authors don't use Facebook or have their page set as 'private'.
  • Lots of authors don't use Twitter
  • Lots of authors don't have a Pinterest page
Where an author does have a discoverable website or blog they often fail to mention their Twitter name - mine is @JChapman1729 (there's a point to that 1729), Facebook page - mine is https://www.facebook.com/JohnChapman.0, Pinterest page - mine is http://www.pinterest.com/johnchapman/. Some don't even give a clue as to the genres they write in; we are supposed to guess that from the book covers.
Of those who have a discoverable Twitter presence, I'm amazed at the number who hamper their followers by using TrueTwit - If you are one of them, I suggest you read Mary C Long's 'How TrueTwit Helps You Help It Make Money – And Waste A Ton Of Time' at http://bit.ly/1ijbdly

I'm astonished that some authors make their Twitter accounts private. By all means make a personal account private but your author account should be made public and shouted from the rooftops!

I'm amazed by the authors who think it's good to respond to being followed with an auto-message promoting a book. While on the subject of automessages, some authors seem to think it's OK to automatically auto-unfollow those who unfollow and auto-tweet that information. Have they never heard that Twitter sometimes unfollows people? If you are going to unfollow - wait a month or so and autotweeting that '5 tweeps unfollowed me. Know who your latest unfollowers are? Find them at...' simply proves you are a vengeful person and maybe not a nice person to follow in the first place.

I'm amazed by authors who obviously buy Twitter followers and make that fact public by promoting buy follower posts. I can only think of one possible excuse for buying followers - to get round Twitter's 2000 followers rule. Any followers you get from purchasing will be otherwise useless and are likely to destroy your reputation. I usually block those who post these messages.
As to Facebook, some author accounts are simply a list of books and 'What I did today' posts. No interaction, no sharing. Boring and no fun!
Are you guilty? If so, then I think you are shooting your book sales in the foot. I doubt if I've covered everything. Can you think of some other examples of bad author practice?

1 comment:

  1. The self-published authors you described do not realize to be successful marketing their book they need to be entrepreneurs. They are delusional, thinking that somehow if they write something they will be found.

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