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#16 | |
You kids get off my lawn!
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I too prefer the author promos that come out as a part of a more natural discussion. Authors with more than 10 posts or those who participate in other discussions are a lot more likely to catch my eye (unless I already know their name and/or collect their books). |
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#17 | |
Not so important
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#18 |
Wizard
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I don't have much experience with authors promoting their own stuff except in the podcast world. Scott Sigler was a VERY aggressive self-promoter, and while still giving his stuff away for free, got a publishing deal, and the "free" book in podcast form, sold enough to make the NYT Bestsellers list with Contagious.
I think the work speaks more than the author. |
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#19 | |
Feral Underclass
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#20 |
Guru
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Location: St. Louis
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What I think e-publishing needs are DJs.
Today dance music is bigger than ever. People all over the world can make it just by owning a computer. There are dozens, probably thousands of songs being released every week. DJs basically filter it out. They listen to stuff then pick out the best and play them on their shows. (The same sort of thing happened in the early days of Rock 'n Roll). So basically a person just has to find a few DJs to follow who play the sort of music they like. I'm not sure how this would work for books. Books take longer to read than listening to a song. But probably fewer released a week and well, instead of the whole world, it's mostly done by languages. |
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#21 |
Author's pet-geek
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Reviewers / bloggers are probably going to become the "DJ's" by your analogy.
Paul. |
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#22 |
Wizard
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I totally get what you're saying about needing a filter. My filter for myself is as follows:
1) Some genres I just ignore. Past experience as a reader has told me they are not my thing. 2) Obnoxious authors, I ignore. Self-promotion is fine, but in non-obnoxious ways. For example, an author here only posted in their own thread and kept bumping it, complaining that nobody had read the book or that X people had downloaded it and none had reviewed it on Amazon. That just screams amateur to me. 3) Spelling/grammar mistakes or just bad writing in the blurb turn me away. 4) If we get this far (genre I like, interesting blurb, author playing nice) I will read the sample. If I like the sample, I'll buy the book I do think reviewers will start to establish themselves and be the new taste-makers to a growing extent. I keep thinking of the parallels to my exercise video group---another niche market. Over time, I found that certain people seemed to share the same tastes as me, so I would especially notice reviews by them. I could reliably judge whether I would like a workout or not by what they thought of it... |
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#23 |
Addict
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I agree with Ficbot for all except #1. I don't care for certain types of genres, and I tend not to browse for them at all. But I've taken chances on writers based on their input in discussion threads (other than their self-promo), and in some cases I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the book. Admittedly, those books didn't suddenly turn me onto the genre, but I more than got my money's worth.
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#24 |
Grand Sorcerer
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It's an interesting conundrum. On one hand, I've tried to promote my books mainly by participating in threads on MR and at other sites, and tried to keep aggressive self-promotion controlled. On the other hand, I've watched my sales nosedive in the last year, and came to realize I may not have been promoting myself enough!
Subtle self-promo on a site like MR is fine... provided those people buy your books, like them, and enthusiastically tell others outside of MR to check them out. In absence of that, an author must work harder to sell their material, it's just the nature of the business now. I don't have a problem with aggressive self-promotion... like any other ad, I can tune it out whenever I want to. But any self-promotion gives you a chance to learn about a product, or its creator, and I take advantage of that. Well-constructed promotions with good grammar and spelling, descriptions that actually get the story idea across, and of course, links to excerpts, reviews or other material, usually tell you the real story about a book before you ever buy it. Yes, some are very over-zealous... sometimes that alone tells you all you need to know about a book. But I'd suggest you try to be a bit tolerant: This whole process of authors self-promoting themselves online is a fairly new one, and the bugs are still getting worked out; and in your haste to brush off an aggressive ad, you might miss a real gem of a book out there. |
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#25 | |
Feral Underclass
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Location: Yorkshire, tha noz
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Completely new writers (to me) I would only really find through genre selection, and even then only when there isn't anything new from the writers who have already made my reading list. Another way to make it onto there would be if I read something by them in a genre short story collection and it interested me enough to see what else they had written. Short story collections need to be free for me to look at them, I don't know how feasible it would be to get together with similar writers and put one out on Smashwords, etc but that would be worth looking into. I don't read reviews and don't take much notice of the pimp your own books forum in here. But I do see the mini-pimps that people add as a sig to their posts elsewhere. Never bought anything as a result of them, but at least I am aware of them. I've also downloaded a lot of free offer books from Smashwords that have been advertised in the deals section, but never read any of them. Two of them made it onto my reading device for a few months, but never got any nearer than that. |
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#26 |
Scott Nicholson, author
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Amazon's new program to allow affiliate sales from ebooks will help a lot. Bloggers will have a vested interest in finding and promoting good books beyond the bestsellers that everyone else is trying to sell. Those who are good at it will earn more money and in turn have more interest in telling other people about good new books.
Scott |
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#27 | |
Not so important
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Location: Zurich
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#28 | |
Zealot
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--Maria |
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#29 |
Addict
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Until I reach a point where I'm no longer able to find mainstream books I'm interested in, it's unlikely I'll put much effort into sifting through the self-promotion for self-published gems.
It's not like music where you could make a legitimate argument that most mainstream material is crap. |
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#30 |
Ottawa 5-0-1 at home
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I agree with both of Manos's points regarding fiction. However, I have bought and enjoyed a couple of self-published non-fiction books on a topic of interest to me.
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Tags |
promotion, publishers, self-publishing |
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