Guilty... and Hoping to Change.

Have been putting tons of effort into advertising my book.  Forcing myself to tweet, trying to add every human under the sun as a friend on facebook.  All because I've gone around online and every article I've read has insisted this is the only way you can do things.

Being on twitter for a while, the only people who ever follow me are people who post (every seven seconds) "Buy my book!  My book is awesome!"  And I really didn't want to become one of these people.  It seems cheap and dehumanizing.  And yet, there I was on twitter and facebook (I still want that account on youtube) trying to friend-add and follow and tell everyone about my book.

And I was hating every moment of it, because it's so totally not me.  I am not that kind of person.  Granted, I'm generally just a very antisocial person.  I'm also kind of an uninteresting person (if you exclude the stripper/novelist/off-gridder-ness).

So last night, I decided I needed to can the "buy my book everybody!" mentality, because it was making me sick and depressed and kinda headachey.  I started looking up new marketing strategies today, and came up with more garbage, so I decided to see what other successful people had done.  (Them, specifically, and not other people who may or may not have succeeded, but were very happy to shell out advice.)

That led me to this gem: an interview with Smashwords success story, Amanda Hocking.  My favorite quote from that interview being this one.

"I think the biggest things that I see people do is becoming very spammy. Or they'll comment on blogs and all they really say is, "Yeah, I agree with you because my book is like this." They're not adding anything to that conversation. They just immediately start talking about their book. I get tweets all the time from people that say, "Buy my book." I know nothing about this person. I know nothing about their book. All they're saying is to buy their book and I'm not going to do that. They're just being obnoxious."

Took the words right out of my mouth.  (And used better grammar than I might have.)

I think the reason I've been hating twitter with such a passion is the fact that a good 80% of the people I know on twitter are constantly pestering me to buy their junk.

I've hated the idea of advertising my books, because I was under the very erroneous impression that I needed to be just as irritating to sell my work.  And this just can't be the truth.  If I'm driven nuts by these people, who's to say prospective readers aren't too.

That said, I'm gonna unfollow a lot of my spammier followers on twitter, and I'm gonna make a point to tweet things I want to tweet, and not just shit I'm "supposed" to retweet.

Will this help me sell more books?  Honestly, I have no clue.  But, on the plus side, I won't feel cheap and sleazy anymore.  Gotta say, that's a definite bonus.

WISDOM: (I keep relearning this lesson for some reason.)  Don't keep banging your head against a brick wall just because everyone around you insists it will turn into a door.  It may be a doorway for them, but it's not for you.