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June 15th, 2009

6:53 PM

The smell of desperation

A classic mistake made by many self-published authors is believing that if they review each other's books on Amazon, people will be led to believe that those books are so good, they have to buy those books.

https://www.createspace.com/en/community/thread/2212?start=0&tstart=0

This classic thread has everything.

Authors telling each other where to find chapter excerpts and such, because heaven knows, reading a book to write the review is a waste of time. As one author puts it, nobody reads the whole book when writing reviews anyway.

Authors complaining that they can't afford to buy their own books for review. And they expect readers to somehow afford those books, then? Amusing.

Here's my unsolicited suggestion: stop treating readers like a herd of brainless twits oblivious to such blatant tactics. Setting up a Yahoo! group to bombard readers who join with sales pitches - come on, why would any reader sign up to such a blatant promotional group by a bunch of lesser-known writers in the first place?

The road to success via the self-publishing route is never easy. But it's never easy because readers tend to be smarter than these authors believe.

Think about it. If these authors, while wanting to review each other's works, whine that the books are too expensive and reading an entire book is too hard, why would any reader bother with the books of such authors then? The attitude towards readers/customers here seems to be, "I've written a book, NOW BUY IT BITCH!"

That's why I once said that many of these authors never consider readers as human beings in their plan for world domination. I got plenty of heat from so-called POD experts for saying this, but if you ask me, it is such attitude - assuming that readers are a bunch of homogenous fools with no independent thought - that causes 90% of the efforts by these authors to promote their books to fail right out of the gate.

It is important, IMO, that they respect the people they are selling their book and treat them as intelligent human beings capable of discerning gold from BS. Only then will those people pay attention to what they are selling.

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