Advert saturation - grumping.

[erastes]

Re: Spammage.

I have to say: I'm not very impressed that a group of m/m writers have got together and agree to advertise each other's books on their blogs en bloc.

It's a laudable idea, and I understand the thought behind it, but there's only about 7 of you doing it now, and most of them are on my flist and consequently I'm getting the same post on my flist over and over and over.

What happens when there's 50 of you?

I don't want to have to defriend you, but... ARGH! there's THREE MORE adverts now, for a new book - "Kitten" by Kay Derwydd!

*drowns in spam*

Please think of us on dial up!

Comments

[julesjones]

I first encountered the group as spammage on my flist, and it struck me as something far more likely to put off potential readers than encourage them.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

I agree - there's nothing likely to infuriate me more and resolve me NEVER want to read something as to see it spammed.

[rwday.livejournal.com]

You know, I get quite enough advertisement spam in other places - I certainly don't need it on LJ. This sort of tactic would make me LESS likely to buy the book on principle. I have no objection to an author announcing his or her releases, obviously, or other people promoting and reviewing books written by friends. I will certainly announce mine, and I'm going to pimp Standish to the heavens, but not through identical spam posts with uncut graphic images.

[kay-derwydd.livejournal.com]

*sighs* It'd be nice if people actually gave us feedback before it gets to the annoying level. Thanks for the note. We're stopping it as far as I know.

[emilyveinglory.livejournal.com]

This program has been going for some years and this was the very first time I was told there was a problem. We have immediately made moves to correct it. But IMHO, "friends" communicate. It was obviously not our intent to cause a problem and we have *immediately* moved to eliminate this unintended effect.

[julesjones]

Em, I emailed you back when it started, although it wasn't as personally annoying to me then. It obviously got eaten by the net (no, I'm not being sarcastic, I've been on the receiving end of net gremlins today). But did it really not occur to any of you how annoying it is to anyone with several of you on their flist to get multiple copies of the same ad, one after another?

[kay-derwydd.livejournal.com]

Hi Jules (and everyone),

We've come up with a solution to fix the problem. We now have ONE LJ that will be strictly for promos, so no clogging up friends' lists with multiple LJs about the same book. Hopefully this will help.

http://erwf-promos.livejournal.com/profile

~Kay

[emilyveinglory.livejournal.com]

No it really didn't. The program has been running for years, only more recent changes to friends list caused the high degree of duplicates. Seeing ads for books of people I personally know over and over doesn't bother me--obviously I had a failure of empathy with other readers there. I changed the program literally within minutes of actually receiving my first complaint. Do you really think I wanted to annoy people? Other than being impolite it would be ineffective as promotion.