Writers write to be read—the more people who buy and read your books, the better. But there is a price to be paid for this.
There are people out there who, like vultures sitting on a fence waiting for a sick animal to die, lurk about the book sites looking for new books that seem to be getting attention. Having a book or two make it to Amazon’s Top 100 or better will bring you to these scavengers’ attention, and they will begin to swarm you.
Now, I’m probably being unduly harsh on a group of entrepreneurs who seek to make a living identifying authors who might be open to shelling out money for their services—as uncertain as those services sometimes are—but I’m not a newcomer to this business, and they are annoying. And, sometimes, sneaky. I say this because their emails, which clog my inbox, often seem to be targeted to a recipient who is a first-time author, completely unfamiliar with how the business works.
Let me give you an example. One of my books recently dropped, and was just outside the top 100 in days. It was ranked around 180 for its gene, and the day after the ranking appeared on Amazon, I received an email stating that the writer had really enjoyed my book and would like to know if I’d published others. Warning bells went off right away. If this writer found the one book and was intrigued by my writing, it takes no real effort to search Amazon for my other books (more than 400 at this point). I’m always wary of overblown praise from strangers, and in this case, I decided to tease the writer to see how long it would take before I got her pitch. I sent the link to my Amazon author page, and within an hour, I got an email offering to promote my book to a vast audience for a mere $199. From that point, the sender’s emails get deleted without being read. Eventually, I won’t get any more from that one. But there seems to be an inexhaustible supply of these people.
This morning, I received an email asking for the link to my Amazon author site, so the sender could ‘review’ my books. I sent the link with a message that I don’t pay for unsolicited promotions or for reviews, which was replied to with an offer—apparently ignoring my message—another sender for the delete without reading file.
The downsides, and I use the plural deliberately, because 1) it takes a lot of my time to delete all the unwanted emails, and 2) there’s a danger that I’ll delete an email from a genuine fan, which I hate to do. But my time is precious. I need time to write, as well as for other things, such as spending time with my family. I can ill afford the time to respond politely to all these unsolicited pitches, and even the time to delete their emails eats into productive time.
But there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about it. I don’t plan to stop writing, and I sincerely hope my books will continue to enjoy some notoriety.
Alas, the price of being known.
