Quote:
Originally Posted by ardeegee
Dude-- when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. You made yourself look unprofessional by jumping in with an insult the first time, and you are only making yourself look worse now.
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No, no, don't discourage him!
Seriously, Karl, you come in here promoting a book which is, in a word, bad. You're far from the first one to do that, of course, though you may hold the record for sheer mass. But you've got this book to sell, you don't try to become part of the community, you don't participate, you're just hawking a book. Once again, not the only one. When someone disagrees with the premise of your book, you lash out at them with a post which I must admit is a marvel, packing more rudeness, arrogance, and petulance in a few lines than most people can fit into half a page. Now that is something we don't see a lot of.
Most of the people who want to sell something to members of the MobileRead community recognize that it
is a community, and behave accordingly. Like any other community, it gets a bit defensive about rude outsiders. And yes, you are an outsider. You don't post, you don't participate, you haven't even said "hi" over in the welcome forum ... you just tacked up a flyer for your book, nothing else. Certainly, there are other authors who do this (although those who hang out with us, discuss their books and various other topics, and in general become 'one of the guys', seem to find their sales reflect that effort) but, in general, that's
all they do. They post their notices and move on. I think you're the first, at least in my experience, who stuck around to insult the people you're hoping will buy your book.
This is not winning you any friends. More germane to the topic, it's also not winning you any sales. MobileRead is a more significant market than you might imagine, because many of its members and lurkers are the office/family/club "ebook expert" (even if that's defined as being the only person who knows how to load a book on the reader) and we tend to be a chatty bunch. It's not an unreasonable assumption that a very high percentage of people who buy self-published ebooks are, or know, one of us. Word of mouth is a big thing, and when someone barges in here slinging insults, that word of mouth doesn't tend to be very positive.
This would be a good time to take a step back and work on some things. Take an anger management class. Engage the services of a professional editor. Lurk around MobileRead and get a feel for the community. Then you can promote your newly-edited and perfected book and get sales instead of snark. Everyone wins.