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It's an interesting conundrum. On one hand, I've tried to promote my books mainly by participating in threads on MR and at other sites, and tried to keep aggressive self-promotion controlled. On the other hand, I've watched my sales nosedive in the last year, and came to realize I may not have been promoting myself enough!
Subtle self-promo on a site like MR is fine... provided those people buy your books, like them, and enthusiastically tell others outside of MR to check them out. In absence of that, an author must work harder to sell their material, it's just the nature of the business now.
I don't have a problem with aggressive self-promotion... like any other ad, I can tune it out whenever I want to. But any self-promotion gives you a chance to learn about a product, or its creator, and I take advantage of that. Well-constructed promotions with good grammar and spelling, descriptions that actually get the story idea across, and of course, links to excerpts, reviews or other material, usually tell you the real story about a book before you ever buy it.
Yes, some are very over-zealous... sometimes that alone tells you all you need to know about a book. But I'd suggest you try to be a bit tolerant: This whole process of authors self-promoting themselves online is a fairly new one, and the bugs are still getting worked out; and in your haste to brush off an aggressive ad, you might miss a real gem of a book out there.
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