So, um, does this "right of an advertiser to have access to their audience" mean that you'll be running free ads for my website design business on stevejordanbooks.com? That's great to know; where should I send the banners?
On a less snarky note, regarding the "MR Home Shopping Network": I believe the term you're looking for is "bookstore". I go to them all the time, both online and offline, precisely so that people can advertise books at me. I just came from Baen Books (where I talked myself out of buying an advance reader copy of
Monster Hunter Vendetta by meditating on the size of my TBR list). I'm probably going to be visiting Borders this afternoon (good coupon in the email). I'm a reader. A bookworm. A bookaholic. I like to read books, and I like to buy books in anticipation of future reading (given the situation with my TBR list, possibly even more than I like reading them). I've spent years deliberately training the Amazon recommendation engine so that it can advertise books at me more effectively. So why wouldn't I, as a typical MR member, want to read through a "Promote Your Ebook Here" board in search of even more books?
There seems to be a segment of the marketing community -- in my area, especially auto dealers -- who believe that nobody would be interested in finding out about their products or services unless they were tricked into it. They want to force their ads on people who don't want to read them. In short, they have a spammer's mentality. Seriously, who in their right mind thinks that their ideal target market is
people who don't want to do business with them?
Yet it's not that people -- especially in our hyper-consumer culture -- don't want advertising. Hell, I was watching Sherwin-Williams paint ads on YouTube a couple of nights ago, just because they were so cool, and I don't even need any paint (check their YouTube channel -- the CGI is amazing). I get a lot of advertising in my email, but none of it is spam; it's all mailings I chose to sign up for, ranging from book authors, publishers, and retailers to local pizza places and mail-order steak vendors. I also get a fair number of snail-mail catalogs, mostly tech, pet or garden related. The critical thing is that I want to deal with that advertising
on my own terms. I want to read those emails and catalogs when
I want to, not when someone else wants to make me.
Take, say, Spring Hill Nurseries. They sell perennials*. They just sold me some more perennials, because I liked one of their specials in their latest email that I've subscribed to. Would I even have looked at it (except maybe to note who to blacklist) if they'd advertised in a way that interfered with something else I was doing? Hell no! But I'm looking to buy plants for the new place, and I've got a tight budget, so when their sale ads come in and drop into their proper "Spring Hill" folder (I'm a bit crazy with my Thunderbird filtering) I read them long before, say, stupid jokes forwarded by random relatives.
Your target market is
not the people who don't want to read your ads. That's like trying to sell books in a clothing store. Your target market is people who are looking for your products, which is why books are sold in bookstores. And that's what I'm suggesting: not an ad ghetto, not a dark corner, but the MobileRead Book Fair -- in fact, that might be a great name for the board! -- where people who want to find out about new books can find them when they want them.
*note: I think it says something about me, though I'm not sure what, that among the plants I've bought from them are white-leaved hostas and pink lavender (which seems like an oxymoron).