GOOD NEWS...

[Alm Hlgh]

You've asked for it and now it's yours... You fell in love with them; watching them meet each other; watching them hate each other; watching them live with one another; watching them fight together and then falling in love.


Their story: The Princess & The Thug: Hood Love is now available in print! That's right, you can own your own copy with that highly anticipated BONUS ENDING.
Just go here:
GET YOUR COPY NOW!!!
http://www.wordclay.com/
Search: X-00000070309

[Worldwalker]

All caps because the author is Really Important ... yep.
Post icon because the author is much more Important than other authors ... yep.
Thread title gives no clue about what the story is about, what formats it's in, etc. ... yep.
Post contains Flash ... yep.
And most of all, post is telling me what I think, what I want, and what I've said ... yep.

/me flees for dear life.

Whatever this book is, I will stay far, far away.

edit - add: Link goes to a vanity press, from where I would presumably have to search (except search is broken) for the book if I wanted to bother ... oh, totally yep.

[Alm Hlgh]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

All caps because the author is Really Important ... yep.
Post icon because the author is much more Important than other authors ... yep.
Thread title gives no clue about what the story is about, what formats it's in, etc. ... yep.
Post contains Flash ... yep.
And most of all, post is telling me what I think, what I want, and what I've said ... yep.

/me flees for dear life.

Whatever this book is, I will stay far, far away.

edit - add: Link goes to a vanity press, from where I would presumably have to search (except search is broken) for the book if I wanted to bother ... oh, totally yep.

Thank you for your very kind words.... God love and Bless you...

Alm... ^__^

[LCF]

Worldwalker makes a lot of very good points.

Unless you are one of the best selling authors in the world, a post in this manner will only confuse/reject/piss potential readers. And even if you are, the post still sounds much more like a tv commercial than it should.
My advice: Browse around and take some notes on how people react to various promotional posts.

AND ASK A MODERATOR TO CHANGE THE CAPS LOCK IN THE TITLE, BECAUSE IT IS ANNOYING! (as you can see)

[Exer]

Whoa, you people are harsh.

It reminds me of the time my GF tried to make a "cute" sounding CraigsList post for someone to adopt her puppy -- for free -- when she had to make a cross country move. The hate mail started rolling in from dozens of people telling her how stupid her posting sounded, how lame it was, how tired they were of seeing things like that, how she should just go die in a fire and take the puppy with her, etc etc.

Originally Posted by LCF

Unless you are one of the best selling authors in the world, a post in this manner will only confuse/reject/piss potential readers.

Seriously, the things that anger people these days amazes me. If a post like this "pisses" people off, then "people" have anger management issues.

I get being "confused", or even turned-off from wanting to read the book ... but pissed off? If I notice someone had hit & run my vehicle; that pisses me off. If someone steals from me; that pisses me off. A cheating spouse; pisses me off. Animal abuse; pisses me off.

A random person on a forum using caps and describing a book in a confusing and commercial manner; does not piss me off.

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by Exer

Whoa, you people are harsh.

It reminds me of the time my GF tried to make a "cute" sounding CraigsList post for someone to adopt her puppy -- for free -- when she had to make a cross country move. The hate mail started rolling in from dozens of people telling her how stupid her posting sounded, how lame it was, how tired they were of seeing things like that, how she should just go die in a fire and take the puppy with her, etc etc.



Seriously, the things that anger people these days amazes me. If a post like this "pisses" people off, then "people" have anger management issues.

I get being "confused", or even turned-off from wanting to read the book ... but pissed off? If I notice someone had hit & run my vehicle; that pisses me off. If someone steals from me; that pisses me off. A cheating spouse; pisses me off. Animal abuse; pisses me off.

A random person on a forum using caps and describing a book in a confusing and commercial manner; does not piss me off.

[rhadin]

Originally Posted by Exer

Whoa, you people are harsh.

Seriously, the things that anger people these days amazes me. If a post like this "pisses" people off, then "people" have anger management issues.

I get being "confused", or even turned-off from wanting to read the book ... but pissed off? If I notice someone had hit & run my vehicle; that pisses me off. If someone steals from me; that pisses me off. A cheating spouse; pisses me off. Animal abuse; pisses me off.

A random person on a forum using caps and describing a book in a confusing and commercial manner; does not piss me off.

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by Exer

A random person on a forum using caps and describing a book in a confusing and commercial manner; does not piss me off.

Does it make you want to buy the book?

I wouldn't call this trying to sell the book in a commercial manner because people in the business of selling books try for effectiveness, not confusion. They want us to think well of them and write their ads accordingly. They tell us what their books are about and why we should buy them. They make it easy for money to migrate from our pockets to theirs. This ... doesn't.

When it comes to basic questions about the book -- the kind of things I want to know about any book before I buy it -- the ad gives me no information.

Is this book in a genre I'm interested in? I don't know.

Is this book available for my ebook reader? I don't know.

Is this book DRM-locked? I don't know.

Is the author someone I want to support? That part I can tell, and the answer is not good. He thinks he's better and more important than other posters here, which doesn't put him on my good side to begin with. He's telling me what I think and what I feel, and I haven't liked anyone doing that since my mother tried the "you like broccoli" line on me (didn't work). Then there's the Flash, which -- although it ran headlong into my Flashblock add-on and died the death of all forced content -- still made the attempt, and I don't like things that play commercials at me without my permission (hence Flashblock).

And, of course, the author didn't even bother to include a link to his book -- just a link to a vanity press website where we're expected to search for it, although as of last night when I posted, the site's search function was broken. (just checked: still is)

Actually, at least for me, the Flash link was broken too (it may or may not be for other people; Flashblock can do some strange things). But if it had worked, a YouTube video would have played a loud commercial at me. If I'd been reading MobileRead while a spouse was asleep (normally, MR is a quiet sort of place that doesn't wake anyone up), or on a break at work where other people don't want to listen to commercials, or if I just had a headache, and I looked at this thread, expecting it to be well-behaved like its others, then I very well might have been pissed. It's just plain rude to subject people to loud, blaring commercials (with copyright infringement!) without any warning and where they have no reason to expect them.

I didn't sit through the commercial (if I wanted to watch YouTube, I'd watch YouTube, not read MobileRead) so I still don't know if the book is in a genre I enjoy, available for my ebook reader, DRM-locked, or in fact something I want to buy or not. I can't even find out from the vanity press website. However much he may have impressed himself with his own importance, the author failed miserably on the one thing, the only thing, that matters: selling me his book.

[LCF]

@Exer - I personally got to the confused stage. But I have seen people jumping from there to rejection and being pissed off in similar situations - that is why I posted it.

The text in the original post might be very well suited for a personal website with established number of regular visitors, but it's not earning brownie points for the author on a forum where she joined a month ago and has 12 posts.


Btw Alm has another thread in the self promotion forum and the first post is (IMO) much better than this one.

[Worldwalker]

This is one of those mornings, and to make matters worse, I can't even do anything because I can't stop coughing. Yeah, the fun part of living in the south: things are blooming already, and I'm allergic to one of them. *cough* So, with nothing better to do until this coughing settles down, I started looking into this book.

For starters, I decided to find it on WordClay. While their search function remains broken, and the author is too Important (yes, the caps are used ironically) to actually provide a link to the book, the Google-fu is strong enough in this one to find the thing. (in the process, I also found out that WordClay is owned by the same people as AuthorHouse, who are ... um ... not the good kind of vanity press) But, in any event, I tracked down the book and took a look at the blurb for Alm's book.

The first thing that hit me? It's a pbook. I don't know why the ad is here, because it comes on dead trees. There is no ebook listed for it. That's why the ad lists no devices and no DRM status -- the book is paper only. The line "...is now available in print" is not just a cut-and-paste error; it is now available in print.

The original page Google hit was actually a search results page listing 10 books. Before I looked at the specific book, I compared prices among them all. One (13 Essential Steps for Evaluating a Franchise Opportunity) sells for more than the book in question: $29.99 as opposed to $20.17. That is to be expected, since it's a non-fiction book with a fairly small target market, and proposes to make money for that market. If you're going to make a million bucks off a franchise, thirty bucks for a book is trivial. The other eight are fiction, poetry, spiritual, and one I can't make head nor tail of. Their prices range from $8.92 to $14.00. So this book is 44% more expensive than the next most expensive book in the same results (which, given the state of WordClay's search engine, is the best we're going to get for a random sample right now) and 78% more expensive than the average.

For $20+, I could buy three ebooks from Baen that I know I'll like, or a whole series from Tim Myers' backlist on Smashwords, or a book at full price (or several on sale) at O'Reilly, or a lot of other things I want more than some random book by some random author who won't even tell me what it's all about, and just tells me what I supposedly think, and gets it wrong.

Then there's the formatting issue. Here's how it looks in the search results (boldface mine):

Westside Story meets Romeo & Juliet in the 21st Century. $0$0Hi my name is Angela. My bff name is Karen and we live in the Hills area. Just in case you don’t know; that’s the rich area of Chicago.$0We book details

The "book details" link goes to this:

Westside Story meets Romeo & Juliet in the 21st Century. $0 $0 Hi my name is Angela. My bff name is Karen and we live in the Hills area. Just in case you don’t know; that’s the rich area of Chicago.$0 We like to shop and go into the city to visit the lake front; you know do girl stuff. Well anyway we were doing our usual shopping and girl thing in the city when, guess what: OMfreakingG we got caught in the middle of a gang fight.$0 Can you say freak the hell out? Yup that’s what we did. We were so scared. I mean there were shots being fired, people being beaten up and to top it all off, we were stuck underground in the subway. OH MY GOD! We had no way out.$0 Anyway, suddenly there was a blast of sirens from above. And people really started freaking out. I mean it was really crazy and it was really wild. Me and my friend Karen; yup my bff we got separated and we didn’t know what was happening.$0 That’s when I felt someone grabbed me, but I didn’t know who. It was dark. I mean REALLY dark. Next thing I knew I was being pulled; oops I mean dragged up the other end of the subway and out to a side street located in the Printer’s Row area of Chicago. That’s when it hit me: Holy Shit… I’ve just been kidnapped by one of the gangs.$0 Yup that’s when I met him. OMG I HATE him… He is so arrogant and a know it all. Well it’s a long story and I really don’t have the time to give you the details, but you can read all about it.$0 $0 $0 **** Includes the highly anticipated BONUS alternate ending. A must read ^__^

I think the last of those is an attempt at cuteness. All the rest of the bolded strings, though, are some sort of formatting issue. The other books for sale don't have them (admittedly one doesn't have anything). This is a potential buyer's first impression of the book for sale, and it's got random characters stuck in it. I tried another browser -- it's not me, it's the blurb. It's that way. Alm apparently didn't think this was important enough to fix, or just couldn't be bothered. There are also punctuation errors in the blurb, which are another turn-off for me. Spelling and punctuation are the easy parts of writing; if someone can't get the easy parts right, what are they going to do with the hard parts?

So, anyway, when it's finally run down, this whole ad is for an overpriced pbook from a highly dubious vanity press and with significant errors in its listing. I set off my cough again by laughing, because the author is defending an ad that doesn't even belong on MobileRead in the first place!

Alm, this is MobileRead. It's a forum that's for and about ebooks. That's electronic books. The kind you can read on a Kindle. Not the kind printed on paper.

[Alm Hlgh]

I find it amazing; but I shouldn't. How one person can do something and another person can take it totally left field out the ballpark and interpret it a whole different manner. I know I'm having a duh moment; a moment where that should be obvious. I've been told in a previous life that "you can't expect people to do/ see things the way that you would do it."

So I use ALL CAPS when I'm excited and extremely happy for my small strides in life; I'm sure that you have your own way of showing excitement- we are different after all. I think it's wonderful; our difference it is what makes life interesting and fresh. I think though sometimes we can become a little too self-centered in our ways and think that the whole world should think, act and behave like us (me); how absurd and small we can be in our thinking.

So I write this as a reminder to myself that even though I am blissfully happy to have achieved a small step in the world of writing; I have to remember that there are always people out there who are just looking for a reason to rain on my parade. But like I said in my previous blog, "life isn't about the rain that falls on our parades; but rather our being able to still enjoy the show despite it." Thank you so much all for your wonderful response to my thread. They say all publicity is good publicity; good or bad. I will choose to believe that in this instance. Thank you for being so very kind and welcoming to me.

God Bless All...

Alm ^__^

http://www.goodreads.com/almhlgh

[queentess]

I don't think anyone was trying to be mean, just pointing out information that should have been provided.

Alm, here are a couple pointers to having an ad that works:
#1 - Link directly to the book, not the vanity press website
#2 - As this is mobileread, it should be an ebook
#3 - I couldn't tell anything about the story from the blurb here, so I'm not going to the bother of looking it up when the link click went nowhere and a search on the site revealed nothing. A synopsis or list of genre or anything would be helpful.
#4 - Rethink how you use semi-colons. It's a big turn-off when you're trying to sell your writing and can't use semi-colons properly.

Also, you're reposting your mobileread posts on your blog? I have to admit I find that a little odd...

[Worldwalker]

So because you're excited, you should be able to act exactly as you want, with no regard for anyone else or what those other people do? And that's not "absurd and small"?

You're giving yourself far too much credit if you think people want to rain on your personal parade because you're just so special. You are, in fact, just some random person trying to sell a printed book on MobileRead (a no-no to begin with) and not observing the conventions followed by other posters (because you're just that awesome). Nope, not important at all. Just a mild annoyance in my quest to find something good to read.

Of course I have my own ways of expressing happiness. I do not, however, decide that the ideal way of doing so is to do annoying things to innocent people. I don't try to sell printed books in ebook forums. I don't put titles (anywhere!) in all caps because I know it's rude. I don't surprise the unsuspecting with blaring videos. I don't believe that my happiness gives me the right to do whatever I feel like. In short, I grew up in a time and with a family that believed consideration for others outweighed self-expression. And I prefer to live in a world like that, instead of the physical equivalent of Facebook, with millions of people all screaming at once but nobody listening. Most of the time, MobileRead is such a place. And I'm going to say something when it isn't.

As for publicity: "They" say a lot of things. Do you think the publicity Anne Rice got for her Amazon tirade was good publicity? Her sales crashed and burned. Laurell K. Hamilton saw similar results, though whether the sinking sales, in her case, could be attributed to her rant about how her characters were her imaginary friends (I'm not making this up!) or to the fact that her books became ... well, if you or I sent a book like her most recent to a publisher, they wouldn't tell us "try submitting to another market"; they'd say "try a different line of work." No, all publicity isn't good publicity.

In a rather distant way, this whole thing about happiness comes back to the basic premise of an open society: does respect for the ideas of others include respect for others who say such ideas are unworthy of respect? Does accepting all points of view include accepting racist, sexist, and various other -ist points of view, too? And people who say only their points of view (often one of the latter) are worthy of respect? And, in the case of the original post, does respect for the happiness of others include respecting rudeness when they choose to be happy that way? If someone, say, paints my car purple with big daisies all over it, is that okay too if they say it's because they're happy? Where do we draw the line? Which precedents, which conventions, and which rules does happiness give you license to break? And does sadness give you any special privileges, too? Can you be more annoying if you become a parent than if you just have a birthday?

A world with billions of people all shouting at once, but nobody listening, just doesn't appeal to me. And if everyone insists on their right to shout whenever they feel like, that's where we're going. It's not a nice place.

[Alm Hlgh]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

So because you're excited, you should be able to act exactly as you want, with no regard for anyone else or what those other people do? And that's not "absurd and small"?

You're giving yourself far too much credit if you think people want to rain on your personal parade because you're just so special. You are, in fact, just some random person trying to sell a printed book on MobileRead (a no-no to begin with) and not observing the conventions followed by other posters (because you're just that awesome). Nope, not important at all. Just a mild annoyance in my quest to find something good to read.

Of course I have my own ways of expressing happiness. I do not, however, decide that the ideal way of doing so is to do annoying things to innocent people. I don't try to sell printed books in ebook forums. I don't put titles (anywhere!) in all caps because I know it's rude. I don't surprise the unsuspecting with blaring videos. I don't believe that my happiness gives me the right to do whatever I feel like. In short, I grew up in a time and with a family that believed consideration for others outweighed self-expression. And I prefer to live in a world like that, instead of the physical equivalent of Facebook, with millions of people all screaming at once but nobody listening. Most of the time, MobileRead is such a place. And I'm going to say something when it isn't.

As for publicity: "They" say a lot of things. Do you think the publicity Anne Rice got for her Amazon tirade was good publicity? Her sales crashed and burned. Laurell K. Hamilton saw similar results, though whether the sinking sales, in her case, could be attributed to her rant about how her characters were her imaginary friends (I'm not making this up!) or to the fact that her books became ... well, if you or I sent a book like her most recent to a publisher, they wouldn't tell us "try submitting to another market"; they'd say "try a different line of work." No, all publicity isn't good publicity.

In a rather distant way, this whole thing about happiness comes back to the basic premise of an open society: does respect for the ideas of others include respect for others who say such ideas are unworthy of respect? Does accepting all points of view include accepting racist, sexist, and various other -ist points of view, too? And people who say only their points of view (often one of the latter) are worthy of respect? And, in the case of the original post, does respect for the happiness of others include respecting rudeness when they choose to be happy that way? If someone, say, paints my car purple with big daisies all over it, is that okay too if they say it's because they're happy? Where do we draw the line? Which precedents, which conventions, and which rules does happiness give you license to break? And does sadness give you any special privileges, too? Can you be more annoying if you become a parent than if you just have a birthday?

A world with billions of people all shouting at once, but nobody listening, just doesn't appeal to me. And if everyone insists on their right to shout whenever they feel like, that's where we're going. It's not a nice place.

lolololo..... Even though you didn't use a single cap I can swear I hear you yelling at me... I don't know what has you so angry at the world, but how about I buy you a glass of orange juice? It seems to make everything all better... Take care love it is a great pleasure hearing from you and I enjoy your taking a special interest in my work... Suddenly I am reminded of a saying:

"A lie/ rumor will travel the world 3 times over before TRUTH has the time to get out of bed and put his shoes on."

God Bless you..

[Pablo]

Alm,
I hope you don't get the wrong idea after all this bashing: this is in general a friendly site that welcomes readers, writers, editors and software developers.
I hope you are not discouraged.
Welcome to MobileRead. This is a great site.
Best regards
Pablo