SA Book & Challenge Lovers discussion

This group's policies regarding author self-promotion go as follows
- Several threads have been created to allow for authors or their representatives to self-promote
- Self-promotion posts are also allowed if they are on-topic
- Self-promotion threads are allowed if they are in an appropriate folder.
- Self-nominations for the monthly discussions are allowed, but the author may not rig the polls
- Any off-topic self-promotion post will be deleted.

However, these rules mostly came about based on general attitudes toward self-promotion in other groups, personal preferences and/or decisions made on the spot. We have not set out formal rules or had a general discussion to see how group members feel about self-promotion.

So please, use this thread to give us your opinion on the above policies, and any other related issue.

I quite appreciate this set of comprehensive author guidelines from another group.

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

I would add one more from another group who are incredibly strict on author promotion which is that an author may NOT nominate their own books for Book of the Month. We have a small enough nomination process to be able to confirm this easily.

Most author self-promoting seems to stem from self published authors who do not have a publisher's marketing budget behind them. I do understand that it is really difficult to promote your book in such circumstances and that authors who have been through all the pain of writing a book would like to be recognised. This recent piece by Charles Stross is quite a good discussion on the topic (it makes some important points along with the humour - read the comments as well). http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-...

However, I personally regard my Goodreads groups as something akin to a book club. If we were meeting in person, we would be honoured to invite authors to our wine drinking and book discussions, but it would be by our invitation. As I said in the other thread, if a book is good enough and in line with the general taste of the group, it will be nominated.

On a more positive note, I recently received an e-mail on Goodreads from an author to inform me that her book was on special on Amazon. I had marked the book as "To read" and I was happy to be informed that it is available for $2. I've downloaded it and will eventually read and review it. I thanked the author for her e-mail and has not been badgered since. A much nicer way to do promoting.

These are my thoughts

- I am in favour of allowing some self-promotion. We see books advertised all the time on Goodreads, in bookstores, magazines, etc. You're free to learn more or ignore. Indie and self-published authors don't have the marketing resources of big companies, and have to self-promote. I don't think it's fair to tell them they're not allowed to tell us about their work; self-promotion is their only means of getting readers. In addition, these titles might offer a much-needed break from the mainstream. Ok yes, lots of self-published books are badly written, full of hopeless cliches or are just a means for the author to indulge their prejudices or crude fantasies, but sometimes self-publication is a way of circumventing mainstream prejudices, by including LGBTQ or POC protagonists, for example. And those books deserve a platform. As long as it's courteous and not intrusive, I'm ok with it.

These are the kinds of self-promotion I am fine with:
- posts in the threads for self-promotion, giveaways, review requests
- posts that are on-topic and helpful eg. if someone is looking for a specific kind of book for a challenge, and an author suggests their own.
- authors posting on discussion threads for their books, as long as they keep it civil and participants are free to give their honest opinion

These are the kinds of self-promotion I tolerate, but don't like:
- authors starting threads about their books, even if it's in a relevant folder. They can use one of the self-promo threads instead of adding clutter
- authors suggesting their books for reading challenge tasks. Even if it's relevant, it's unnecessary unless someone asks for suggestions. Such self-promotion is not helpful, it's just self-serving, and often ignores challenge rules because the author is just there to sell something and doesn't bother finding out how things work.
- Authors nominating themselves or their books for monthly discussions. They have plenty of opportunity to tell members about their books, and all members are free to nominate whatever they want. Also, we've only had one case of self-nomination, and that author rigged the poll. We allowed him to win, and no one contributed to the discussion.
- posts in Sales and Special offers. Indie titles are usually cheap anyway, and what people are looking for in this thread are mainstream titles at low prices, not unknown titles going for $0.99. Again.
- Authors suggesting their books when people ask for recommendations of good books.

These are the kinds of self-promotion I don't tolerate, and will probably delete without warning:
- off-topic promotion. It's inconsiderate of the author and intrudes on the thread.
- repeated self-promotion outside of the promo threads, even if it's on-topic eg. suggesting your book for every challenge where it fits.
- Authors praising their books in the third person as is if we couldn't see through their shameless self-promotion. If anything I'd just delete their posts for being so fucking stupid.

I agree with what you have set out in the post above mine Lauren. However I like this from Carolien:

"I would add one more from another group who are incredibly strict on author promotion which is that an author may NOT nominate their own books for Book of the Month. We have a small enough nomination process to be able to confirm this easily."

All the indie/SA authors books we have read have been nominations from members and not the author. So this process works.

Agreed.

Also - I think the rule regarding harassment/ behaviour, and 'hard-selling' from Carolien's link should be added.

My meager experience with self-promotions/ self-published authors have not been good, I usually just don't go there.
I, like Lauren appreciate the difficulties these authors face, however, its been my experience that they really don't handle any criticism or negative feedback very well at all - even when done politely.

Jax wrote: "Agreed.

Also - I think the rule regarding harassment/ behaviour, and 'hard-selling' from Carolien's link should be added."

Agreed

I have had some really good experience with self-pub authors and have been lucky that none have reacted badly to one of my reviews.

I'm lucky not to have had any bad experiences either. At most it's an annoyance, like that thing with Paul Haston, or too much self-promotion.

I don't mind either way with the hard sell, but then again, I almost never click on their links. I have a very long list of review requests for indie novels and most of those are better suited to my tastes than the stuff that pops up here.

I think a good guideline for authors would be to think of this group as a real-life book club, as Carolien suggested. We've got a noticeboard where you can put up ads about your book, and we welcome people who'd like to join our discussions, but we don't like vendors coming in off the street and interrupting us just to sell stuff.

I think scrapping the self-nomination is a good idea. You're supposed to nominate something because you want to read it, you think the group will enjoy it, and it'll make an interesting discussion topic. Authors would only self-nominate because they want you to read their books. And now that I think about it, it's only the more obnoxious sort of author that would self-nominate.

I just get annoyed with self promoting. We've had authors who have promoted their books in every topic they could find. That just puts me off of their books and they go on my list of authors I will never read.

I don't mind people promoting their book in the appropriate topic, but only there and only once. I don't want to see an add over and over again.

So I think it is a good idea to be a more clear about what we tolerate and a bit stricter in upholding the rules. (I have never deleted a post even if it is in the wrong topic and off topic)

I don't like that repeated self-promotion either, and honestly, I don't understand the mindset of authors who think it helps. Why would I want to read your book after you kept waving it in my face? So I just delete some of those posts. I don't think you should hesitate to delete either Barbara. Even if we don't set out specific rules I think there's an unspoken rule in social media that says off-topic promotion is inappropriate. Authors who do it are behaving rudely and their posts should be treated accordingly.

I always think who am I to delete the post and maybe I am the only one who is bothered by those posts. That is another reason I am happy you brought this up so I know I am not the only one.

Well, you are a moderator :)

I know, but still. I will be more assertive from now on. :D

Someone just tried to nominate an author for the April/May BoM, but it was obviously just promotion, either by someone doing promotional work for the author, or one of the author's sockpuppets. EDIT: definitely a sockpuppet - same person in profile photos.

Should we ban this as well? The nomination is not made because the person wants to read and discuss the books with other members, or thinks it would make a good group read.

On another note, I think we need to work through this thread at some point and set up a few official rules or guidelines for promotion.

Another question: lots of authors or promoters start new threads to advertise their books, rather than using one of the available threads. Are you guys ok with this? Or should we delete those threads and make a rule against it?

I'm also thinking we should have one thread were all the rules are listed, maybe in the First Stop folder. The thread should be marked important so that it stays on top of the list, and should be easy to spot on the home page. Perhaps a link to it in the group description? Thereafter all authors/promotors are responsible for checking it, and any posts that break the rules can automatically be deleted.

I discovered that they are the same person too. I said so in the nominations thread, before I read this one and saw you had discovered it too.

I think we should ban self nomination. It is one of the reasons why I say in most of the challenges I moderate and people can nominate for that people have to have participated in other challenges. You weed out the persons who only nominate tasks or books (in the DIC) to promote books.

I hate all the separate discussions about one book started by the author. I think a separate corner with 3 discussions (one for promotion of books, one for promotion of authors and one for promotion of publishers) is more than enough. All other promotional threads should be deleted. If someone thinks another thread in that special corner is needed they can contact one of the moderators who can then decide if an exception is warranted or not and if it is the moderator can set it up, so we know it is approved.
In these 3 discussions they can rant about their books all they want, but only there.

I do feel that we need official rules to be written out in a discussion posted both in the First Stop folder but also in the Author's Corner Folder (or what is that folder called) and a link to them in our group profile.

If no one else has time I will take a crack at writing out the rules from our discussions.

I must say it is starting to annoy me and taking the fun out of reading all the comments to come across all the self promoting and seeing comments all the time that I do not want to read.

I don't like the clutter that all the separate threads create either. I often want to delete those threads without warning.

I think we have enough threads for promotion and related indie stuff already - one for general promotion, one for review requests, one for giveaways and one for special offers. The review request and giveaway threads do tend to drop to the bottom of the lists since they don't get much use, but we can just revive them and mark them important so they stay on top. I don't think we need separate thread to promote books, authors and publishers. In some cases you wouldn't differentiate between promoting an author and a book for example, and in many cases people could just post the same thing in all three threads.

Should we keep the promotion in the Authors thread? I think it's fine there. We can change the name to Author and Publishers or something, if that's a bit clearer. I don't want to make a new folder, as we already have quite a few.

Feel free to write a draft if you want Barbara. I've also been meaning to but am trying to catch up on stuff since I got back. If you do it in Google Drive and invite anyone who's interested, then we can collaborate and make additions and edits easily.

One thread sounds good :)

I wrote a draft for the message on the home page:

Self-Promotion

SA Book Lovers welcomes authors and publishers to our group, but please note that there are specific threads for self-promotion:
General promotion: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
Sales and giveaways: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Any promotion outside of these threads will be deleted.

We may make exceptions for active members who regularly participate in discussions, and posts that are on-topic and helpful (eg. if a member is looking for a certain kind of book and yours fits the requirements).

Authors and publishers may NOT nominate their own books for monthly discussions.

Does anyone have any changes or additions? I'm not sure if we should add the bit about the exceptions we're willing to make, so please give me your thoughts.

I made a new thread for sales and giveaways because the others are in different folders, and I thought it would be more convenient to have one specifically for self-promotion, since that's not what we're looking for when we go to the other giveaway and sales threads.

We have a thread somewhere for review requests, but I left that out as it's been dormant for a long time, and I'm not sure it's necessary. Personally, I get a ton of review requests via email so I'm not even going to bother looking at more. Nevertheless, I wouldn't mind a thread, especially if the non-bloggers would like the opportunity to get free books in exchange for Goodreads reviews. In that case, I think it would be best to make a new thread rather than reviving the old one.

Don't mention exceptions. I think this is pretty clear.

I think create a new thread for review requests.

I agree with the idea of a separate sales thread for authors and publishers. I've picked up some decent books over time from those kind of threads.

One question on the author promotions. Is it worth setting up some threads by genre? That way an author can promote their SF book under that genre and if any of the regular users want to find something new in a specific genre, it's a pretty quick search.

On the one hand I feel like having separate genre threads will create too much clutter, but on the other I'm one of the people who would probably only be interested in the sci fi, fantasy and horror. So what about one thread for speculative fiction, and one for general fiction?

Lauren wrote: "On the one hand I feel like having separate genre threads will create too much clutter, but on the other I'm one of the people who would probably only be interested in the sci fi, fantasy and horro..."

Add another one for non-fiction and that should work really well.

Looks good like that! I don't mind if the exception stays or goes.

Gah, just realised we didn't implement all this stuff we were talking about...

But I wanted to ask another question - did we come to any sort of decision regarding self-promotion outside of the designated threads but that still falls within a suitable folder? For example, if a South African author posts about their new book in the South African Books folder.

A few people have done it lately. Personally I don't like it and I've deleted a few of those threads. But I'm not sure if that's ok and I'd like some clear-cut rules.

I think we are sort of tolerating it if on topic.

Two suggestions: if a book is mentioned outside of the designated profile but on topic, we only allow a link to the Goodreads profile of the book, no Amazon etc sales links. We can all look at the profile and find a place to buy it if we want it. If it is on special, you can mention it in the appropriate spot.

Other than the wording in message 18, which we must really implement, I suggest a similar topic something like Group Reads and challenges for 2015. And Mark it Read this first. Here we have a summary of our BOM categories and nomination process as well as the main challenges that will run in 2015. So if anybody joins the group, there is a spot that explains our main processes and we can refer people to it easily.

I suppose some tolerance is needed. But I'm beginning to think that if you give an inch, a mile will be taken.
I think self promotion should be separate. If a group member recommends the book in the Book folder, that's fine. But if we allow authors to use that, what's to stop another author from creating a thread for their books' theme?

Caroline - I mostly agree,
Though I find it a little annoying that you'd have to create a special topic marked as 'read first' for these occasions.

The threads already exist. And the group bookshelf is easily viewable. I think that if they couldn't be bothered doing a minimal amount of research about the group they wish to market at, then they wouldn't read the "read first topics" either. It creates more (unnecessary)work for the moderators (I.M.O.)

I agree, keep it in one place then there is no confusion.

I like a read this first thing, we need it! Cause if they don't read it and get deleted they might wonder why and find this topic and see why.