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Plug Your Book!
195
Ethics of online marketing
Perhaps nothing is more important to authors and publishers than
their reputation. While it’s perfectly fine to promote your work
energetically, consider the way your promotion might appear to others.
Sometimes there’s a fine line between being aggressive and being
overzealous.
In some cases, the boundaries are clear. For example, the CAN-
SPAM Act outlawed unsolicited commercial e-mail, so it’s inappropriate
to market your book by sending e-mails to strangers. In other cases,
you’ll need to use your judgment. For example, one section of this book
discusses how to persuade people to review your book on Amazon. But
don’t ask people who haven’t read your book. And don’t review your
book yourself. Don’t buy thousands of copies of your own book in a ploy
to push it onto the bestseller list.
On the Internet, it’s fairly easy to hide your identity, but often it
comes back to haunt people who use it as a marketing technique.
Shill reviews
For years it was rumored that several authors and publicists had
posted flattering reviews of their own books on Amazon, anonymously.
This dishonest tactic of writing shill reviews, sometimes called “astro-
turfing,” depends on contrived reviews to simulate a grass-roots
movement for a book on Amazon.
Then in 2004, a computer glitch revealed it was true—the real
names of the authors were displayed, earning them a lifetime of
embarrassment. One was John Rechy, author of the bestselling novel
City of Night. The ironic thing was that Rechy was a successful writer
whose honors included a PEN-USA West lifetime achievement award.
He wasn’t famous, but he didn’t need shill book reviews either. But that
computer glitch made him much better known, though probably not in
the way he’d hoped.
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