Self-Promotion Forum Discussion

"Spam spam spam spam spam spam spam lovely spam, wonderful spam" - Monty Python

I can't help wondering what the purpose of the Self-Promotion Area is -- to encourage self-promotion or discourage it?

Neither. It is so they don't spam their self-promotion across the whole forum.

Can't we just treat them like we treat all the other spammers? Someone posted about selling NHL jerseys the other day, and I don't see anyone putting up a football jersey subforum...?

beer good said:

"Spam spam spam spam spam spam spam lovely spam, wonderful spam" - Monty Python

Click to expand...

I don't have anything against you.
Just an observation: your nickname in this forum is ''beer good''. Posts: 4,473. Maybe you are a spammer and you are trying to promote ''beer'. Beer equal alcohol, chemicals ... which is bad for health.
Certainly books are better than Beer.
Sorry, I am not a bad person.
Just try to be in my place, maybe you will understand more.
You have a book, you want to write more books and you are not a rich person; you don't have tens of thousands of dollars for advertising....
I think each new author deserves at least one chance.
I am supporting new authors, because I understand them.
And I think you know way rich authors ''sell more books'' .. I don't have anything against them, but you need to understand the methods of manipulation(immoral manipulation). Search on the internet ''methods of manipulation''
Your brain gets spammed just like your email inbox "Wherever you are" ...

Cheers!!!

I do hope you don't employ the syntax as you did in the above post in your book as well. Though that would explain the need of promoting your own books through methods such as posting on this here forum.

If we build it, they will come.

It doesn't surprise me that if we have a self-promotion area, then self-promoters will come and use it. Why not? And why then give them a hard time? We have an Ignore Thread feature that is easy to use.

beer good said:

As long as there is one, I reserve the right to at least poke fun at the people who blunder in uninvited and pour hours of work into trying to sell their book on a forum visited by a few dozen people. Especially if they try to sail under false flag.

Click to expand...

Aye.

I'm not actually going to leave the forums over it. I just think that, if I were an author that needed to self promote my book and I saw a forum where readers hang out... and that forum had a place for self promotion... I, too, would post about my book in the hope that someone here might buy it. He did nothing wrong that I can see, yet he was treated as if he had... and that kind of rubbed me the wrong way.

Believe me, I understand. I've been moderator and admin and content writer at a few different forums throughout the years. I've dealt with my share of spammers and trolls... but this guy is neither in my opinion. *shrugs*

At the end of the day, those who post and contribute to the forum set the tone. Here it seems we've got an honest mix of people fed up with the self-promotion area, and its knock-on effect on the site, and those who think that it has its place and are okay with it. Yes, it's unfortunate that the original poster got caught up in a crossfire such as this, but then I like that there is such a strong range of opinions that are shared by all.

Honestly, I am drawn between the two positions, from Pontalba to Beer Good and beyond. I see the existence of this sub-forum as a necessary evil, aimed at preventing more prevalent trolling that goes on - but when more and more we get self-pubs touting their wares rather than contributing to the wider community its hard to be as open to such things. I say get rid of the self-promo section and make clear this isn't just some place for people to come try and promote their books at but a community of book lovers and readers. I mean, hell, it's just going to get worse as more and more budding writers crop up out of the woodwork with amazing novels that haven't gone through any kind of proper editing/publishing procedure (a generalisation, and may not apply to this author, but generally the case from experience in this area).

I do think that it may be time to get rid of the self-publishers/promo section, and get the site away from being some MLM-marketeer's noticeboard and back to a more genuine book and reader's discussion forum. Whether it is perceived as being 'okay' to have this sub-forum here, it's clear it's causing friction amongst heavy users of the boards, so why not get rid of it. It doesn't really bring anything new to BAR.

Peder said:

If we build it, they will come.

Click to expand...

Believe me, Peder, they come anyway...
This way, at least, they don't just post anywhere.

Landslide said:

Believe me, Peder, they come anyway...
This way, at least, they don't just post anywhere.

Click to expand...

I am quite content to have the self-promoters sequestered in an area to themselves. And if the management wished to ban them entirely that would be quite alright with me too. It just seems oxmoronic -- or is it cognitively dissonant -- to have a thread which seems to invite them and then beat up on them as if to discourage others from coming.
Maybe a good sound public thrashing is indeed the way to keep them away and we should all pile on and jeer -- invigorate the place with some good loud public sport.
Your call, admins and moderators.

Will said:

I say get rid of the self-promo section and make clear this isn't just some place for people to come try and promote their books at but a community of book lovers and readers. I mean, hell, it's just going to get worse as more and more budding writers crop up out of the woodwork with amazing novels that haven't gone through any kind of proper editing/publishing procedure (a generalisation, and may not apply to this author, but generally the case from experience in this area).

Click to expand...

Hear hear.

Landslide said:

Believe me, Peder, they come anyway...
This way, at least, they don't just post anywhere.

Click to expand...

From what I've seen, many of them do post anywhere and the mods have to waste time moving them to the spam forum and telling them it's OK to post there.

Landslide said:

Believe me, Peder, they come anyway...
This way, at least, they don't just post anywhere.

Click to expand...

They do, though. Quite a few of them start off posting in either the introductions or general book discussion forum or, which is even worse, they go to one of the fiction subforii and post a review whilst pretending to be a reader who is in awe of some obscure book.

Polly Parrot said:

They do, though. Quite a few of them start off posting in either the introductions or general book discussion forum or, which is even worse, they go to one of the fiction subforii and post a review whilst pretending to be a reader who is in awe of some obscure book.

Click to expand...

A book that has only been "released" for three days. :

I defer to the mods in whatever makes their job easier. From my own perspective I don’t see the point in having it. It is choked full of threads posted by people who join the board for the sole purpose of advertising. It would be one thing if the posters were long standing contributing members of the board who wanted to let us know they had published a book. But in such rare cases we probably wouldn’t need a subforum for that. Such a well established poster could get away with posting a thread about it in the Books and Novels forum. But the whole joining a forum just to advertise rubs me the wrong way.

Bob Magness said:

It would be one thing if the posters were long standing contributing members of the board who wanted to let us know they had published a book. But in such rare cases we probably wouldn’t need a subforum for that. Such a well established poster could get away with posting a thread about it in the Books and Novels forum.

Click to expand...

If I were a long-standing contributor, and were so fortunate as to have completed and published a book, I would rather find some other place and way to promote it, than to subject it to the possible jeers here. I think everyone would be happier all around. Sorry. :sad:

I think people treat the self-pubs the way they do because the only reason they register is to promote their latest book. I'm sure that if and when a more regular members happens to have published a book and lets us know about it in one of the subfora, they wouldn't receive such a treatment.

The reason the self-promotion area came to be in the first place was to direct the one-time posters who only come here to promote their book(s) to one area of the forum rather than to let them flood the entire place with posts about said book. Unfortunately, all that forum does now is attract more self-pubs which greatly annoys several of our regulars.

Polly Parrot said:

I think people treat the self-pubs the way they do because the only reason they register is to promote their latest book. I'm sure that if and when a more regular members happens to have published a book and lets us know about it in one of the subfora, they wouldn't receive such a treatment.

Click to expand...

Quite. I haven't seen WriterJohnB catch any flak for promoting his books, for instance. The ones who get their heads taken off are typically the ones who join
a) With the express purpose of promoting their vanity-published book
b) Pretending to NOT be the author and expecting us to fall for it
c) Expecting people to simply hand them great wads of cash for an obviously inferior product.

Polly Parrot said:

I think people treat the self-pubs the way they do because the only reason they register is to promote their latest book. I'm sure that if and when a more regular members happens to have published a book and lets us know about it in one of the subfora, they wouldn't receive such a treatment.

The reason the self-promotion area came to be in the first place was to direct the one-time posters who only come here to promote their book(s) to one area of the forum rather than to let them flood the entire place with posts about said book. Unfortunately, all that forum does now is attract more self-pubs which greatly annoys several of our regulars.

Click to expand...

I very much agree.