Want to Buy a Bridge?
Photo by Gabriel Meinert on Unsplash
I don’t remember how long ago the first one appeared in my email. Six months ago, maybe? But it was followed quickly by another … and then another. Until I’m getting at least a dozen every week.
What am I talking about? A flattering email about one of my books.
So, what’s the complaint? That the person sending the email is trying to earn money off of me. She professes to be the head of a company that has access to book clubs (one promised entry to 1,000 book clubs; another to 10,000!), access to reviewers, to all sorts of ways of bringing my book to the attention of “discerning” readers. The readers referred to are always discerning ones, those who will take my very special book to heart.
The professionalism of the presentation varies widely. A couple of them, obviously a scatter-shot effort, referred simply to my “book.” (No way to know which “book” they might be referring to out of the one hundred and nine I have published.) More often, though, the book is named and praised to the skies. (Though sometimes it’s one that happens to be out of print.) Occasionally, the writer quotes a line that impressed them with its lyricism or “made me smile.” They can find some quote to praise even when the book in question is a non-fiction early reader. I’ve published many ready-to-reads, each written with care and respect for my young readers, but I promise there is very little room for lyricism—or even smiles—in an informational text of less than 250 words.
One held up, as an example of what she had to offer, a book for which she had successfully procured FIFTY reviews! And she was proposing these services for a book of mine that already has more than five hundred reviews both on Amazon and on Goodreads.
It took me a while to figure out where this great rush of offers was coming from, but I finally understood. AI! Of course! Not one of these people has read the book they are praising. They have simply used artificial intelligence to analyze its contents and, no doubt, used AI to manufacture their flattery, too.
These emails are little more than a mild annoyance for me. I can delete them as fast as they appear and move on. (How much time we all spend these days, deleting emails!) And I can delete the follow-up—"Why haven’t you taken advantage of this amazing offer?”—quickly, too. But they do irritate. Enough that, occasionally, I’m tempted to respond. But what is the point of explaining my irritation to one person when another will be knocking on my door a few moments later?
So, though these new “marketers” probably don’t read writers’ blogs—or much of anything else we produce—I’m letting my steam off here. And this is what I’d like to say:
A survey by The Authors’ Guild established that, if you break down a book by the hours it took to create, most full-time writers earn less than minimum wage from that book’s royalties. That means a median income of $10,000 a year. And these hordes are attempting to earn their own livings on the backs of such people?
Yes, of course, we can all say “No!” But I worry about the vulnerability of new writers, those with their first book or books out and their souls imprinted on those pages. I’m concerned about the many self-published writers with little experience of the field, about the struggling writers seeking some easy answer to standing out in a market where truly good books go to die every day. I care about the tender hearts of all those who love gathering words and sorting them onto a page and have had the good fortune of being published but haven’t yet caught the world’s attention.
And I want, fiercely, for these new “marketers” to leave those coming behind me alone. To stop playing off dreams with promises that will, almost inevitably, cost much and deliver little.
Surely, they can find someone out there who wants to buy a bridge instead.
Perhaps even one with actual money to spare.
