I’m repeating this here in case you’re missing me. You are?? Awww. In which case, you can now find me (along with a few tasty heroes who’ve been hogging my blog lately) over at SHERYL’S WEBSITE I’d LOVE to see a few of you over there – and maybe following, if you fancy it.
Here we go, my reasons for moving home:
After seeing this http://wordpress.com/types-of-blogs/ in regard to their ‘violation of advertising policy’ which lists book tours as possibly one of those violations (I’m quoting below. Hope I don’t get done for scraping!),
“Book tour blogs: Blogs that consist of scraped, pre-written content, as opposed to original book reviews, for the purpose of promoting books and driving traffic to other promotional and giveaway sites.”
I decided to switch my website. I understand that internet bloggers strive for originality, and I can see how a book tour that posts only covers, synopsis and buy links, including a giveaway, could be seen as repeated advertising or spam. Personally, I would include some original content of my own, thus, hopefully, avoiding this. However, it seems whichever way authors turn, they seem to run into trouble. The big problem, I think, is that often we simply don’t have the time or the energy left over after many, many hours at the keyboard to be able to assimilate all the jargon that comes at us. We start out writers and for many the etiquette of social media sharing is a steep learning curve. We learn. We try to stay within protocol guidelines. I don’t think there are many authors who would want to flout the ‘rules’. However, we do have to sell our books. To do this, we do have to showcase our books, the covers – which often attract the reader in the first instance, a synopsis, sometimes along with an excerpt/interview or – that prized of all things – a review. Sadly, it’s just not physically possible to write original content to include in all posts. To do this would mean that writing time, as in book-writing time, would slip further off the daily agenda and eventually we would have nothing to sell. And not all book-bloggers are able to make time to review books in time for their publication dates. I would just like to say a huge thank you here to all of those book-bloggers, who work tremendously hard supporting authors. I hope we can find a way forward, perhaps, as mentioned above, by including a personal touch to the posts. For my part, I’m happy to continue to showcase covers along with synopses and excerpts, perhaps with a little pearl of wisdom from yours truly alongside it. As for Internet etiquette, I have my social media expert on it.
Meanwhile, stay safe everyone. Happy blogging! Lots of love,
