This is a well-reasoned but rather flippant rant I originally posted on another blog. Then decided that since it was rather flippant, I’d move it over here instead. I work in a library, and while we are entitled to hold personal opinions, I don’t want to be pointedly rude to the rare patron who might stumble upon that library blog. I edited to reflect frustration at junk email and concluded with a few helpful suggestions.
My own customer service attitude needed some tweaking, and I have done so. That isn’t to say I want to discard the opinion, I just want to park it in a more appropriate place. This is what I originally wrote:
We all know that the canned meat product has suffered greatly in recent years, as its name has been applied to the e-machined offal that is pushed out sausage-style (ugly to look at) to our mailboxes in such volume that Spamhaus estimates that 90 % of all email in North America is junk or unsolicited bulk email. Pity Bill Gates, who receives an estimated 4 million spam emails a year.1
Here in the library, we get our share of spam, and alas, much of it is from people promoting books. We have a spam filter in our email and if one of us assigns a piece as spam, everyone else sees that it is already on that list. And most of the spammers we assign to that list are hacks out peddling their books.
Can you imagine how depressing it is for someone who works in a LIBRARY to assign book-promoters and writers to the spam list?
On the other hand, one hopes that successful writers are thoughtful and creative people, so perhaps this is the Darwinian demise of the unfit of the writing world. Spamming all of the addresses in the library administration office, or everyone in the library, with an email promoting your books smacks of desperation and of a lack of critical marketing (if not thinking) skills. These people haven’t stopped to consider WHO buys books in a library (very few people, actually, though we can all recommend purchases) and writes to the acquisition folks alone. And those of us who do recommend books aren’t likely to send an over-the-transom suggestion to the book buyers in our midst.
So do yourself a favor. Find out if you can send your book to the various library journals that review books (some want them pre-publication only, that’s why I say, check first). Librarians read those. Send them to your local newspapers after contacting their book editor to see if someone will be assigned to review it. Ask friends who write book reviews if they can write a good review of your book that they can blog or send to a journal they write for.
I would suggest that if this kind of review is generated, you find another day job. Though I didn’t intend this little rant to be about David Brooks’ new work of fiction, it’s a good point to end on. Reviewer PZ Myers got through the 2-dimensional “satirical novel” by yelling “Die, yuppie scum, die!” as he reached the end of each page. He gives a withering account of a poorly conceived and written “arid wasteland” of a novel by an otherwise respectable political commentator. The animated review had more life than the subject it described, rather like a well-written obituary.
If, in his desperation to sell this book David Brooks should send me a junk email suggesting I put it in my library, I will assign him to the junk email list.
1 From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_spam
