Goodreads, LinkedIn, and all that…
Tuesday, April 10th, 2018[This article is the second in a series about social media use by authors. Feel free to comment.]
Let’s see: I’ve disparaged Twitter—it’s mostly useless, for authors directly participating at least (your publicist might use it, though); and I’ve given my advice to use Facebook in a limited sense (you could limit it to just an author page—if they start charging, forget about it). What’s left?
Goodreads. This massive website for discussing books and reading used to be a lot better, but it’s gone downhill since Amazon took it over. It’s never been user friendly and allows cliques to develop without any adult supervision. Anyone can form a group, and some of them are huge. Groups are run by a monitor (maybe more than one for large ones), and submonitors often control subsections of groups. Rarely you’ll come across monitors or submonitors who are snarky individuals, little despots who like to flaunt their power.
Authors should promote their books in the sections allocated to them, of course, but the definition of promotion is often distorted by monitors. I was censored in one chat thread about sex and romance in books just for mentioning my opinion as both reader and author—no mention of my books, so not really promotional at all.
Groups can be political too. I was kicked out of a discussion group for expressing an opinion contrary to the monitor’s (I can’t even remember what the thread was about, or what pissed him off—a mountain out of a molehill, to be sure, but the little tyrant booted me out without any explanation). You never know when someone will get their hackles up and go after you. Back away from such people. They’re not worth your time.