LibraryThing abuse halted

[julesjones]

As I grumbled about yesterday, this week a couple of idiotic authors decided that the LibraryThing friending system was the perfect opportunity to connect with interesting people, as one of them described his behaviour. Or spam themselves and their books to thousands of LibraryThing users, as some of us on the receiving end saw it.

Various people complained about it both by email and in a thread on a LibraryThing talk forum. The result is that Tim has put limits on comments-per-day that will discourage this sort of thing, and give the staff an early warning in any future incidents:
http://www.librarything.com/talktopic.php?topic=24257

The moral of this story for other writers is that spamming is a bad idea. You could annoy more people into deciding that they'll never buy a book with your name on it than you gain extra sales. As ever when you're contemplating some course of action as a writer, put your reader hat on, and consider how you'd feel as a reader if a writer did this to you. And if you're trying to pimp your work -- how would you feel if all of the thousands of authors out there decided that you should be told about their work in the same way that you're proposing to tell other people about yours?

Comments

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

Yay! for librarything!

Yes, the problem with the internet as advertising medium is that it worked, sort of, for early adopters, but if everybody will advertise their new book in twenty blogs etc, we can shut down the blogosphere.

Already people are shying away from e-mail because there's too much spam and not enough content. It would be a shame it it happened to networks like LibraryThing.

[julesjones]

Going by his comment in the link above, Tim was not at all happy about this development after a couple of years of LT users generally being sane, sensible people who obeyed the Golden Rule. I think if the problem continues, he'll stamp on it. This is a Good Thing. :-)