Jules Jones

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?