Some people can really bring you down!

All the thousands of hours of work I put into DROP OUT and it's off to the
formatter and done forever. Yeah! So, I've decided to devote myself to marketing
this week because I have the time and I was going to give AFTER one more blast
before I started rewriting INSECTLAND and marketing and promoting DROP OUT.
Okay, all is well and good. I've done my usual postings on Kindle forums and my
various writers sites that I belong to. But the other day I discovered something
unique and promising. My friends on the website Goodreads. Since I've been a
member I've slowly friended people who first friended me. And before you know
it, I've got almost 100 friends. Yeah, again! Now about three weeks ago I
decided to use my Goodreads friends and promote AFTER. Nothing too harsh, just a
little blurb and a link, only once, no spam. Well, that resulted in a pretty big
jump in sales. Yeah, a third time! So the other day I started exploring
Goodreads and discovered a way to announce that I was looking for friends to a
large (several hundred) group of like-minded writers and readers. Within an hour
I had more than 100 friend acceptances. I started replying personally, like I do
on Twitter, to all my request. As usual, it's a small intro with a link to my
site on Author's Den. All was going great. I had many replies to my thank you,
and people were checking out my site and commenting to me how much they like it.
Until this one note I just read. This person who I don't even know totally wrote
me a page long rag-session about how authors shouldn't promote like this and how
I was wasting everyone's time by placing a link to my site.
Well, first of
all, this woman probably has no life if she took that much effort in replying.
And she even friended me so she could do it. Second, I checked her profile, she
is a reader and not a writer. Hey honey, put yourself in the writers shoes.
We're all struggling here to keep literature alive. How else are we going to
expose people to our work. We're not forcing anyone to do anything. And lastly,
before I end this rant. Why does this one negative comment bother me so much? I
guess, it's because readers like this woman are going to keep anything that is
new and experimental from reaching people who may be interested in reading it.
Thank you.