I get them at the rate of one or two a month. Some are semi-polished, one-size-fits-none form letters, others seem to be a little more personal. Some are mass e-mailed, some aren't.
They all start out offering me some wonderful opportunity:
"Link to the site that does X" (in which "X" is usually something you can get Bing or Google or Wolfram|Alpha to do if you tickle them correctly. So why bother?).
"Get a free review copy of my book!" (No. Tell me where I can buy it and if the price is within my budget, I will review it; I think getting a freebie instead of paying for it affects my ability to give a fair review. I've done so once and I lucked out, it was a good book, but I'm not chancing it again. If you shy away from that, then maybe you need to sit down and do some editing.)
"Slip in links to our
cheap crap valued advertisers and we'll toss you a nickel." (Oh,
hells no. If ever I get that desperate, I'll cut out the middleman and go yell at cars -- it pays better and at least you're not screwing your
friends.)
"Let me write for your blog and slip in links to
cheap crap valued advertisers." (The best was the one who wanted to do that for
I Work On A Starship; I keep meaning to write back and ask about how strong her grasp is of calculus, astronomy,
Alcubierre's FTL metric and
Heim-Dröscher theory, not to mention who
Gobau was, what the Glocke supposedly did, and the real reason Byrd went back to the South Pole so soon after WW II, but I suppose it would be wasted. A pity; I really should do a Writer's Guide for the Hidden Frontier one of these days, though I fear my maths aren't up to it.)
Gosh, I miss Burma-Shave signs and ciggie ads jammed in the middle of paperback books; this new way of advertising is like havin' snakes wanting to get all snuggly.
I had plans for a future history that I started writing over 30 years ago. Alas, I found that writing all the background stuff (the writer's guide) was more fun than actually, y'know, writing the stories...
ReplyDeleteI'm convinced that, had I been born 30 or 40 years later, I'd have been considered to have Asperger's Syndrome...
You getting the one pimping his gun selection tool?
ReplyDeleteGobau? I'm still trying to make sense of a Windom! But it's a great story. 73
ReplyDelete::cough, cough::
ReplyDeleteIf that one time is the book I'm thinking of, it was supposed to be a swap.
That said, if an author wants to send me a sample copy of a book, I'll take it because I'm a book hoarder, but there's no telling when I'll get to reading it. The book review might not come out for a decade.