Read-marketing woes

Something happened recently that pointed out to me the problems of read-marketing, which has gotten to be kind of a burden on me lately. In general, it's a problem because I love reading and do it at the expense of writing, meaning I haven't produced enough lately, or done some of the other work I need to do. But it has some other issues as illustrated by this story.

One of the sites is read-only (actually a couple of them focus on that) but has a very careful admin, who makes sure people understand the rules and follow them. In general this admin is good but sometimes I wonder if she shouldn't just let a few things go. Recently I've been focusing on this page - reloading and reloading it, hoping that someone will post on the over-100 and under-100 trains. To put it quite simply, the number of books that I haven't read has gone down considerably, as I've been working these sites hard for months. And I've been relatively successful too, both because I like to read, and because I have 27 books that all need a little attention, and any time anyone reads any one of them it's a huge victory for me.

But to get into the train I have to find a book I haven't read, and that's pretty difficult sometimes. To compound it, other people who are like me, similarly desperate, have read many of the same books - we've read all of each other's - and they are prowling at the site the same way I am. I can tell because when a new book comes it doesn't take more than a few minutes for someone to pounce on it. They are just like me! Waiting for a book that can put them into the train.

With the under-100 train, the situation is good, because I can read an under-100 book in a quick evening and get an entire book of mine read - for that I concentrate on the short ones, under-100, but I have several of those so I feel like I'm not putting my audience in the same jam as I would if I kept putting the same book up there. In other words, I can stay successful as long as I can keep finding people who haven't read one of my books.

So this person comes along and puts an 80-pager in the over-100 list. Wrong list, but I figured, if she wanted to read a longer one, and found one she wanted to read, more power to her. Quick I put mine in there and started reading hers. Mine is 120-something, so I didn't feel too guilty putting a longer book under a shorter book. Besides, everyone can read the rules, right? If she's in there with her 80-something, I figured, no problem. Quick, someone put theirs under mine and we were off and running.

But the admin emailed me and asked me to either remove mine, or read the one above that one (which of course, I'd already read), because the 80-pager was against the rules and was removed.

Alas, we are at a kind of "stuck" status again, as a book about controlling alcohol consumption is up, and apparently none of our authors want to read it - it has, before, stopped the train for several days at a time. I'm not especially complaining about it. The guy needs readers just like I do and his book is at least as good as mine; he has a right to market it. But our progress and success seem to be bottled up behind the fact that either his topic is not appealing to a crowd of thirty or forty authors, or too many of us have already read it (I have).

In general this is probably a sign that I should move on, and that's what I'm doing, starting very soon. It's hard though; I'm somewhat addicted to it. Addicted to the rush of market success, addicted to actually having readers in any form, and even addicted to reading what's out there, which I find to be a fascinating occupation for a retired guy. So it goes.