A new definition of Spam

[reviews_and_ramblings]

Sending an email to 20 authors (ONLY 20) to alert them they are in my Top 10 Book List for the month of April is spam... good to know, and good to know who I have to remove from my contact list.

And no, don't try to go and see all the authors in that post to imagine who she was, since I have not only promptly removed her from the list, I have also removed her from my flist, and if in the future she will try to contact me, I will be sure to remember that name.

Now I don't pretend to be thanked for every post I do, but to reply to a kindness with a slap in the face, it was not really the best of replies. And btw her books are not even that good (maybe that is the reason why I read only 1?)

ETA: the kind author of above replied to me "I don't pay attention to that stuff. The only ones I read are the real review sites my publishers send to. If I read every "review" from anyone who has a blog with an opinion I'd spend days just doing that...".

Ok, maybe I'm not a real review site, but kind author YOUR TWO PUBLISHERS send me your books to review, not the viceversa, even if now I will know for whom I have not to waste my time. And yes, my ego is pretty big, never denied that, so maybe kind author, you should remember than not so far long ago, on a symposium on marketing ebooks (and not M/M ebooks, ebooks in general) someone said "Elisa is the world’s foremost eBook reviewer. Get a good eBook review from her and you are golden." But problably she doesn't need that kind of advertisement.

Comments

[mistry89.livejournal.com]

Golly, it has been a busy week with breakouts of Author-Madness on review fronts ... what's next, I wonder?
Yours was the first place I found reviews of the books I want to read (and related stuff *g*) and although I now have others bookmarked, yours is still the first one I see. Not only that, with the tags you have, it is easy to navigate when I want to go and check out previous titles by a new-to-me author - you always list the series order and related stories.
Reviews are tricky things to write, I think - readers (and writers!) all have different ideas of what they want to see in reviews. I like to be able to see the blurb, the cover and to get a sense of the feeling of the story and characters - not a synopsis (including spoilers) .. and you deliver that every time. We always know the things you liked and didn't like, without regurgitating the entire tale. Most m/m review sites do this (actually, I'm really impressed with most places I find reviews of m/m - far more than I was when I read het romance) and I wish I found the same thing in SF/SFF and Murder-Mystery sites (funnily enough, many rec's and reviews I read these days in those genres are from m/m reader/reviewers, so all is not lost!).

Someone commented that spam is usually selling products or offering great scams, but I suspect that as in the garden - where a weed is a plant in the wrong place - spam has become any message the recipient doesn't want. Fortunately for Inboxes everywhere, the delete button deals with anything one doesn't want to read. I belong to far too many groups and struggle to winnow it down to the stuff I want to read now, the stuff I will want to read later and the stuff I can safely delete.

I think the author made a big mistake - not because you are a reviewer, but because you are a real person, so her response was impolite at best - and if she had deleted your messages, you would have been none the wiser.

Sorry, I've gone on too long!
Cheers :)

[elisa-rolle.livejournal.com]

No, I thank you for your comment. It's true, she could have deleted the message, but in that way she would have probably risked to receive other messages from me in the future. If she was rude in her first reply and stopped there, all right, but she replied a second time telling me she didn't know who I was, when I kindly pointed her to my review of her book (positive) she added venom telling me she only read "real review site her publisher send to"... and so on. that is what I didn't like, you are right, she was speaking to a real person (if not a real reviewer) and she could have been at least polite.