Another New Promo Site! What's Going On?

 

Lately, new book promo sites seem to be popping up with regularity. It's troubling ~ not to me personally, because I've given up on marketing ~ but will unsuspecting authors get roped in and waste their ad budget? 

While I've not had success with marketing, I have dissected the various promo sites, and a few, even established ones, raise some red flags. That's not to say these sites are scams; on the contrary, but authors have to do their research to determine if a site is right for them. Important factors to consider include subscriber base and a site's most in-demand genres. If you're an author of, for example, literary fiction, you want to advertise on a site with a huge subscriber base, because let's face it, there's not a big call for literary fiction. (No offense intended. There's not a big call for my genre, either.) If a site has only 20,000 subscribers, your literary fiction book will never sell.

The popularity of a particular genre is important, again, because an author doesn't want to throw away money. Most links to promo sites take you directly to the author signup page, but what you need to do is view the site as a reader. What are the most popular books? What are the most popular searches? Not all sites provide that option, but some do. I made the mistake of signing up with BookSprout without doing my due diligence, only to learn later that the most in-demand genre on the site, by far, is romance (in all its incarnations).  

But here's my real concern: new fly-by-night operations that seem eerily similar to one another and have zero track record, yet are featuring a wide selection of books.

Red flags an author should heed:

1. When the site contacts you. That's not how it works; that's not how any of this works. Cold calling? Really? 

2. No reviews of the site to be found by Googling. Every site has reviews; come on. What that tells me is, this place is so brand new that it doesn't even have a track record.

3. The website verbiage contains odd word choices/lack of English proficiency.

Here is an example: I was contacted via email (red flag #1) by a place called Bookbeetel (odd spelling of "beetle"; could be deliberate, but I'm skeptical). The only instance of the site popping up on Google is the site itself; no references to it by anyone, particularly Reddit users, who talk about everything (red flag #2).

In perusing the site, one can't help but notice the off-kilter language. "Free and Sale Book", "Discover Book", "Discover great ebook deals on Bookbeetel, as you like to read" (red flag #3). Google tells me that "Eastern Asian languages can find English plurals challenging." 

Also notable is that there is no "About" section.

The one thing I'm still confused about with regard to this site and to the one I referenced before (BookPinks) is how it manages to get author participation. It could be as innocent as unsuspecting authors falling for the email solicitation. Yet, these sites are obviously new and at least with Bookbeetel, every book has the accompanying message, "Marry (sic) Christmas and Happy New Year!!! From Bookbeetel". Of course, considering the site's foreign origins, maybe the webmaster doesn't know when Christmas or New Year's is. But that's a minor point; I have no reason to suspect anything untoward. I do, however, have plenty of reasons to suspect that an author would be throwing money down the drain by buying an ad from a site with this many red flags.

That's what I'm here for ~ to expose places that prey on self-published authors. I've got no issues with reputable sites that don't happen to work for me; my books are a hard sell. But obvious scammers need to leave us alone.