Annoying People for a Living

If only I had actual social media followers.

The good news is, I'm gaining Instagram followers at a steady pace. The bad news is, as far as I can tell, they all want to sell me something. I think the more I post, the more I attract them. Can people actually make a living by annoying people? I seriously need to rethink my career choices.

I don't know if there's an etiquette involved with these reachouts, or if shunning them is the preferred course, but I've gone with shunning. I cringe at being rude to people, but they're invading my space, after all, uninvited; and how do I know they're even real people? I might be worried about offending an AI bot, for God's sake. 

It's also insidious. Some people come across as normal authors who want to connect (although I don't get the why of that), and if I look at their profiles, they are clearly what they claim to be; but I've been down that road before. I'm having a perfectly nice conversation with a fellow author, and boom! They begin their spiel about whether I've ever considered hiring a publicist. Frankly, those types of exchanges are the worst. You feel like a chump. And any author who engages in this kind of subterfuge deserves to have their writing career crash and burn (which it probably already has).

An evolution I've noticed is that the spammers have also become more insistent; almost insulted that I haven't responded to them. "Hello?" a lot of their followups say. I should probably respond, "Hello!", but of course I don't want to respond at all. So I spend a lot of time deleting these one-sided conversations from my DM list. (One spammer offered to promote my music, which was a different approach, since I'm pushing books. I guess he/she/it was confused because the novel is about music.)

From what I can gather, the predominant spamming occupation is social media promoter. You know; they'll send out two tweets for $20.00 and on and on, increasing in frequency the more an author is willing to spend. That has got to be the ultimate in being a lazy F. "Well, I'm on social media all day anyway; I might as well make some money from it." Guess what, kids? I can tweet about my own book for free!

The other "occupation" is paid reviewer. The weirdest thing about that is these people's DM's are riddled with spelling errors. Are they even able to read? And would they read my book even if I paid for a review? Or would they simply steal from the blurb? (as they are wont to do.) Anyway, I'm not paying for reviews. Go away.

My initial thought, which has been confirmed by Written Word Media's reader survey, is that regular readers don't want to engage with authors, so I'd be thoroughly shocked to find a DM from a normal person. And I don't need that. I do need buyers, so I'll keep promoting, even if I'm now the one who's annoying. But hiding my posts is easy, and I'll even never know you did it. 

It would be interesting to know if my social media promotion has produced any sales. I doubt it, but it's not impossible. So I'll keep doing it until it becomes a bother. At least the spam bots are mostly nice.