Only Put Your Best Work Out There For The Public

I remember being at a conference several years ago and heard authors talking about getting reviews and getting publicity. One author had put out a project that had not done so well. But here is the amazing part of all this. The author knew the writing was not good, but to her, at least her name was out there.

I started thinking about this even more over the weekend. On one of the social media groups I follow, an author is sort of doing the same thing. She is posting, on a regular basis, a line or two of a story. Now, I fully understand people have tried this in the past with things such as Twitter and there are a few success stories, but in this case, it is writing that is not so strong. In fact, it took a couple of other people to ask the author what she was doing? No one understood what she was doing.

While she might think this is a way to increase name recognition (which it is doing), it is not giving readers a positive view of her writing.

The same goes for authors who want to take hard-core stances on things in publishing or on things in the real world. They go on tirades on social media and again, is there name getting out there? Yes! Are they being seen as someone respectable in the industry or showing how this attention is demonstrating their skills as a quality writer? Probably not.

I would also add that we are seeing this with a ton of authors who are using self-publishing platforms to "fill in the gaps" between their writing with other publishers. Again, while this might seem like a great idea, if these authors are dumping less than quality work out there, it is going to reflect on their sales of all of their books.

I remember an editor commenting on this once before and she openly stated she did not like the idea of people self-publishing while they were being traditionally published. She recognized that when those authors put bad writing out there, readers would connect it to the work they had put in on the traditionally published book.

Look, social media is good. Publicity is great! Name recognition does sell books! But it has to be good publicity!