Coffee heat rising

Goodreads: The Last Social-Media Straw

Dear GOD how I hate these accursed faceless social media platforms, with their horrid “help” pages that run you around and around and around circles and don’t answer your question and seem to have been designed solely to frustrate users.

It’s been a while since I visited Goodreads. I need to get back into my author page, update my booklist, and start a blog. But GR has decided I’m “not a member,” even though it seems to recognize  me, sort of.

It wanted a password. I entered the pw I have in my records. It rejected that password. I clicked “forgot password.” It emailed a link to reset the password. I jumped through that hoop. When I tried to get in, it ran me RIGHT BACK TO THE SAME HOOP JUMP!

It asks me to enter a password, flicks me the electronic finger, and then tells me to enter my email and if it approves it will send me a link. I jump through that hoop again…with the same result.

GoodreadsAnnoyance

Your choice is to “confirm” with a password or, astonishingly, to “confirm with Facebook.”

FACEBOOK? Why on earth would I want Facebook to have my Goodreads credentials or to “confirm” that I’m me or even to know that I’m on Goodreads?

It apparently is a choice (of sorts): either enter a password or “confirm” (whatever that means) with Facebook.

Over the past months, I’ve put off going back to Goodreads, even though it’s supposedly a key marketing tool, because I got so mad the first time I signed in there that my password is a near-obscenity. Because three of my books — published through real publishers, not through Amazon — came out under variants of my full name, they won’t let me post the Racy Books at my Goodreads site, because they’re published under the “Roberta Stuart” pseudonym. None of my bylines are pseudonyms.

My parents gave me a clunky, old-fashioned, ugly first name that made me the target of bullying throughout grade school. When we came back to the states, I started using a nickname based on my middle name. As a journalist, this was my standard byline, and The Essential Feature, a journalism textbook, naturally was published under that byline. But I had used my full formal name for my first book: a historical biography that grew out of my Ph.D. dissertation.

The first business partner I had, back in the day, was a marketing & PR guy of some skill. He felt I should go by the full, more formal-sounding middle name, which is also stuffy and stilted but at least most people can pronounce and spell it. So my third book had that name, and I still use it for business.

Amazon and its purchased underling Goodreads have decreed that a legal name consisting of three fungible parts — a first name, a middle name, and a last name — is actually three pseudonyms! No argument to the contrary is brooked.

That means, of course, that I can’t use Goodreads to market the steady stream of books we planned to emit — and have emitted — through Camptown Races Press! Goodreads had already glommed what it announced were “pseudonyms” from the books Columbia, Folger, and William Morrow had posted on Amazon years ago and so would not allow me to add a real pseudonym.

When I protested this, a CSR came back with an elaborate workaround. It was so complicated and promised to be such a vast time-suck that I was put off and let the whole project drop. Then I ended up in the operating room.

The medical nightmare was such a distraction that it was all I could do to try to meet our original goal of publishing 80 to 100 books within the year. Anything that was aversive — or that had an aversive element — got tabled. And the most solidly tabled of those was Goodreads, primarily because the first experience with it started off in full aversive mode.

Much as I dislike toilet-paper-style social media platforms, I did take up Twitter to a lesser extent Facebook. Facebook is inhabited by my coreligionists, whom I would rather not proselytize with Racy Books. So Twitter was pretty much it.

And the result was not very successful, probably because I don’t understand the point of social media and so don’t understand how to address them.

Magazines, books: I know why people read them, and I know how to reach magazine and book readers. Blogs are to a  large degree similar: you can see a reason that a person might want to read a given blog. A blog is magazine-like in that it has an editorial voice, it usually has a specific topic or slant, and it has a relatively consistent publication schedule.

But an endless, gestalt flow of nonstop babble about…what? Trivia? Cat pictures? Kid photos? The latest house you sold? That plate of food you bought at Alice’s Restaurant? Why? What is the appeal?????

Social media of the Facebook/Twaddle/Google+/Goodreads variety seem to me more like small talk than like journalism. And I’m really not good at small talk.  Because it bores me, I lack the patience to engage it for very long or to come back for repeat engagements. It’s part of the Aspergery character of my personality: I don’t connect with people in that way.

And…I don’t want to be “connected.” Not that I don’t like people. Most of them, I do. It’s just that I don’t want to be all over them, and I don’t want them all over me. 😉

So. I don’t know if I’ll ever get on Goodreads. And quite possibly don’t care.

***

Meanwhile, print copies of the cookbook have been flying out the door! It’s sold a few electronic copies on Amazon (why anyone would want an electronic device on a kitchen counter while water, olive oil, butter, and flour are floating around escapes me, what what the hey?). But I can barely keep up with the requests for hard copies.

Interesting.

So I’m thinking my real social medium may be Toastmasters. This would give me an opportunity to talk about writing and thence segue into mentioning my books. I’m pretty good at public speaking, after 20 years of teaching in a college classroom. But people I’ve met who’ve been to Toastmasters are really good at it. One woman who gave our writing group a presentation on public speaking was so skilled as to be downright gifted. She came across exactly like one of those people who give TED talks.

Maybe what I need is not to be parked in front of a computer poking useless messages into “social” media but out on the road, talking to live people face to face.

Another Fine Day in Social Media Marketing

So I set up a Goodreads Authors page today. Now as activities go, THAT one defines frustration.

Yea, verily, it would suffice to define any number of English words:

aggravation
confusion
mess
crazy-making
incomprehensible
pointlessness
arrogance
annoyance
time-suck

Well, I’m hoping that Twitter and Facebook (where I should have been setting up a new page instead) will generate buyers. I kind of doubt it, but…damn, this stuff is frustrating.

It sucked up my entire afternoon, and I didn’t get anything else done. And since I very much doubt that a Goodreads Authors page that no one reads is going to go far by way of marketing, as far as I’m concerned I didn’t get anything done, period.

LOL! What I did just now — try to create one of their Goodreads widgets — is a case in point, and typical of what happened every. step. along. the. way. It asks you to enter the ISBN of your book. In response, I copied and pasted the ISBN that I copied into my spreadsheet direct from Bowker. Click enter. And what excuse do I get for the FAIL?

“Enter a valid isbn to see a example and widget code.”

Folks, it can’t get much more valid than electronically copying and pasting it from the electronic horse’s mouth.

Should’ve used my afternoon to build a new Twitter page for Fire-Rider. What a waste of energy.

Think I’ll do a) a Twitter page for Fire-Rider and then b) a Facebook page for P&S press, which can then comprise the porn, I suppose, after all the FR bookoids are online. So that will produce three sites:

Twitter for Camptown Races (Racy Books for Racy Readers)
Twitter for Fire-Rider (not a racy book, by any means)
Facebook for both FR and the racy books.

So once again, another day went by in which I did exactly NO writing. That would be OK (marginally) if my time had been spent productively. But when the whole goddamn day is wasted…jeez.

Interestingly, most of the Internet chatter about GoodReads is overwhelmingly positive. One suspects the Power That Is Amazon behind the page after page of cheery burbling that comes up in a Google search for user reviews of the platform, but maybe it really is the be-all and end-all of indie author marketing. We have this interesting post questioning the Received Wisdom about Amazon give-aways, though it seems to be of most concern for people who have to ship off hard copies to customers who “win” one of these give-away contests. It’s as verbose and complex as the Goodreads Author site itself. Possibly those characteristics are contagious. Overall, though, the gist seems to be do it but tweak it. But then, deep in the comments section, the blogger responds to a reader with this: “You can’t give away e-books on Goodreads, so you must produce something in print to run a giveaway.”

This was the case in 2014. Whether it’s still so, I don’t know. When I looked at the form for the giveaway, NARY A WORD to that effect appeared. However, given the program’s consistently cryptic nature, I wouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised but what she’s dead right.

Not a problem for any of mine, because I used a template that converts nicely to PoD page layout, and I have a PoD printer who does an excellent, quick job. If I were forced to do a giveaway through Amazon, then I easily could have two or three copies printed and shipped directly from the printer…assuming I could get Amazon to send me the winners’ names and addresses. A big assumption, I’ll bet.

We have this grutch, about some issue SO arcane that I can’t even follow what the guy’s talking about. A commenter here remarks, in March 2015, that Amazon/GoodReads (six of one, half-a-dozen of the ‘tother) was “considering” including e-books in the give-away scheme. Possibly by September 2, that has come to pass.

Apparently by late 2013, trolling and harassment had become so extreme at GoodReads the situation was becoming disruptive and truly nasty. Unclear whether this situation has been resolved. By September 2013 Amazon had taken steps to deal with it — possibly in a Draconian manner — but evidently the bullying was ongoing at the start of 2014,. In April 2015 people were still bellyaching about trolling at the site, though in June a more temperate observer that Amazon/Goodreads is earnestly trying to get a grip on the problem.

Doesn’t bode well, IMHO.