Just bringing up an interesting developing trend among indie authors. Something I couldn’t help but Spidey Sense as I go about Wordpreneur Peeps business and try to contact authors to harass and shakedown for indie publishing stories, tips and secrets.
What I see: a growing number that provides no means of email contact, relying instead on social media. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.
I played along. For a short while. Then it hit me: Why? That’s like four or five more places for me to go through the trouble of checking daily to see if anyone responded to my query there. More work for me, in other words.
Screw that.
An author doesn’t give me an email contact option, I’ll just go to the next author on my TO DO list. See how that works? Which is likely the same way it’ll work if I were a reporter for the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, or any of the others that can generate sales of your book well into the thousands — and practically instantly — with just one little mention.
This “no email” stance gets even sillier when all it takes is one free little Gmail account to use and give out just for this purpose. If you can’t be bothered to check that account, you can even set it up to automatically forward all email it receives to another email address you give it, like to your real one that you can still keep secret.
If you have your own website or blog, you don’t even have to go that Gmail route. Just set up one of those contact forms on-site; those I don’t mind using, since I’ll be visiting your site anyway to try and find contact info. (Note: If you do do it this way, make sure you use form tech that masks your true email address, not just hides it from view but have it in the code intact; spambots actually scour a webpage’s underlying code to scrape up email addresses, not what appears on the screen — ask your service provider about how to set this up properly if you have no idea what I’m talking about.)
Bottom line: No email contact = Lost PR opps = Lost sales.
Your call.
Article by Eldon Sarte
