Someone’s always trying to sell you something, aren’t they? Even me. In addition to my books, I’ve got affiliate marketing links all over my blogs. It’s subtle, but there it is. A sales job.
At least I’m open about it. I always try to be. I don’t like when people try to game me and aren’t upfront about it. Since I live by the “treat others as you would like to be treated” rule, my blogs have visible disclaimers that many of the products or services I share are from my affiliate marketing companies.
However, I also only put up links for products or services that I either have bought/used or would. I’m very upfront about that too.
The other day I attended a webinar that sounded really good. That should’ve been my first clue. If it sounds too good to be true…
But it was being co-hosted by an author I trust and have known for years. Because I’m disappointed by this person, but not wanting to bad-mouth or smear their name, I’ll give this author the pseudonym of W. (I’m mad now, but I know forgiveness will eventually come and I don’t want to compromise the relationship.)
I’ll also give Author 2 a pseudonym, because their affiliation with my author friend could easily be an identity-revealer. We’ll call this new person S. (For Shyster.)
As the webinar progressed, I heard S (who I’d never heard of before) touting some techniques (mainly giving away free books) that W regularly and vehemently lobbies against.
Yet, W was endorsing S’s techniques. What gives?
Then came the sales job. S had a whole program to sell for hundreds of dollars. W was all for people buying it.
Why? I’m sure it wasn’t out of genuine concern for our writing well-being. I’m sure it was because W was being compensated.
Yet, I could find no evidence of this. There was not one revelation from W, except that S was identified as W’s “sponsor” for a product line she sells herself.
But knowing what a savvy business person she is, I know she was being compensated.
I was extremely saddened she didn’t disclose it though. I was also sad to see her being a hypocrite about an issue she’s passionate about. Which is books being priced right, not giving them away, and writers getting paid for their work.
In fact only two weeks before W had raised a big stink about how wrong she thought even 99 cents-priced books were and she was not interested in being lured in by bargain prices. give her a good book to read and win her with good writing. Yet author S was saying price low, sell more, even give away to get reviews and sucker more people in to his concept.
Frustrating. Disappointing. Disheartening.
But not discouraging. I did get a couple ideas from it all, so in the end I learned that W is not as pious and righteous as I first assumed (emphasis on the first three letters of “assumed”), and we’ll see if I can put a couple of the free takeaways to any productive use.