Amazon, iBooks and Kobo aren't the only outfits who recognized the gargantuan degree of pent-up demand in book authorship; there are packs of hungry services circling us every week, every day, all hoping to make a meal of writers on a regular basis.

Now, I have no issue whatever with folks honestly offering services we're actually looking for. Artists offering cover art generation to those who are consciously looking to hire that task out, or editors who offer a pair of eyes to writers who know in advance that they lack the patience to find all their own errors in grammar or style...these people are honestly offering their skills to those who come to them purposefully looking for such tasks to be done.

But there are other types. I get emails frequently from someone who claims to be able to promote books. This outfit...in fact I suspect it's really just one guy sending emails under two or three different names...implies he's gone "social," that he's got his finger on the social media pulse. He claims a distribution list that tops out above a million emails. Actually he doesn't exactly claim that; he says you can "reach" some huge number of readers through him, and how his math works on that is anyone's guess. Is he assuming that each will tell two and then each of them will tell two...and that every email address represents a household of three readers on average? If so, his distribution list isn't even 40,000 long...which is small, and more believable, considering the relatively recent timeframe he came onto the scene. The point is we don't know...and there's no accountability to his fan-out claims...we don't even know whether most of the emails he actually does have would reach people who purchase books. How many of them bounce? How many are other authors who want to sell instead of buy? A lot I think. How many speak no English? How many are welding supply companies? How many are deceased?

But after a year or two of getting and deleting his emails (which I think means a year or two after he started to cobble his distribution list together), I decided to find out what kinds of promo services he offered. I sent him an email saying I might be interested in an economical email blast, to see if it might generate a bit of a pre-Christmas sales boost, and asked whether he had a pricing structure that let me pay him a percentage of royalty instead of a lump sum. (It seemed better to me that services like what he claimed to offer would guarantee themselves in that way.)

But he said he didn't do that. Instead he asked me (in his very first reply) to point him to some of my full-length novels, so I sent him two Amazon links. He then responded almost immediately to say that only one of them was worth marketing, and that that one book needed a complete re-write of the description AND a complete re-design of the cover art...both of which services he coincidentally charged for. He asked whether I was "open to that." Again, this was his nearly-instant response to my inquiry about a promo email blast.

I pointed out to him that the novel he claimed had no worthwhile market had sold many thousands of copies across 26 countries to date, all without translation and all just by individual word-of-mouth reader-to-reader promotion. I pointed out that it's a story for which an accomplished Hollywood producer is right now awaiting my screenplay version, with a promise that we'll launch a movie project the moment we're ready to go. And the other novel, the one he claimed needed a complete re-do of the meta-data and artwork, topped the charts in its genre for a time and has earned cover-art praise from intrigued readers since the day it was published.

I told him that both of these novels have hard copy versions, making any art re-do a very large project indeed, and ridiculous unless necessary; in fact it would be ridiculous to attempt major changes of any kind before even trying a simple promotional email blast--which was all I'd inquired about to begin with. I reminded him that my own instincts about meta-data and artwork hadn't exactly rolled off the turnip truck yesterday, and asked him the basis for his personal value judgments.

His curt response: "Sure, ignore my advice. Have it your way. Good luck with that."

I thought about this. Who was this guy, really? How did his knee-jerk opinion qualify as 'advice'? On what was it based? Was he a writer? Did he even read? More to the point, did he create anything? He'd cobbled together an email list (and I can't seem to get off that list, either), and on the strength of that he'd labeled himself a book marketing expert. Yes, I guess coming up with that self-appointed title is creative, in and of itself. But that's all I knew about him. Claims are cheap; what, if anything, was behind them? He touts a money-back guarantee but I don't believe it'd ever work out that way for anyone--certainly it wouldn't apply to re-design services, which was where his "advice" went without a moment's pause. Why on earth, after inquiring about a simple email promo blast, would I leap headlong into abandoning serious (and seriously hailed) creative output, AND DECISION POWER, and place it in that guy's unproven hands, and pay him to do so? Only someone with no faith in their own instincts or abilities might do that. Whence did his hasty opinions, made without any historical data, hail? I could be completely at a loss how to promote my work (although I wasn't), but that still wouldn't mean he knew anything at all.

Two things were certain: His 'recommendation' was based upon a pre-meditated scheme to get me to spring for project work, and his personal taste in novels had little to do with the tastes of the world-wide readership.

So I told him he lacked any visible credential to be putting his thumbs on my work, and to please remove me from his email lists...which he never did, and so I'm alerting other authors to the scheme because I intend that my own email address NOT be part of any plan to lure unsuspecting, well-meaning, hopeful authors into parting needlessly with their hard-earned cash.

Yes, these kinds of hyenas circle and snap and yipe all around. But stay to the trail you originally chose--you trusted your abilities and judgment when you decided to self-publish or to go with your chosen boutique publisher...you let your own instincts be your guide when you first began to develop your books. Now is not the time to relinquish control of key decisions to somebody else--some unidimensional stranger with nothing invested in your work, someone who wants to sell you descriptive writing without ever having read a work (it's difficult enough to do if you have...and if you're an insightful, almost poetic kind of person), someone whose creative output is limited to scheming how best to skim foam off a wave of your making.

Remember, you may be completely at a loss how to promote your work, but that still doesn't mean somebody else knows anything at all.

Book promotion is a long and arduous road--always has been, always will be. The ONLY thing that gains appreciative readers is Excellence. Pursue it, revere it, deliver it. Give it time to work its magic. We write in a world full of those who would take advantage of our hopes, our passion, to profit themselves. Be not fooled! *You* are the expert...or if you doubt that with respect to any task or topic, just ask the rest of us, for collectively we know how to do things and what works best. We're here for each other...and for our readers. Hyenas, by contrast, are mere parasites skulking around the outskirts of a creative world.

- Mike