[No, not mine, sorry. It will happen eventually. I just need something to give away first.]
An author I admire – let’s say author X – is doing a twitter giveaway. “When I get to n followers, where n is a nice round number, then I’ll give away something cool to the nth person.”
This is intended to increase followers, I imagine, but I’ve never liked that sort of ‘reward’ system, where novelty is favored over loyalty. Whether it’s the phone company, the grocery, or a book giveaway, it always makes me as a long-time loyal customer (or twitter follower) unhappy. It feels like my time-worn loyalty is being ignored, and only shiny new people are interesting.
I made the mistake of saying so to author X, who really didn’t appreciate my comment. Now, don’t misunderstand me. I like X a lot, I buy X’s books, I read X’s blog, I recommend X to my friends. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t even have tried to engage (or have noticed, for that matter).
I intended it as a ‘This sounds cool, but you might want to consider that you’re making [some] of your loyal readers feel like crap.’ Because I did, and always have when people and businesses do things like that. I’ve asked others, and I know it at least isn’t just me. You know, for next time. Maybe do a random drawing when you hit n, or something.
Because I like X, and want X to grow audience and succeed and all that stuff. But X got mad, and defensive. I’m sure partly it’s the extreme limitations imposed by twitter on rational communication. I tried to be careful about saying that this was how I felt, and that X got to make the rules, but X might want to know that at least some people didn’t like that kind of giveaway. Apparently I didn’t succeed. I probably shouldn’t even have mentioned it.
I think it’s great when authors engage somewhat with their audience. And it’s wonderful when they give away stuff. And there’s no possible way to be entirely fair – it’s always going to be restricted to people on LJ, or Twitter, or whatever. But in this case I as a long-time follower would have to resort to deceit to even enter, and that makes me unhappy.
What do you all think, both about author giveaways and about mentioning it?