We've been called a lot of names in our 49 years. A knobhead [you're welcome-Ed]. A hack. A bad writer. A bastard. An alt-right Nazi troll (some people do no research). A Russian stooge [You did take money from Moscow-Ed]. On Gab we sometimes run into Nazi wannabe performance artists who call us a Jew money speculator who gestated Monkey Pox and later contracted it from a West Village rent boy. The toy Hitler crap is really, really, boring. When we were 14, our 13-year-old neighbor called us a pig-faced idiot (we had that coming). Our point here is that it takes a lot to vex us.
We're of two minds on this matter. The great Robert Stacy McCain says make enemies. Mission accomplished, we guess. Though what we ever did to this fellow is beyond us. The even greater Larry Correia (the evil dark lord of evil) sure seems to have a lot of fun mocking his woke critics. But our late FBF Kathy Shaidle got embroiled in some nasty on-line fights and movingly wrote about regretting it. We're loathe to get into a twitter slap-fight. Certainly not on Yom Kippur. It's not as if we want to add something else for which to atone. Besides, why punch down?
Our Twitter antagonist is an (aspiring) techno-thriller author himself. We wonder if he thinks he needs to slam us to increase his book sales. Why stalk this blog anonymously? Why bother leaving negative Amazon reviews? Why else persist over all these years?We're tempted to give him a talking to about how the business works.
As we've previously stated in this space, book sales ain't a zero-sum game. A reader's choice doesn't come down to James Young or William Stroock. The reader may choose Young first, but he'll get to Stroock eventually. Because when the reader reads alternate history stories about stuff blowing up, he wants to read more alternate history stories about stuff blowing up. We're among the best there is at what we do. So of course the reader will get to us eventually.
We tweeted back a screen shot of World War 1990: The Weser's sales ranking (22 at the time). The facts speak for themselves. The Tweeter responded with mockery and a laughing emoji. We shook our head not in anger but disappointment. Two months after publication The Weser has 168 ratings averaging 4.5 stars. It's hard goddamn work getting to this point. But why would he know that? Clearly, the Tweeter is not up here with us Titans. We sell lots of books and he doesn't.
The Tweeter said he's reviewed one of our books, provided a link to said review, and threatened to review another book. Is this supposed to be a bad thing? People who know something about book sales know there's no such thing as a bad review. In response we invited the Tweeter to tweet his sales rankings (if any) and wished him luck with his upcoming book. To put it another way, we unhooked our gun belt and walked away.*
We got better things to do.
By the way, the Tweeter has 5000+ followers, so every time he mentions us that's 5000+ followers reading our name. We're gaining new fans this very moment. Even a few new fans could amount to hundreds of dollars in the long term. And sure enough, this afternoon we see a small sales increase. Maybe we should punch down after all.
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