Three years ago I decided that published or self-published writers needed an organisation and a means to promote their own books. Promotion should consist of joint projects to sell books or approach booksellers, an extensive searchable database of resources, books review in magazines, magazine advertising, and a discussion forum. Each member should also get a web presence and an email address.
The editor of Writers’ Forum magazine, the organiser of the Winchester Annual Writers’ Conference and other respectable experts in the book world, encouraged me in this concept and supported the idea in principle - though not financially (and nor would I have asked them to, for reasons I’ll explain).
It would have to be funded out of member’s contributions, a bit like a trade union, and it had to be independent of any organisations, such as self-publishing companies for example, whose services writers might wish to purchase, since it needed to be in a position to criticise them. It would make a loss at first but hopefully, in a few years, it would sustain itself and maybe even make a small profit.
I launched this project – called http://WritersPromote.com – out of my own pocket. Slowly it began to pick up members. It received many complimentary testimonials and positive feedback from the members. Writers are often not natural self-promoters and growth was painfully slow, but it was growing. Then, although I didn't discover the cause for some months, around March time the flow of new members appeared to falter and the infant enterprise went into crisis.
The blogger had put the knife in.
This blogger was of the opinion, (and he claims to be an expert in manipulating the search engines – who am I to argue?), that one particular aspect of my website design would not endear the site to the search engines, though it had been doing quite well up until then. So far, so good – not a big deal – it was something that is easily corrected.
Note, by the way, that search engine positioning is largely irrelevant in our case. One doesn’t search the internet to choose a book to buy (and our objectives is helping members to sell books) – one goes to a specific site to read about a specific author.
Mine is at http://WritersPromote.com/DavidCaldo/.
However, he followed that potentially valuable comment by a vicious personal attack on me, calling me a liar and dishonest and dodgy and a cowboy, and made false allegations about my receiving money from advertising without declaring it to members (all of which was false), and using the site to push my own books (obviously untrue, since none of my books are yet published - though I'm working on that). All of his allegations can be proved to be false, from the audited financial figures and the testimony of witnesses.
What his motivation for attacking me may be I do not know, though his website is full of self-adoring comments and he apparently has high opinions of himself. He is really a plain Mr. Brown, but he seems to want to be taken for a member of the aristocracy, both in the name he adopts, and in the prominent publicity photographs of himself in a morning suit and a top hat. His actual knowledge of the facts of Writers Promote, and (apparently) the law of libel, appear even more uncertain than his atrocious spelling and grammar. None of that would matter, but he has damaged an enterprise that is much valued by its members - and also damaged the reputation of an honest man.
The Writers Promote organisation was dying and I thought I would have to close it down. I even wrote to our several hundred members to tell them so. This was before I knew about the bad-mouthing blog and I assumed that I had been wrong and the enterprise was not, after all, filling a need. I received a flood of emails (you can see some of them here) asking me to continue and even offering to pay more to keep it alive.
Once I knew the true cause of our troubles, of course, that changed everything.
I was determined that a facility that was clearly valued by it's members would not be destroyed by vindictive bad-mouthing from someone obviously ignorant of the facts. Now I know that the members want it.
I have reduced the fees to £12 a year and will continue as long as it takes.
Now -- what shall I do about the damaging source of the infection...?
More next post...
