self-publishingEarlier I wrote about the possibility that the new channels of e-book marketing might soon be saturated by the efforts of a new generation of publicists, agents and book promoters—once these had mastered social media and other techniques for getting their message in front of readers—to the detriment of indies or individual self-publishers. Now it seems this is happening before my eyes.

To the right is a screenshot of my Hootsuite Twitter feed for the hashtag #pubtip, which as many self-publishers know, is a well-regarded search term for advice and tips for authors, originally started by literary agent Rachelle Gardner in 2009.

“Agents & editors: I’d like to start a permanent hashtag, #pubtip, that we can use for publishing tips. What say u?” reads her original tweet. Latest hashtag.org analytics for #pubtip shows it peaking at 120 tweets per hour (when presumably the spambots started churning) in a very short compressed period, after which it tails back to nothing. And as you can see from the picture, almost every single tweet is a marketing blurb for some service or offering. Cutting out retweets doesn’t help much—the same items just come up again from different Twitter IDs.

You’ll notice that the feed search tries to exclude SocialOomph, one of the more aggravating paid Twitter marketing spam engines. But even with this filter, #pubtip is being saturated by social media promotional efforts, leaving the poor self-publisher besieged by pitches, with little chance to get their own voice heard.

Again, if anyone thinks this is just a matter of my poor Twitter skills, please update me or inform the rest of the world. Otherwise, we’re looking at a trend here—and it’s not good for self-publishers.

 

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