What is it with people and their obsession with deliberately going blind and selectively quoting-and-responding to your posts in a way that makes it look like you were suggesting or supporting the very thing you were not for little more reason other than to try and climb on top of your head and shout "Look at me, I'm better". Sadly people won't bother looking back at the original post or putting the brain-power into understanding your post before they jump on the bandwagon. Great, another two hours wasted trying to correct everyone. Sure, it shouldn't matter, but it actually can and does in some locations.

Normally this sort of thing doesn't rile me up enough to blog about it - but in the last 12 hours I've had several instances of it happen and quite frankly it's p*ssing me off. These posters go in with the intent of finding a way to paraphrase your original statements in a manner that they can slaughter your insightful post and stand on its beautiful corpse to raise the same flag you were raising, bloody hell.

I know, I know - this sort of thing exists everywhere, politics thrives, and media barons get filthy rich from it. I really had hoped [stupidly] that in a group of independent writers, such pointless cannibalism would be kept in check, but nope, it's alive and well. There's limited food (money) going around, so better to slaughter off as many as possible to ensure one's own survival - at least that's their theory I suppose.

When you read posts, you have a choice to make; given that there'll nearly always be a level of ambiguity - do you err on the side of what makes the poster a similar-minded person to yourself, or do you try to make an enemy out of them, even if they probably are standing for the same things you are?

Waiting now to see how many people can completely twist this blog up, you know it has to happen.

We just finished doing a pair of KDP-Select "free" promotions via Amazon, it's a wonderful tool, finally enabling publishers to push a book out for free up to 5 days (per 90 days I believe) and thus hopefully give you a head start on acquiring some more readers, though it could seem that the potency of this marketing method has already peaked and gone.

In the last two years I've watched the same pattern of success appear with numerous marketing tricks;

* 99c Indies

* Kindle Nation Daily

* Kindle Boards Daily book

* Facebook Amazon-Kindle page give-aways

* Pixel Of Ink

... now KDP-Select

There's likely many others - but it's always the same, a huge initial rush as a new field of readership is exposed to some juicy deals (doesn't matter about the book content ;) ), it lasts for a couple of months (or days) and then the consumer/customer becomes rather *meh* about the whole thing and tends to ignore it.

Thus far I've missed fairly much every peak, a few times due to my own lack of speed, other times just downright bad luck (Pixel Of Ink). Guardian had a woeful strike rate, in part probably because the whole Amazon system had a total brain collapse on February 1, at least I'm telling myself that. "The Darkening of Deacon" on the other hand did reasonably well with nearly 2000 downloads, but they're all far far short of the insane figures that people were seeing closer to the start of the program, where 1000 an hour was happening. Am I feeling a tad upset, yes, a bit - but I am happy we still managed to get some numbers and push to #3 on the Epic-Fantasy category, we cannot have been doing too badly since we outranked a few other big names. Perhaps it was just a genre limitation.

Marketing sure is tough work - if anyone comes along and says "I have a method/formula that'll work for you", then they're likely deluded and you're about to become a sucker-customer. For sure there's guidelines, methods you can try, but overall the more I'm watching the more I see that everyone who has made it to success seems to have traveled a different path. There are going to be some people who strike it lucky/rich, as with lotto-winners though they're the extreme minority. The best option seems to be: "Keep writing, keep trying, keep sharing" and don't get too distracted by the fancy talking snake-oil people, other than to perhaps steal their technique of luring people ;)