Author Secret #2--Hype Teams

I want to talk about a serious topic for a moment.

When you're selling a product, the biggest piece of advice everyone gives you is, "push your product, always be sellin'."

When  you're an indie author, it's the same thing. Articles say, "get your name out there" and "always hype your books." It makes sense--if you're  just starting off, the biggest way to succeed is to get your books into the hands of new readers. And if no one knows who you are, the only way  to do that is to talk about your stories.

However, as anyone can tell you, that's (1) difficult for introverts, and (2) it's met with a lot of ire.

People  see "self promotion" as disgusting and grimy. Most Facebook groups,  sub-reddits, and Twitter conversations have a "NO SELF PROMOTION"  rule.

And that's understandable! 

Some people, if given  the chance, will spam a place full of the same product from here to the moon and back, and that's irritating.

That means that indie authors need to pay for advertising (which has its own  complications and difficulties). That's fine, too--that's what ad companies are for. People will tolerate ads, but they won't tolerate the actual people selling products, because there is a wall between them and the seller.

HOWEVER, traditional publishers have a leg up on indie authors, and it's not  because they have more money for ads (they have that, too, but that's  fair--they're a bigger company).

What's not "fair" is that most traditional publishers want to sell you their products just as much as indie authors, and they'll do it the sneaky way. 

Traditional publishers have "hype  teams" of people who will go to places like Facebook, Reddit, Twitter (all social media) and they'll pretend to be readers who "just read this  book" and "were totally blown away with how great it was."

Don't get me wrong--some readers are genuine, but I've seen the hype teams in  action when I had my books traditionally published. These "readers" go to all sorts of places and get paid to post about how amazing the book they just read is, and how wonderful the writing was, and how everyone should buy it right now.

Hype teams are the same as self-promotion, because the traditional publisher is paying the "readers," but no one knows that, so the publishers get away with it.

This bothers me only because I don't know what to do about it.

Indie authors say, "we need to have street teams" which are almost the same  thing as hype teams, but they're made up of actual fans who won't mind getting products early in exchange for hyping them during release.

Why did I write this? Because I saw a hype person in a group the other day, and it reminded me of my frustrations with the industry.

At some point, I'll talk about Amazon deleting negative reviews. That's also a topic that bothers me, but I'm not sure what the solution is.

Hopefully this weird explanation/rant hasn't bothered anyone, lol.