The Power of Bad Publicity

So many people fear bad publicity. Writers want to write under pseudonyms so no one will know who really wrote their books. They don’t want to have their social networking status updates go “public.”

Have you ever heard the old saying, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity?”

Well, let me tell you a story, and this one relates to my post about guest blog posting.

Back in 2008 I asked someone if they would write a guest blog post for me for my Write Nonfiction in November Challenge, which was quite new at the time. In fact, that was the second year of the challenge and the first year I solicited guest bloggers. That person got very annoyed because I asked her to write something without offer of pay. That’s right. I asked her to write for free. She was a big advocate of only writing for pay.

Now, I’m all for paying writer’s for their work; always have been, always will be. However, in the blogosphere–and in the world of social media–free is how things work a lot of the time. It’s how it works almost all of the time when it comes to guest blog posts. Of course, things have changed a lot since 2008, and now we have virtual book tours, or blog tours, and guest blog posting has become much more common, as I wrote about recently.

Yet, this person slammed me for asking her to write for free.  She also also criticized my blog. Not only that, she took part of an email I wrote and aired it publicly without my permission, and she did all of this in an article she wrote for her newsletter, which had a readership at that time of 70,000 subscribers.

Wow. And this is someone who mentors writers, aspiring authors and indie publishers.

I responded with a brief post. I even got other people to come to my defense. And even though that blog of mine, which was then a free hosted blog,  now has been forwarded on to a new self-hosted location, to this day 27 percent of the traffic garnered by my blog, Write Nonfiction in November, the sister blog to this one, comes from people still following the links to those posts from that person’s blog and mine and landing on my current blog.

Bad publicity? Nah.

Here’s the point: She didn’t get that many comments on her post supporting her; she even got one saying the times were changing and guest posts were a great way to get links to your  blog. (Smart person.) I received a fair number of comments, too, and most of them supported me, mentioned her poor handling of the situation–from her own readers who had now found my blog, and pointed out she didn’t know the difference between a guest blog post and an article written for pay. (I did receive three really nasty comments that I deleted.) And you know what? Every one of those readers–her readers–who bothered to comment (and many who didn’t) followed the link she provided over to my blog…and more do until this day.

Thank you so much for that bad publicity.

Photo courtesy of www.FreeDigitalPhotos.net