The Monday Malaise is Spreading!

It’s either very late Sunday night or early Monday morning as I write this, depending on how you feel about such things. Me, I don’t care what you call it—all I know is that my head hurts! I got hijacked by a story for a day and a half, so haven’t been online since, oh, call it Friday afternoon sometime. Came back to 100+ new loop messages. Now, when you realize that I’m on digest for everything but official-from-the-publisher loops, and that digests from Yahell tend to be packaged 25-to-1...

In a day and a half. That’s a fair bit of mail to sift through.

Worse than the sheer volume was the repetition. It’s Monday’s mail that I usually have to bribe myself into opening; since so many of the loops I belong to allow promos only on Monday, all the promo-ing authors blitz-mail each and every group. Apparently some of the more prolific posters on several loops decided this weekend was a great time for not-quite-outright promos, multiply posting anything that escaped the one-day-a-week-only ban. Special offers. News. Reminders of available releases. Etc., etc.

I like special offers, really and truly I do. But I like them a lot less the fourth and fifth time I’ve seen them in the same day! By the twelfth—and that’s an actual count, not hyperbole—I’ve added yet another author to my "No, never, not even for free" list. Quite probably through no fault of her own, as at least some of those messages referencing that book came from a promoter’s mail address.
I know I’m not the only reader to be annoyed by the over-saturation. I’m not the only author trying to find some middle ground between silence (my default) and cross-posting noise. I wouldn’t even be surprised if that author whose name now makes me grit my teeth struggles with this issue.

I know I now have yet another reason not to appreciate Mondays. But weekends? Oh, no. That will never do. So, next weekend, I shall attempt to post something that isn’t promotional in any way. Chatter or humor or good wishes or something! If only to wash the taste of all the week’s self-promotion away.

Too late to spare me the Monday headache, but at least I’ve gotten a head start on it. Things could be much worse.

If only I didn’t feel so obscurely guilty—not for feeling put-upon, or dismissing that author (you’ll notice I’m not using the name!) but because I’d planned to do a little not-quite-promo-ing myself. Not much, maybe just send out a few reminder-type notices of my own, with a brief announcement about Monday night’s RoL chat. (Oh! Aspen Mountain Press authors, including me! Realms of Love, starts at 9:00 Eastern, either one or two hours long depending on which schedule you check. And giveaways!)

But now I can’t bring myself to add to the noise.

Silently, then, until tonight at the chat,

as always

pxj