Skip to main content

Facebook Takes A Leaf From The Zeta Cartel Handbook Of "Free" Advertising

FB sends me an invite to try out an ad for free for my new book cover. "Free $10 credit" it says. "Click here to boost this post"

I say okay, and then I get a message,
 

Then I get another message saying, 

And when I look at my "free" ad I see they are asking me for money. 



Honestly. Lure me in with free stuff, then snatch it away, threaten me and then demand hard cash.

Facebook would be right at home with the Zeta cartel. 

Update: 23rd August 2017 FB wrote to me to say, "OK, you can advertise" I suspect a trap...

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Should I switch from first person to writing third person points of view? Plus a review of Dark Experiments (Forever and a Night, #2) by Lana Campbell

I write in first person point of view (I/me/my) is where the character tells you what’s going on directly. I was shit scared he’d throw me to the pack, so when he stood up and walked me round the side of the house, away from everyone else, my legs went all shaky. Chloe, from The Bonus In my novels, you get the story as told by my girl and her man. She gets a chapter and then he gets a chapter. (Except in Beast, where the story is told by Wynne). I love first person because it’s so immediate. Apart from the pure whammo of personality, you get to see what my girl and her man are thinking, their inner fears, and you can see them fight with themselves as they grow. Also, as my novels have a mystery as well as a love story plot, and my girl and her man go off and do a lot of things without the other knowing, it made sense to switch viewpoints from chapter to chapter. I love the way you can show an incident through two sets of eyes. Like when Chloe discovers Kyl...

After #Cockygate, do you need to trademark/copyright your book titles?

This post is written for young authors, or new authors living in non-kindle countries, who are worried about #cockygate leaving them open to lawsuits and being blocked by American sales platforms like Amazon.  Also, there are tips on creating a unique title. What is #CockyGate? Faleena Hopkins who sells novels on Amazon is making lots of claims, including that she alone has the right to use the word 'cocky' in a book title. She's been bullying authors, threatening to sue them, and telling Amazon that her rights have been infringed. For a short time, authors who had books with the word COCKY in the title on Amazon had their books taken down. Also, because Amazon uses a lot of automated tools, readers who'd used the word in totally unrelated book reviews also found their opinions censored. Although Faleena is sticking to her guns and making more and more wild claims, Amazon has put the banned books back up, and is restoring the reviews. She's also being challe...

Life In Malaysia: My Neighbourhood

I've been in Malaysia for more than 20 years so I don't really think about how different life is here compared to the West. However, when Stu, a good friend of ours, died a few weeks ago, I realised that visualising those differences can be quite difficult.  So over the next few weeks I'll write a few posts about daily life in Subang Jaya, Selangor.  It's partly so that our friend's family back in Europe have a better idea of what he was seeing every day, and partly for those of you who say to me, "You live WHERE? Wow, so what's that like?" So here goes! I live in Subang Jaya, a suburban area just outside Kuala Lumpur, the capital city of Malaysia. This is my street. My house is hidden under that massive tree. We are security obsessed.  You have to be vetted and approved at a guard house to get into our housing area. And if you live in a condo, you have an extra layer of security. This is the guard house at the cond...