Over-zealous author

I was looking at whether to flag a profile and noticed that this is meant for "commercial spam" and that I should email about "over-zealous authors". But I can't see who I should email.

Someone has added 10 books apparently written by themselves to a List today - Books Read in 2023 - on most they are the only person who has catalogued those books, one has been catalogued by 3 members but one is o.z.author and two are o.z.author-author. I looked at their profile - 10 books authored by the person with lots of 5 star ratings. They haven't catalogued anything else. I wouldn't have actually reported the profile alone as that doesn't impinge in the way that adding to lists and spamming groups does, and I think it's not really helpful if you're an author trying to build your profile on social media - but I think most such will either look around and join in more constructively and engage with other LT users as readers and writers, or never come back.

>1 elkiedee:
There is a thread in the Spam Fighters! group where you can discuss whether or not something is, in fact, spam: https://www.librarything.com/topic/351317

What you have described does not appear to be spam. But it would help if you provided the link to the profile and list to which you refer.

o.z.author and two are o.z.author-author What does this mean?

I mean, they might have (re)read all of their own books in 2023. So, no, not spam.

Sort of annoying though. Yes.

This sort of thing is counterproductive for the authors. It makes us less likely to buy the books.

5* doesn't do anything except make the author look questionable. One author did assure me that she thought her own books were much better than anything else on the market, and why shouldn't she say so. Maybe because it makes me think she hasn't read much besides her own books.

>1 elkiedee: Generally the practice for over-zealous authors is to flag their action (e.g. advertising their books in Talk) but NOT their account, and to send them a message welcoming them to LibraryThing and telling them that what they did is not allowed.

Books on Lists can be flagged by clicking "flag items" on the right side of the list.

However, if this is the author you are talking about - https://www.librarything.com/author/cameronaj - they have added their books to dozens of lists and that's absolutely inappropriate and you should definitely email staff. You can send the email to info (at) librarything.com.

>5 norabelle414: Thank you. That is the author I'm talking about. I'll email, though it looks like someone else may have been on to them. I just had a look at the List I mentioned and their entries have all been flagged already. If that's by someone here then thanks.

>6 elkiedee: That was me, I was making sure the feature worked before mentioning it here.

At least he hasn't added any reviews for his books. That is one of the more egregious actions I have seen from some authors.

>4 MarthaJeanne: I agree, it's offputting, but to be honest it's easy to see and ignore.

>5 norabelle414: cameronaj has sent me a friend request - I've deleted - I do talk to authors whose books I've already enjoyed and even writers whose books sound interesting though I haven't get got to them, but generally that's because I find their posts on FB or Twitter entertaining or interesting in some way. Some clearly stick to quite limited professional use, some share what they're reading and support other writers/friends and some are full on social media addicts and will rant on about anything.....

>9 elkiedee:

I got that friend request too, and scratched my head over it for a few minutes before declining. It didn't seem like we had much reason to be "friends."

>8 krazy4katz: Reviews are fairly obvious and easily deleted. Adding one's own books to the "1001 books to read before you die" list is more insidious.

>9 elkiedee:, >10 paradoxosalpha: I got a friend request as well. I did send him my usual message for overzealous authors (including the part on the authors page where it says "Do not send out friend requests to hundreds of people") just in case, but hopefully staff will be able to intervene

Oh good, I'm with the in crowd of being friended by an overzealous author again.

I got a friend request, too and blocked them the second I realized it was misguided commercial spam.

>11 norabelle414:

Reviews are fairly obvious and easily deleted.

First, flagging reviews does not delete them; it merely hides them.

More important, though, despite how tacky it is, it is not against the TOS for authors to review their own books, and so that is not a reason for flagging.

>14 lilithcat: I did not mention flagging. Reviews are removed if the user account is removed by staff, with no additional action required. Books that are added to a list stay on a list when the user account is removed, though they lose a vote. If no one else has voted for them they can be removed from the list, but it has to be done one-by-one (from the user end. Maybe staff can do it more efficiently).

Also, if the user decides to change their ways they can delete their own reviews easily, whereas removing 10 books from dozens of lists will take time.

>15 norabelle414:

Reviews are removed if the user account is removed by staff,

But why should the account be removed in this situation? There was nothing in the post to which you responded to suggest account removal.

I have blocked friend requests since receiving one as soon as I joined that made me nervous. That was a number of years ago. I would probably reinstate it now except that I don't know what benefit it provides. I do use the "favorite libraries" link.

I also received that Friends request. I'm not going to respond to it. I require some sort of back-and-forth communication with someone before I will consider them to be friend-worthy. I mean, you guys are swell and all, but total strangers ... not so much.

>18 WholeHouseLibrary: I also received that Friends request. I'm not going to respond to it. I require some sort of back-and-forth communication with someone before I will consider them to be friend-worthy. I mean, you guys are swell and all, but total strangers ... not so much.

I think there is a psychological... disparity... involved here. Social media networks are basically competitions to make "friends," and influencers depend on followers -- but this is a library database. If we compete over anything, it's our number of overflowing bookshelves. :-) And if we want to influence others... we write a review.

And I don't know about you, but I wish there were some sort of tool to block the endless reviews of Harry Potter books. :-)

I suspect it results in a much saner definition of who or what is a friend.

>19 waltzmn: I wish there were some sort of tool to block the endless reviews of Harry Potter books

I never see them. Of course, there are no Harry Potter books in my catalog.

>20 paradoxosalpha: I never see them. Of course, there are no Harry Potter books in my catalog.

The problem is that any book one has shows up in one's reviews feed. I like to check the feed; sometimes it gives genuine insight to a book. But I don't need more reviews of Hamlet or The Iliad or The Canterbury Tales; I almost certainly have better scholarly resources about those than do the authors of the reviews. :-) It's probably not worth the staff's time, which is why I haven't put it in a feature request, but I wish there were ways to filter the Reviews feed. My two requests would be: (1) No reviews of books that have more than 25 reviews and (2) No reviews of fewer than fifty words. (I'd actually like that to be a function based on both number of reviews and review length, but that would surely be truly too complicated.)

My "friends" in here are actual friends in real life, almost exclusively. I use that filter to follow what they add to their libraries, keeping it distinct from what interesting libraries, similar libraries etc add. It's useful for me. I would never accept a friends request from someone I had no idea who it was, and I use Interesting libraries to track people I don't know.

>21 waltzmn: I would prefer to filter out the really long reviews.

>23 MarthaJeanne: I would prefer to filter out the really long reviews.

I've certainly seen long reviews that weren't worth the reading. :-) I readily agree that long review of, say, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is not likely to say anything new -- and if it does, it should be a journal article.

Possibly, though, the difference is that my library is something like 85% non-fiction, and mostly obscure. Any additional insight about those books can be useful, although it would have to to be taken with a grain of salt.

So my personal preference is determined by my personal library. With a programmable filter, you could set your own preference for your own needs.

My earlier remark was an observation that under the current arrangement, if you catalog a ubiquitous book, you get its ubiquitous reviews. A "programmable" solution might be collections-based, like the current logic to in/exclude from recommendations.

I don't think review length is very dispositive about whether I will want to have read the review, although most "not a review" entries are rather short.

This drift into the discussion of reviews feels like a potential RSI that needs to be proposed.

>26 gilroy: This drift into the discussion of reviews feels like a potential RSI that needs to be proposed.

Since the idea of a programmable filter was my idea, I'll just point out the reason why I don't propose it: I don't think it would be popular enough to induce the staff to write it. If there are others who are actually interested, then I would try to produce a proposal for an RSI. But is anyone interested other than me?

>6 elkiedee: Tomorrow is a holiday in the US but if we don't hear anything by Tuesday I'll send another email about the friend requests

>27 waltzmn: You'll probably find there are more people interested than the vocal minority on the boards.

>28 norabelle414: I sent staff an email about the friend requests and also asked if the books could be removed from the lists on their end

Kristi responded and she's going to clean up the lists

>31 norabelle414: I removed a bunch yesterday, but there's still a ways to go. I'll chip away at them. It looks like the author's books were recommended a bunch, too, so I'll look at that as well. (I think all of these actions were done before my message to them asking them to stop, so I'm letting it lie. But, let me know if you see new activity crop up.)

This is only tangentially related, but it might come under the header of "over-zealous authors," and it's something that bugs me.

One of my books is an edition of The Gest of Robyn Hode. This wasn't exactly the book I wanted to publish -- much of what I thought vital had to be omitted to satisfy the publisher's editor. But it is a reasonably serious book that I mostly stand by. But it is too short. There is much vital information which I had to omit. So I used the book recommendation system to personally make three recommendations of books that would reveal more background about the "Gest" and the original (as opposed to the modern, very different) legend of Robin Hood.

My three recommendations are all to entirely scholarly books on the same subject, of very high repute in the field (one, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, is the standard work). Anyone who knows the field would know that these are really important books, and I can't imagine anyone who knows anything about medieval Robin Hood studies would give any of these books anything but high ratings. If you can't read the book I wasn't allowed to write :-), you should read these three.

Yet someone thumbed down all three recommendation. Is there a rule that I failed to notice that an author cannot make recommendations relevant to their work? I did not review my book, I did not rate my book; I have made no attempt to sell my book on LibraryThing. (No point, since the publisher isn't paying royalties any more. :-) I receive no money from any of my recommendations. Have I done something wrong, or should I just write this off as someone who has a beef with proper Robin Hood scholarship?

>33 waltzmn:

I don't think you broke any rules. I don't know what possesses some people to thumb down recommendations. I know my most useful recommendations rarely get thumbs at all, since people who have read the one work haven't read the other.

>33 waltzmn: I don't think I'd regard you as an overzealous author. I don't have an issue with authors listing their own works in their libraries, making recommendations of books that they found useful on a subject they write about, for research purposes, whatever. I hope Librarything is a welcoming community for many authors if they want one. But this one was adding their books not just to lists of what people have read this year but all over the LT lists, including ones like 100 or 1000 books recommended by a newspaper etc.

>33 waltzmn: When you make a member recommendation, the text underneath the box says "Recommending your own book is strictly forbidden."

>36 norabelle414: When you make a member recommendation, the text underneath the box says "Recommending your own book is strictly forbidden."

I did not recommend my own book. I didn't even think of recommending my own book, or I would have explicitly denied that, too. :-)

>33 waltzmn:

I see no problem. At first, I wondered if you had made the recommendations reciprocal, which might have been a problem. But you didn't.

There is nothing against you recommending, on your own book, a relevant book.

The only thing I can think of is if you mentioned your own book in the recommendations, and someone thought it was a sneaky way of marketing your own book. Otherwise I have no idea why someone would have thumbed those down. (Not that thumbing down would have been correct in that scenario either.)

Maybe the person doesn't like the recommendation? Thumbing down isn't flagging.

>40 lesmel: Maybe the person doesn't like the recommendation? Thumbing down isn't flagging.

First, thanks to all who confirmed that my behavior accords with the rules as they understand them. :-) I was, genuinely, trying to do others a service; I thought long and hard about my recommendations. (Particularly since there are four books I would have liked to recommend, and you only get three. Deciding between #3 and #4 was hard!)

Given that only four people have my book, and two of them are me and my mother :-), I think it unlikely that the person has my book. :-) Assuming the person was not thumbing down simply because I made recommendations for my own book, it seems more likely to me that this is one of the people who wants the modern Robin Hood legend to be true and doesn't want to admit that it used to be very different (and, to my mind, much better, but no doubt I'm biased. :-)

Yes, it is perfectly permissible (although obtuse and irritating) to thumb-down a recommendation just because the thumber dislikes the book recommended regardless of context.

I don't know that I've ever thumbed-down a recommendation. If I did, it would be because I thought that the recommender had a mistakenly connected books with no common thread.

The recommendations I least like seeing are same-series and same-author ones. I mean, give us some credit: we are in a library database. But I don't thumb them down.

>42 paradoxosalpha: I don't know that I've ever thumbed-down a recommendation.

I have certainly given low ratings to some the recommendations I see on LT. Typically this when the book are about very different things -- e.g. the original book is about twelfth century English history and the recommendation is for a book on sixteenth century Japanese history, or something like that. But those are places where the books are patently about different things! And, even then, I am doing the rating based on the recommendation -- I have no idea who made the recommendation.

I occasionally thumb down a rec, almost solely when there's a lot of them, as a way to indicate which I believe are not that similar and/or relevant. These are as a rule fiction books since non-fiction rarely has many recs, so ordering them by relevancy is not particularly significant. The prerequisite for both thumbing up and down would be to have read both books. obviously.

I got another friend request from the same author as in >10 paradoxosalpha:. Shouldn't one "no" be enough?

>45 paradoxosalpha: I would think. I would either flag or message staff. Once is already obnoxious. But apparently lots of people want friends.

>45 paradoxosalpha: Kristi asked in >32 kristilabrie: to let her know if any new activity happens, so definitely message or email her

>1 elkiedee:

Looks like he created a whole slew of lists, most of which have only his own books (the exception is one to which other members added books). Not surprisingly, all his books also have 5 stars.

>48 lilithcat: Hasn't this person violated enough rules to be removed from the site yet?

>49 clamairy: Yep, they have. All of their activity was originally before my warning to them, and their reply agreeing to stop, but the activity has started up again. They're suspended. Thanks for everyone's help!

(ETA: restoring briefly to finish removing spam content.)

Good riddance

>48 lilithcat: I noticed those but didn't bother to look further as it was quite clear what they were up to!

>50 kristilabrie: Thanks for taking action and the updates.

>50 kristilabrie: Many thanks. I'm sorry you have to deal with clowns like this, and clean up after them.