It's That Time Again...

Hiya!

I’m possibly going to offend someone today, but please bear in mind this is just my opinion!

Now, it’s “that time” again, when we’re asked to vote for books. Anyone can nominate a book, cover, editor, you name it. However, to “win” a good place, you need the dreaded votes. Some authors are totally unaware if their books are on that site because perhaps they realise that it isn’t a big deal. Me, for instance. I agree that if someone nominated you, that’s a nice thing to have done, and if you promote the fact you’ve been nominated, excellent. But what I dislike is the barrage of emails I get asking me to vote for them.

Why would I vote for a book I’ve never read? Despite knowing the author, wouldn’t it be wrong of me to go and vote for this person to win best book or best whatever, when I have no clue what their book is about? In my opinion, yes. The same goes for the following: Why would I vote for an author I’ve never read and don’t even know? Same with covers. Why would I vote for a cover I didn’t like when there were nicer ones there to choose from? Do people just blindly go along like sheep, doing as they’re told and clicking the links provided?

There are many authors who ask for votes and state that if you’ve read the book and enjoyed it, feel free to vote. This is preferable to me, but even more preferable—and I’m not talking about the poll that is currently going on because I haven’t voted there since I realised it wasn’t a fair voting system—is when I go to the link, having read a book, and I vote for someone else entirely. I don’t mean that in a nasty way toward the person who may have sent me to the site to vote, but if I get there and see a book I enjoyed more, you can bet I’m going to vote for that one instead. This isn’t being mean, this is being honest and true to myself.

So now we come to unfair voting. There are some people out there who create multiple email accounts so they can vote several times. They also have their friends and family do the same. They garner far more votes this way, and for what? To “win” a poll that doesn’t reflect the true feelings of the people who matter the most—the READERS. For me to sit here and do that, and just say for argument’s sake I won, I would have won unfairly. I wouldn’t deserve that win because I had manipulated the voting system. Again, for what? To make myself look good? So I can go about telling everyone I won, therefore I must be an awesome author and you really ought to go and buy my books?

Umm, no. I’d prefer to let the readers choose which author and book they liked the best. If someone else won, good on them, and I mean that with total honesty. I don’t feel envy or jealousy toward someone who may win over me.

What I’m saying is, that it would not sit well with me if I won because I had bombarded people with vote pleas. For a start, I couldn’t even bring myself to type the email asking for votes. It would embarrass me. I’d be knowingly putting pressure on someone to click when they otherwise wouldn’t have. I’d be giving someone a dilemma if they didn’t like my book but felt they should vote because I asked really nicely and in an overly-excited manner. Why lie to myself? Why be pleased I “won” because I just happened to entice several hundred people—the majority having never read a book by me in their life, possibly have never even heard of me before I asked for votes—to vote for me?

I find it all very bizarre that people get so excited about a poll that is so easy to manipulate—and believe me, a great percentage of authors know this poll isn’t worth bothering with. A few years ago I watched two people literally fighting for the #1 spot. One would have, say, 4 votes more than #2, so #2 then rounded up a few more votes and overtook #1. #1 then did the same. It was exhausting to watch, because the authors were clearly watching the other’s votes totting up and off they’d go again to ask for more votes.

WTF?

I’ll say again that this is just my opinion and how I feel about these kinds of polls. They’re fake, they mean absolutely nothing when you win unfairly, and to have a “win” on my conscience that wasn’t done in the correct way—because fairly means readers have voted because they wanted to, readers who have actually read the damn book—is something I wouldn’t want to live with.