Friday, January 16, 2015

Blogger to Author (3)-- Using a BCC when mass emailing--Please, please, please do this. Please.

Blogger to Author is a bit of an advice column for authors with tips and suggestions about working with bloggers, blogging in general and making the most of the platform.

After 3 years of blogging I've noticed trends and methods I think can help or harm authors and their goals and wanted to put something together to hopefully create better author/blogger relations and give some insight to authors who may not be bloggers themselves. It's all based on interactions that have happened here on herding cats & burning soup over the years. 
Hey guys!! Hope yall are all doing fabulous today. So a really quick Blogger to Author chat for this month. This one is about emails and if you're sending out a mass mailing.

One big thing for a LOT of bloggers is keeping their email fairly private. It's a huge aggravation--aka make a girl twitch-- type thing when mass emails are sent out and the person sending them does NOT BCC the email addresses. And it happens a LOT in our community. Not just by authors. But tour companies, publishers, etc. And oh my word is it frustrating.

It might not seem like that big of a deal but for a lot of us bloggers it really is a huge gripe for a couple of reasons.

1) When people start hitting "Reply All" instead of "Reply"
 If you're included in one of those emails and people start hitting "Reply All" instead of "Reply" to just the email sender it can lead to a freaking TON of extra emails that a blogger doesn't need to be getting. Which I'll admit makes me want to bite someone pretty darn quickly because I have enough trouble keeping on top of regular emails, ya know?
It can also really lead to some crazy uncomfortable moments on all sides if someone replying doesn't have a great message to send back and it gets sent to everyone on the list instead of just you.
2) People do sell/collect emails
This, for me, is the big reason for using BCC. Unfortunately there are people in our community that will sell blogger emails to authors or that will just compile lists of blogger contacts and pass them about to authors or whoever as a way to "help" them but really it can do just the opposite.
This can really really tick off a blogger and leads to those "spam" requests we talked about in the first Blogger to Author (the first meet). I get these all the time and when I ask people to remove me from their contacts I'll get a reply of "well your name was on a list of bloggers I got". One guy got upset with ME because I was on 5 lists he purchased. Hrms. I've never added my blog to any lists like that so it was someone in the community adding me in. Which gah is so rude but a topic for another day. 
If you DON'T BCC you're automatically setting up every blogger you're contacting for that kind of aggravation. Without fail whenever I'm contacted by a blogger/tour company/author/publisher and they haven't BCC'd their list...I get a pretty immediate uptick in those spammy author requests. Which really just puts me in a not so pretty blogger place and less inclined to want to have the author or whoever didn't BCC me on the blog.
It's so so easy to avoid this too. In your email service when you're going to send a mass mailing instead of adding the email addresses to the TO box click on BCC and add them there. Then everyone's emails will be hidden from everyone else and you'll keep a lot of bloggers from having grrr-arrrg moments. And this totally applies to EVERYONE--blogger, author, tour company, publisher. Just hit the BCC.

Annnnnd that's my 2 cents for today's chat.
What about yall?
Does it irk you when things aren't BCC'd or do you not mind?

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Blogger to Author




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