As part of my campaign to step up my marketing efforts, I’ve started to make a few forays into new types of social media. In addition to my author’s Facebook page, I’ve set up a Twitter account, signed up with BooksGoSocial (the jury is still out on that one), and I’ve done a little work on improving my Goodreads profile.
This morning, I realized that my second book, Shampires, wasn’t appearing on my list of Goodreads titles. “That’s odd,” I thought. At first, I wondered if the problem was that I am still a relatively obscure writer. Perhaps the title hadn’t made it into their database. I started to enter the details for the book and realized it had to be in there somewhere. The book was released last August, so there should have been plenty of time for it to populate. I decided to go looking for it.
I entered the title, clicked search, and there it was. To my surprise, my work had been incorrectly attributed to another author with the same name.
My initial reaction to this wasn’t very good. I found myself increasingly irritated when I noticed that the other Alex Taylor’s book list also included by first title, The Wannabe Vampire. Not only was my second book completely missing from my list, but my first book was also appearing on his list as well.
He didn’t write these books, I did. And darn it, I want credit for them!
Now, when I get real about all of this, I’m pretty sure it is an easily-corrected mistake. Goodreads will fix the problem when one of their customer service representatives gets around to reading my message. In the meantime, though, it is really bugging me.
I don’t have anything personal against Mr. Alex Taylor of Rosine, KY. It’s not even that I’m worried he’s going to somehow use this mistake to collect royalties from my books. After all, I’m securely in possession of my Amazon and Createspace account credentials; the sales from those outlets will go to me.
No, this isn’t about money. It’s about the fact that writing those two books was a non-trivial effort, and I want to be recognized for it. While I might never become a world-famous author, and my titles might not be widely circulated, I’d like the people who do end up reading my books to know that they are mine.
For the record, this isn’t the first time I’ve had a mix-up with this author. Back in 2012, I attempted to post a quote on TWV‘s Goodreads page, and it ended up attributed to the wrong guy. I sent a message to their support staff, and as I recall they corrected the problem fairly quickly. I hope this will be the case with my book list as well.
So now, I wait. I hope the fix won’t be too long in coming.
Update (04/27/2015) – The folks at Goodreads e-mailed me back very late Friday night to tell me that they corrected the problem. Kudos to them for taking care of this so quickly!