Having written and published Just Dirt, the book with my story about running away from boarding school, I needed to figure out some ways to get the word out. I wrote a press release, submitted it to a site or two that distribute releases, and to a few local papers, and nada. I posted a bulletin here, but if your list of bulletins is like mine, you know how little attention is paid to them. I blogged it here. I posted about it on classmates.com, and at some point when I was posting to classmates I realized that I could send a heads-up to all the people on mySpace who had taken the time to enter The High School of Sadism and Snobbery as their alma mater.

And that seemed like the greatest of ideas.

One thing bothered me, though: was this spamming? The case could certainly be made: unsolicited commercial messages in people's in-boxes; that's sort of the definition. But the fact that I was promoting it so directly, and to such a narrow audience, made it seem like a fairly innocuous form of spam, if it was spam at all.

So I sent out a few messages to test the waters, and much to my surprise people wrote to thank me, and to share their own awful experiences at boarding school. I ramped up the number of messages and I got even more positive replies, and it seemed to be driving traffic to the web store pretty well.

I ran out of alumni and moved on to a different school that was quite similar to the one I'd attended, and maybe that was when I crossed some line between a mass "Check this out" and honest-to-god spam.

And after sending out a bunch of those, and getting some nice replies, I got a "Thanks for the SPAM," and my heart sank. I wrote the guy back the next day and apologized and told him how well it had been going, and we actually sort of worked it out. He realized that I wasn't exactly selling Viagra or Nigerian bank accounts, or whatever, and it was cool again, tho a little less cool than before.

But the next day I got TWO nastygrams, both a little more unpleasant than the first; clearly from major-league assholes, to be blunt. The fact that these were mixed in with really effusive "thank you"s and "right on!"s cheered me a little, but it seemed like I'd reached some threshold, or something. I tried to apologize to one of the people who was offended, and got an even snottier reply back, and that was it.

So I'm done with messaging people directly and off to a street fair to hand out little promotional postcards...

W

[ back from the street fair... the folks at Goner records are so nice! they let me put a bunch of cards by the cash register ]