To Avoid Marketing Pitfalls on the Net, Tip #1: Watch What you Click!

On my Amazon page yesterday, I couldn't believe it: a naked woman, crouching and looking sexy had replaced my sedate author picture. Judge for yourself:




That's not me, that was never me, help! My site had been hacked, I was sure of it. I ran to Twitter and shared my alarm with a raffle of anxious tweets!

But wait a minute. 

That picture is a painting of mine! Sure, look here:


 
It's that sexy nude that plays a pivotal role in A Hook in the Sky (for fictional purposes, it is meant to be painted by my protagonist). Did some nasty trickster copy it from Picasa album (where I keep my photos online) and paste it over my photo? Someone with a deviant sexual obsession? All sorts of wild theories flashed through my mind as I walked over to the hairdresser and had a haircut.

I couldn't wait to get back to my computer and try and figure out what had happened. I was certain I'd have to do all sorts of difficult things like change my password and warn Amazon...

Well, once I looked at it from the inside (going in editing mode), I realized I was the unwitting culprit of this mess: I had uploaded pictures related to my book in the wrong order, giving first place to the naked woman...So the sexy lady turned up on the author page and I didn't. Mea culpa!

I made the change, if you go now to my page you'll see it's all in order, click here...I do look rather boring, don't I? All the steamy sex is gone, sigh...It would have been more fun if I'd been really hacked or better still, if she'd been the author, right? An Indie author gone stark raving mad, showing off naked, why not? After 50 Shades, anything goes, that would have been a real marketing scoop!

Moral of the story: in the heat of promoting your book and getting your Amazon author page to look perfect, make sure you upload your book-related pictures in the right order! More generally: whatever you click, check it again...

Did anything silly like this ever happen to you?

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Comments

Caleb Pirtle said…
The Net may be out best friend or worst enemy, and it only does what we tell it to do. Great post. Great warning to us all.i
Thanks, Caleb, hope you had a laugh...afterwards I was really laugning at myself, how silly can one get?
Jack Durish said…
Thank you for clearing that up! I thought this was a new requirement for authors to post nudes of themselves, and I was certain that I would never sell a book if readers got a look at mine.
Jo VonBargen said…
Oh, goodness!! Good thing you figured it out. Thanks for the tip!
Jack, don't underestimate yourself! And Jo, I'm glad I could be of help...I must say I honestly never suspected switching the order of the photos would have this result! Opens up new possibilities though. You could upload yourself as, say, a chipmunk or a pigeon...
Adrienne Smith said…
Oh you poor thing Claude! Heck, I would have been freaking out too. Guess that was a lesson learned young lady!

~Adrienne
Ack! What an adventure. Glad it's all sorted out and you didn't get hacked.
Adrienne and Sonia, thanks for your warm support! Yes, I was lucky, at first I was convinced I was dealing with a sex-obsessed hacker, LOL!

To think it was all my mistake, how perfectly silly!