New Member Question

Hi. Is there a way to e-mail or otherwise send a message to more than one person at a time? Specifically, if you learn that 24 members have read a certain book, it shows the adresses for all of them, but is there a way to send a message to the entire group at once rather than one at a time?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

I don't think so. And I don't think a way to mass-mail everyone who has a certain book would be a very good feature.

> 1

if you learn that 24 members have read a certain book, it shows the adresses for all of them . . .

It does??? Where are you seeing this?

Unless a member decides to put her email address on her profile, there's no way you should be able to find it. (In fact, as I recall, you don't even need to give LT your email to sign up.)

To contact a member, you can leave a comment on her profile (if she has enabled commenting), but there is no way, and personally I hope there never will be, for one member to mass email other members.

It's not difficult, using copy and paste, to send the same message to lots of people, but the LT admins and users generally don't approve of of such behaviour. IIRC, there's a cutoff at a fairly small level of profile or forum messages per day, and if you exceed it you will be investigated as a possible spammer and your membership may be suspended or even deleted. And independent of official action, I don't think it would do your popularity any good.

Posting your message in a relevant forum, preferably after making yourself known by other posts (OK, I know you've been doing that), is the way to go.

ETA. lilithcat, I suppose he means the user IDs, so he can send us profile messages and we get email notification, if we've opted in for that.

Good point. As I think about it, this would get out of hand fast. The list I'm talking about must have just been the list of people and their profiles.

Thanks for the help.

Douglas, after looking at your profile, I'm wondering if the reason you wanted to address so many people at once was for the purpose of introducing your books to them. If that's the case, then that action would be frowned upon. You would be safe to discuss your books in the Hobnob group, though. http://www.librarything.com/groups/hobnobwithauthors

Countrylife, this is actually not the case. Actually, I'm a big fan of a book called flow about the science of happiness. I think it is fascinating, and I actually wrote a piece about it for a BBC radio program called The Naked Scientists. Tens of thousands of people have read my Online piece, but basically it is a book summary of FLOW. I was thinking of contacting others who have read the book to discuss it. But I obvously hadn't thought through how out of hand it would get if everyone could send e-mails to a list of people.

Believe it or not, the last thing I would do would be to contact people about my own books unsolicited.

Thanks to this group for the help.
Doug

Hi Doug,
Having seen various of your posts, I'd assumed you weren't likely to be spamming your readers - in particular your first two or three posts asking how things worked.
Fairly recently Tim (the owner of LibraryThing) started a discussion on book discussions - sounding people out on approaches and so on. So, while there isn't currently a way to start a discussion about a particular book other than a post in Talk and hoping people respond before it drops off the radar, it does look like one is in the pipeline.

Oh, cool! Have you posted about this topic in any genre groups? Group tagging is a relatively new Thing here, but you might try the search box on the Groups page to find a group that might be likely to have readers interested. Or look at that list of members you already obtained and see if they share any groups. That might be the place to post about this particular book to get a conversation going.

PS: Here's the link to the book-forum discussion that nuatha mentioned 8. http://www.librarything.com/topic/89983

Cool. Thanks!

The owner, Tim, has also started a recent thread (perhaps in Recommend Site Improvements) where he's thinking about ways to start a conversation thread about a work directly from the work page and have it attached somehow to the work page.

>9 countrylife:
Thank you countrylife, posting in my teabreak and couldn't find it in time.