Is your publishing house really helping you promote by emailing websites, or is it drive-by spamming? AKA why must marketing people spam Vampires Realm with review/publicity requests?

I'm normally quite a patient author, but over the past year I've been dealing with a plague that has become increasingly frustrating, and it has led me to wonder what damage publishing companies do to a book's sales or reputation with their drive-by copy-paste spamming of websites begging them for reviews and promotion.

I don't suffer this problem on my main website contact form, but I get at least 2-3 emails a month at my Vampires Realm official website slamming my eyeballs with a long boring email about some author's latest book and wouldn't I love to review it and promote it for them on my website. Um, no, and now I'll never buy a book by this author, either.

Now, if these drive-by spammers took a moment to actually look at my website rather than just searching for something like "vampire reviews" or "vampire book reviews" in Google and picking out my website because of its name, and then going straight to my contact form to spam me with a pointless request, they would see that it is rather obviously a website for a romance book series by a single author. NOT A REVIEW SITE.

Let's take a look at the glaring neon signs that make this obvious to most people who aren't racing through as many sites as possible sending out copy-paste totally lacking in personalisation emails in an effort to get their authors books and names turned to mud in the site owners' minds.

For a start, the title of the website in their browser mentions the website is a series by F E Heaton! Then there's the Contact menu that actually lists my "author site" and my author Facebook and Twitter links, but if that wasn't evidence enough that this is a site for just one author's vampire romance series, then the fact that every book on the left side bar, and the home page happens to be written by the same author, a mysterious "F E Heaton", should have switched on that light bulb in their head.

There's also a Bio that explains my love of writing vampires and my series... and all that information about a single world... and again... all those books with just my name on it, all labelled as Vampires Realm series book X...

The latest offender was someone from Orion Nova trying to goad me into interviewing a guy about some upcoming comic. I'm not going to mention it... because I would be advertising it, and I don't advertise for spammers who can't even do me the courtesy of running an eye over my website before hitting the contact form. Honestly, publishing houses, you would do better to take 20 seconds to check out a website before you spam them, because otherwise you're just incredibly rude. From today, I will never buy a book by Nancy Holder, Scott Nicholson, or any of the other authors this guy spammed me about.

Of course, my standard response to these emails is to point out that I too write a vampire series, and while I'm not interested in promoting the competition, I'd certainly be interested in them taking a look at my books for their publishing company. I just don't understand why they never reply back.