A couple of weeks ago I published my new release, Water Lust, and as I do, I went to BookBoast to schedule some newsletter swaps. Although I’m on the free plan, and I admit that my newsletter publishing schedule got erratic over the summer, I really enjoyed using their service. I could approve/decline swaps for my newsletter easily, as well as make requests and see openings in newsletter. To me, it was so much more streamlined to use than Facebook Groups, though I’m diving back into those as well, and usually I got a good bang for my release.

When I went to approve/reject my admittedly large que of requests (due to being out of commission most of the summer), I got an error. A standard “Something has gone wrong. Check your error logs.” Well, as an end user I don’t have access to the site’s error logs. That’s something the developer needs to do. I sent an email. Since the developer also suggested we join the Slack channel, I did, and I saw reports of the same error going back to July 29.

Now I’m in technology. I know how sticky some errors can be. But what alarmed me more was that the developer hadn’t addressed any of these concerns. And, as of this writing, I haven’t heard back either to my private message or post in the group #general chat room in Slack, nor have I received a reply to my email.

Alas, abandoned plugins/programs happens quite often in technology. The reasons are many due to busy family situations to realizing the ROI just isn’t there…yet. In the WordPress environment it’s common enough that people often post calls to have someone take over the site/plugin.

I have to conclude given the lack of responsiveness that the developer of BookBoast has abandoned his project. And for authors, that’s sad. I’d love to hear what services you use for newsletter swaps on the comments. Let’s see if we can crowdsource some good replacements.