Earlier this year I published my first novel, “Mountain Folk.” It’s a historical fantasy set during the Revolutionary War. To promote the book, I set up a Facebook page and occasionally spend a few dollars boosting posts about its characters, settings and themes.
It was one of those boosted posts that Facebook rejected multiple times. The post consisted almost entirely of review excerpts. As best I can determine, this was the offending passage, taken from a magazine review:
“Fairies, elves, dwarves, water maidens, monsters, and more. Soldiers and heroes of the American Revolution. Founding Fathers of our country like Washington and Jefferson. Cherokee and Shawnee women and warriors. A minister turned soldier and politician who is unembarrassed to quote Scripture. Throw all these ingredients into a stew pot of fiction, turn up the burner, and you soon have bubbling on the stove John Hood’s Mountain Folk.”
See the problem? The reviewer described George Washington and Thomas Jefferson as “Founding Fathers of our country.” That could be construed as an implicit endorsement of candidates for public office — assuming Facebook readers possess time machines, that is, or that some evil genius is reanimating the corpses of dead presidents to effect a zombie takeover of the federal government (which would, I admit, be something of an improvement).
