I've thought about it a few times and come to the conclusion that rule 1 might be a bit restrictive, and actually becomes a hindrance to indie authors helping each other, which I see as one of the main goals for the sub. I think the rule overall is important to fend off a front page full of buy my book posts, but I think there's also a couple scenarios where it makes it harder for authors to actually help each other with the business side of self publishing that are marked as self-promo without really being intended as self promotion.

1. Postmortems - when authors come looking for reasons their self published books aren't performing, we're forced to dig through their profile in order to find the book in question because they are not allowed to mention the title or provide a link in the book. A lot of times the problem is something as simple as a bad cover, blurb, or look inside and it would be nice to skip the middleman of hunting through profiles to diagnose an issue.

2. Strategy and marketing guides - when someone is offering their experience and strategies on what worked for them and trying to share that information, they have to be intentionally vague, and users have no way to verify or disprove claims and have to do extra leg work to find out if the advice even applies to them. It would be nice to be able to verify numbers or placement or even share examples of successful ads on different platforms to compare marketing strategies, which is something I think a lot of self published authors really struggle with.

Just my thoughts on the matter, not trying to speak for anyone so I'd like to know how other members feel about this and are willing to count these situations as exceptions to rule 1 so long as those exceptions are no abused (IE, repeated buy-my-book posts disguised as needing advice).