Bottom-line: for indie writers at Kindle, reviews make or break sales, or so I have read. Will reviews from say a newspaper lead you to buying a book-- or not buying it? Do you do reviews on books you have read?
When friends of mine reviewed my eBooks, I was happy to get their opinions. worried a bit that they might not have liked the books, but still writers learn from positive and negative -- when the negative is well thought out for why the book doesn't work or something seems inconsistent. I never asked them to do it and haven't actually asked others to review my books although I have heard there are some sites where you can submit your book to get honest reviews-- but those are booked up for months ahead of time.
I have to be honest, this book marketing stuff makes me feel like Rapunzel in the Disney film Tangled. She is leaving the tower, where she has been living since she was a baby, one moment she's ecstatic, the next in deep depression and she keeps repeating that. Well I do that with marketing. One moment-- wow, this is great. I love it. Next moment-- this is horrible-- I hate it.
Even with over 4000 of my books having been given away on free days, I haven't gotten reviews from strangers. I have had a few people tag them or say they like them... The tags have been a mixed blessing as I mentioned in the previous blog. I'm still mulling that one over. One even listed a book as having been a free book when it never was.
It's not like I can blame people for not doing reviews. There are reasons beyond mine of simply never thinking about doing it. For instance, I read in forums, that readers don't trust reviews by other writers as they feel it's payback time. I wonder if they realize how common those kind of reviews have been in books published through corporations. There you will see a writer's name you recognize praising the book and you know that book was mailed to them as a galley and intended for them to do reviews-- which their books will likewise garner in their turn. That doesn't mean the writers lied either. It just means reviews by writers are a technique used to sell books and it's not new to eBooks.
Actually, it turns out, there is also a rather peculiar side to reviews at Amazon. Evidently (or so I read) writers can pay puff sites to do glowing reviews for their books. So those people who want to only buy a book with twenty totally positive reviews, might find those reviews weren't all regular readers. How does one tell? Amazon does have a place where they validate that the book was purchased through them but until I read that, I never looked for that information. It still wouldn't tell me if the review was fake but maybe no details about the book would be a better clue-- like couldn't put this down which really tells you nothing about why the reviewer liked it.
To add to the difficulty of evaluating the fairness of reviews, coming out of the consumer forums are apparently a group who regard themselves as almost professional reviewers as they do many of them. From what I have read from their own comments in the forums-- they can get it in for a writer and post something scathing about the book which is totally because they hate the writer. If enough of them hate the writer, that could look pretty bad for the book.
Before I really got into this idea of how important reviews are, I was reading some for a book I was considering buying for my Kindle. A reviewer had written how much they hated that book. They said they hadn't bought it. They had gotten it from a library. Now that is really hate!
I won't say that the readers are all wrong either to get irked with a writer. Some writers post links to their books on any topic whether it relates or not and they'll do it many times. In my blogs, I call that spam. It evidently ruined conversational threads and especially when (in the opinion of the readers) a lot of those books were of lousy quality. After all in the Wild West, you can publish any book-- quality or not. And we all think our own book, which is our baby, is quality, don't we?
When I got into ePub, I felt it would be like the Wild West with only minimal if any rules. Well the further I get into looking at the politics of it, the more I feel I was right and more than I knew. It's like walking into that saloon in Dodge City and knowing the marshal doesn't go there and everybody in there could take a dislike to you-- irrespective of what you do. That might be better than the alternative though which is totally ignore your post and existence.
You can probably guess that for someone like me, who loves understanding the dynamics of relationships and why people do what they do, the whole thing is fascinating to watch-- although most often from a distance. But before I post words anywhere, I double-check to be sure it's in Meet Our Authors and that this particular title for subject hadn't slipped into my list from the 'other' place ;). I bet a lot of other indie authors get the shakes at the very possibility of wandering into a consumer forum and getting into trouble-- well except those with phony IDs who can cause all kinds of trouble and walk away smiling ....
