Something for the authors

I’ll run another Twitter promotion this month. The last one had disappointing results but I thought I should give it a fair chance before discarding it. I’m hoping the weather will leave me alone this week and not flood the house again. Fingers crossed…

In the meantime, here’s something Longrider tipped me off about. Short reviews on a section of your book – free of charge.

I would send them all in but I’d probably end up marked as a spammer and they’d all be rejected. So I need the authors to send in a chapter themselves. No cost – it’s all done by eMail and there is no charge. Don’t forget to include a link to your Amazon listing or Goodreads page so those reading the review can find it.

[UPDATE: Tim has said he’d rather it was handled by the publisher (me) so I’ll send in a few a week. If you’ve already sent a chapter, that’s okay, but be sure to let me know so I don’t send the same one again!]

Your best bet is to pick one of the chapters covered by the ‘Click to Look Inside’ on Amazon. That’s already available for free anyway so you’re not giving anything away. It also lets anyone who follows up see that chapter in context in Amazon’s free bit.

There is, of course, no guarantee of getting a review. I suspect Tim is going to be inundated and it’s unrealistic to expect him to deal with every one of them. Still, it costs nothing and if you don’t try, you certainly won’t get reviewed.

It doesn’t matter if the reviewers blast you to bits. In fact, a blistering attack can be as good or even better than glowing, gushing praise. People love to rubberneck at a car crash and it’s the same with books – a really vicious review gets them interested and they have to go see for themselves. None of the books published so far would merit a bad review but you know what critics are like. Sometimes they just like to show off.

There’s always that one smartass who has never tried to write a book but who thinks they can do it better than you. There’s always one who will read a secret and terrible ‘meaning’ into your book that only they can see. The internet is abuzz with people like that.

Shrug off the critics. They are sending people to look at your book, even if they say they hated it.  Sending people to the listing is all that matters.

Some will buy it because what they find doesn’t match with what the critic said. Some of them will buy it just to see if they can find something else to complain about. It really doesn’t matter why they buy it. You get paid even if they buy a caseload of the print copies and burn them all. If they manage to start a trend of burning piles of your book on YouTube, you can laugh at it all because every book they buy to burn earns you money – and you don’t lose out on second hand sales either.

Don’t be afraid of reviews and never worry about bad reviews. Whichever way they go, they get attention for your book. Look at what the Daily Mail did for ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ when they published their Outrage! at this perverted filth! The book went from ‘never heard of it’ to ‘must-read’ overnight. I haven’t read it because everyone who has tells me it’s really not that good, but hey, the author doesn’t care what I think. She has a much bigger bank balance than me.

There really is no such thing as bad publicity.