On Promotion and Reviews

In an effort to not only promote my own work but to help other indie authors I'm planning on letting you know of books and websites where you can find books you might enjoy. All the books will be independently published by their author or a small publishing company. 

Getting the word out there about your books is extremely difficult. Getting reviews and people to sign up to newsletters even more so. I'm not sure why but it seems to me that Christian readers are less willing to write reviews than secular readers. I see books with sexual content garnering hundreds of reviews. I know these have a larger audience to pull from so one would expect more reviews.

However, I've given away thousands of of copies of my works. In one give away there were more than 13,000 books downloaded. So far this month I've given away nearly 5,000 books. Out of all these downloads I've been given maybe ten reviews scattered over ten different books. Not a very good return rate.

I posted a poll in several Facebook groups asking if readers posted reviews and if not why. The reasons why they did not were pretty consistent. Not wanting to discourage other readers since they might like the book. Amazon requires too many words. Not enough time.

Personally, as an author, I'd rather have a well thought out comment on why you didn't like the book rather than no review at all. Does it hurt? Somewhat, but if it's a valid reason I appreciate the critique and try to learn from it. I'm always looking to improve my writing and constructive criticism is helpful. This book just stunk, isn't a valid reason and is not helpful, although it does add to the number of reviews.

Although Amazon claims to require twenty words for a review, it doesn't. I've seen and received two word reviews, 'Good book.' which Amazon posts. So the word requirement is pretty flexible. Also, the people who claimed this as a reason not to post reviews used an average of thirteen words to explain why they couldn't post reviews. Which leads me to the final reason why readers claim not to post reviews.

I don't have time. Yet, these same readers have time to get on Facebook, read the posts they want and post comments. Huh, they have enough time to do that but not enough time to post a review and help a Christian independent author in their struggle to promote their works.

I guess any excuse is a good one when someone simply doesn't want to do something.

As I said before, I'm going to be promoting and reviewing books and sites of other authors in my blogs. Be warned, some of the books may have sexual scenes in them. Not graphic but some may have premarital sex as part of the story. Most will not and I will state in the review that the book contains such. No book reviewed will be more than PG in content. I will also warn if there is language.

I'm including such books since there is a variety of tolerance for these types of things and I don't want to be limited and legalistic, but in deference to more sensitive readers I will warn of such content.

The first site I want to promote is Clean Romance Books.

Clean Romance Books is a site where you can find just that. It's purpose is to help readers connect with indie published authors who write clean books. Not all will be Christian, per say, but all will be clean. I'll be promoting my books on this site. I hope you stop by there and find a good book to read.