Some
day people will look back on this transitional period in the
writing/publishing industry and they'll be able to map out the trends
pretty clearly. But right now, in the middle of this mess, it's hard
to figure out what works and what doesn't, especially for authors who
are self-publishing. An excellent example of this is the reputed
power of the starred review. I read an account from a successful
self-published author in a Kindle newsletter explaining how she
managed to build an audience by petitioning book review bloggers to
review her book and then asking them to also post their reviews on
Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Goodreads, etc. This sounded like a
great idea.
For
a year I attempted to do the same thing she had done. I had a magic
number in my head – 50 reviews might vault me into the spotlight
and get my book under the eyes of readers. So I queried bloggers.
In fact, I think I must have queried close to 1500 bloggers. After a
year of hard work, I managed to get 6 reviews for one title and 9 for
the other. The whole sloggy process forced me to recognize a few
things.
1.
Every damned writer out there is petitioning bloggers for reviews, 2.
It takes way more than 50 reviews to get people to notice your book,
3. Some writers have compensated for that unhappy fact by paying for
fake, glowing reviews or even by writing (sometimes hundreds of) fake
reviews themselves, and 4. When you manage to get legitimate reviews,
sites like Goodreads tend to drag down the average rating of even the
best books.
When
I made my original pitch to bloggers, I briefly listed my
professional publishing credits and mentioned the fact that one of my
books was nominated for the Philip K. Dick award. I hoped this would
assure bloggers that I'm not an amateur – that I do, indeed, know
how to write. I was a bit discouraged when so many of them ignored
my query (though not hurt, because this is just the sort of
experience professional writers have with publishers – you develop
a thick skin). But as I read the review policies on these sites, it
quickly became apparent just how hard bloggers were getting
slammed.
I
had become part of a massive wave, made up of professional writers and amateur writers alike. Or as an old writer friend put it, I found myself
“down among the lepers.” So many scabby palms are extended
toward these bloggers, many of them have flat-out refused to review
any book that wasn't published by big publishing houses. And who can
blame them? Even I'm getting
requests for reviews from writers, and I don't have a review blog.
I
invested so many hours in my quest for reviews, my writing came to a
complete halt. One of my books did manage to get 33 reviews (as of
this writing), but this was not even one of the titles for which I
was requesting reviews. And sadly, 33 reviews haven't helped much to
boost the sales of this book, even though all of them are real,
genuine, un-paid-for reviews.
So
I have to wonder: How much do readers rely on reviews to make their
purchasing decisions? And now that reviews have come to seem like
pure gold to writers and publishers, how much can readers trust those
reviews?
Maybe
not so much. One cardinal rule of entrepreneurship is that providing
a service to someone who is trying to make money doing something is
often more profitable than doing that thing yourself. Reviewers have
realized this. So not surprisingly, some fake review services have
sprung up. And – also not surprisingly – some writers are too
cheap to pay for all of those fake reviews, so they just write their
own. Most of these folks aren't even that clever about how they
construct those reviews. You can spot the fakes pretty quickly by
looking for one thing right off the bat: they have dozens, sometimes
hundreds of reviews and their average rating is 5 stars.
Do
a quick check on Goodreads and you'll notice that even the classics,
the very best books ever written, books that have inspired people and
changed their lives, usually have an average rating between 3.5 and
4.5 stars. Then take another look at a book that claims an average
rating of 5 stars. If you notice that they all seem to be written in
the same voice and use all the same key words, there's a good chance
they're phony.
Conversely,
if you notice a book tends to get good reviews, and someone posts a
scathing review, there's a possibility this negative review was
written by a writer trying to sabotage the competition. This has
been going on for years – in fact, it's a major plot point in Dean
Koontz's thriller, False Memory.
Fake bad reviews may be as common as fake good ones.
So
what's the verdict on starred reviews? Should I stop trying so hard
to get them? Pretty much – yeah. All of that time I spent trying
to drum up a handful of reviews could have been spent writing.
Writing is what I would rather do. Remember that choice – whether
you're a writer or a reader.
The
wonderful and wacky illustrations for this post were stolen from my
husband, author/artist Ernest Hogan, and he can do nothing about it.
