[emellaich]

Hello, I really enjoy the deals and freebies section. It seems to me that there is even more room for improvement here. I'm not sure what, so I'm looking for ideas. And I definitely don't mean this to be a complaint or criticism -- I enjoy the forums generally and the deal section specifically.

The issue for me is that there are too many great deals. I think that it is driven by two things. First, both indie authors and traditional have figured out the value of giving away books to hook readers. Secondly, some folks use postings of books deals to capture affiliate credit from Amazon. I have no problem with the affiliate practice but I would like to see higher quality posts to earn my Link clicking. So in the interest of brainstorming here are some suggestions -- many of these are not compatible, I'm just throwing out thoughts to see what sticks.

- move to wiki style posts so we can see the list on one page. Maybe the list would contain some categories, and anyone would be free to delete outdated posts.

- institute a "standard" subject on posts, something like this:
genre/publisher/star rating/number of total ratings/title
paranormal/penguin/3 out of 5/2,300 reviews/sallies skeletons
Christian mystery/indie/5 out of 5/1 review/jesus' burden

- divide postings into subfolders by genre -- however I don't think there is enough volume for this. Maybe they could be grouped on the wiki.

- ask posters to put some content into the posting. Ideal would be a personal review, but even a summary of existing reviews would be useful. For example I just visited a post that had oodles of links to free books by indi authors. I'm not sure this added much over what I could have found on my own. It would have been useful to see a short blurb for each like this:
Young adult by an indie writer in paranormal. Doesn't have any reviews yet., or

The thirty five reviews average 3.5 out of 5. They seem to like it if you can get past the slow first chapter and if you are tolerant of a few typos.

Anyway, if the section stays the same, I'll still be happy with it, but I thought I'd pass along some random thoughts for improvement.

MLH