Quote:
Originally Posted by ficbot
I have been thinking of actually starting a 'Hall of Fame' webpage where books can only be on it if they meet certain conditions. For example, they would have to be available in more than one format (i.e. at Smashwords OR at Amazon plus an ePub sture) and they would have to have a positive review from a minimum of three indie blogs. That way, we could get around the 'I don't follow so and so blog so I missed x book' or 'I don't have time to vet both blogs and books' or whatever the excuses are. Would there be interest in such a page?
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I would be interested in such a page. Perhaps when it gets large enough, your "Hall of Fame" could end up as a separate site (or at least set apart) covering the best by genre in a easily browsable format.
Something related to the difficulty indies face in the vast sea of material - has anyone else noticed that some reviewers (reader reviewers, not review sites) seem to be harder on indies? For example, I've seen reviews that basically blame the author for things that are subjective - voice, genre, style, etc. I wonder if it's because, with indies, you don't have the "
someone saw something good in this" that you have with traditionally published books.
I guess I'm something of a review-stalker on Amazon. If I see a bizarre review, I find the reviewer's other reviews and try to see what's up. I did that with a few of those like I mentioned, and found that the books from publishers they were familiar with got higher ratings, even if they didn't like the book, but indies (which one reviewer referred to as "no-name hacks") got incredibly low ratings for the same "offenses".
Obviously, reviews are always opinion, but I'm bothered by this, especially since the indies often have far fewer reviews so each carries more weight. One can read the text of the review and see why the rating was given, but I imagine many people don't look past the number of "stars".
For this and many other reasons, we really need to get more indie review sites into the spotlight.