Quote:
Originally Posted by jbcohen
Personally I could care less about reviews, they simply represent one person's opinion of your work and have nothing to do whether I will like your work or not. Here is how to get my attention: 1) You need to write in the genre that I am interested in; and 2) you need to be price competitive (I refuse to pay more that $9); 3) You need to give away a sample of each book, the first two paragraphs will do, I want to see your writing style. Notice I said nothing about reviews.
|
Items 1, 2, and 3 in your list are all covered for anyone that has their book on Amazon or B&N (most indie published books are under $9) - but there's just so many new books all the time that no one, no matter how good their intentions, is going to see them all. (Well, maybe you can if your tastes are narrow enough to be only interested in very specific, less common genres.)
And there's one you haven't mentioned, the first one: 0) get the book in front of you long enough to be noticed. That, as far as I'm concerned, is what book review sites are about, getting your book out in more places where people that read might actually notice it.
I'm a firm believer that word-of-mouth is what sells the most books. A writer's problem is to get word-of-mouth (preferably favourable
) started. That means getting those first readers that like it enough to talk about it, and that means getting noticed in the first place. Book review sites are not the be-all and end-all, but they are one of the ways to try and get noticed.