Quote:
Originally Posted by BearMountainBooks
It's more like 1 in 100 who leave a review and/or spread the word, but it varies by genre. Romance readers, for example, tend to converse more about characters/books online than some other genres.
Reviews also vary by whether the book is paid for or given away (probably because most books given away for free are not read. Kobo did a study and based on what they could see of "progress" from e-reader data, it was less than one percent read for freebie downloads). So, for example, I recently gave away 1000 copies of Executive Lunch (approx) and 1000 copies of Under Witch Moon in a free run of each. So far I've gotten 1 review on GR and two ratings for Lunch (it's a mystery btw). No new reviews on Amazon. Moon ran two weeks after Lunch and I've gotten one GR rating so far, and no reviews.
This 1 review per 1000 given away matches other authors I checked with before I did the run so that I knew what to expect. For 1000 books sold the number of reviews was about double, but I'm not sure if that holds true over the last year. The GR ratings for books sold is about 5 to 10 per 1000 sold, but the reviews...that is closer to the 1 per 1000 for me.
Keep in mind that GR has only been popular the last 4-5 years or so, which means books released before that will have different data. Some authors I know report almost no activity on GR, but they have very good sales and lots of Amazon reviews. Some of that is genre and some of it is just a complete mystery!
I agree with MikeB and the facebook followers info--we authors do giveaways on FB and we get likes that have nothing to do with followers/buyers. When Amazon used to show the number of followers via the author profile, it was probably a more accurate count of "core" followers. Mailing lists or subscriptions to blogs are probably better at identifying core followers, but those can be skewed by giveaways as well.
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Hey Maria,
Logic question on free versus paid books.
Are the freebies not being read because the reader's TBR got so large that the reader is about 3 years behind?
Or could it be the freebies aren't worth what the reader paid for them?
Or perhaps a bit of both?
The reason I ask is I am cleaning out my ereaders. I am just doing the cookbooks at the moment. Over 50% are getting deleted because of formatting or just plain unreadable. There was one that all the recipes had strike throughs.
Part of the problem stems from author expectations. Some put a book free then complain the very next day that I didn't get any reviews.
Granted I know a few people that can read a book in a day. I know a couple that read multiple books a day. But the vast majority take at the very least a week and usually longer.