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Publetariat Dispatch: As Borders Lies Dying…

Publetariat: For People Who Publish!

Today’sPubletariat Dispatch offers a survey of analysis and reaction to Borders’ failure.

There’s analysis, punditry and post-mortems aplenty where the failure of Borders is concerned.

This Slate piece asserts Borders died primarily of self-inflicted wounds its competitors have avoided. From the article:

Other companies have adapted to the e-reader revolution, and even benefited from it. Other companies have changed to fit the new bookselling paradigm. And other companies are dealing with the drawn-out aftereffects of the recession. The better reason for its demise is that Borders had long lost its competitive edge on many fronts, from corporate strategy to coffee. It died by a thousand—OK, maybe just four or five—self-inflicted paper cuts.

The Wall Street Journal quotes numerous customers of the chain’s "#1 Store" in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and while all of those customers are disappointed, none are surprised.

The Atlantic takes a broader view in its article, Books, Borders and Beyond: How Digital Tech Is Changing Retail:

"But if there’s one thing the Internet takes away from stores, it’s foot traffic. The Web is a shopping mall. So who needs the shopping mall? It’s more convenient for buyers — and cheaper for merchants — to play with a virtual storefront and bypass the high fixed costs of real estate.

"All retailing is vulnerable," says Joel Kurtzman, senior fellow at the Milken Institute and former editor-in-chief of the Harvard Business Review. "I’ve spoken with executives at many major big box retailers, and they’re all very worried about how the digital world is changing their business."

Forbes wonders, Does a Failed Borders Presage a Doomed Bookstore Business?

“As Borders expires, new enterprises will evolve to take book retailing’s place,” wrote Gene Hoffman, one-time president of The Kroger Co. and former chairman and president of Supervalu. “Those new enterprises won’t be conventional book retailers but companies that are on the leading edge of what current customers are responding to.”

National Public Radio raises a question about other possible consequences of the Borders failure in its article, When Borders Closes, Do Doors Slam Shut In Classical Music?

Borders’ buying patterns also made for fan frustrations, Goiffon asserts. "For years," he notes, "we pushed in vain to get them to target buying geographically: Instead of sending most of their stock to the biggest markets for classical music, such as New York, they’d send four or five copies of each title to every single store they had — so New York would sell out and be stuck, while all those other copies languished in other stores around the country."

So if you were in one of the main U.S. classical music markets, like Manhattan or San Francisco, you might never see a label’s biggest releases as you flipped through the bins. For many classical music listeners, browsing is still an important pathway to musical discovery, one that many online sellers haven’t managed to duplicate. And lots of people still prefer physical CDs to downloads. (And classical music metadata is still the beast to be tamed.) The Borders experience left a lot to be desired, for sure, but you could walk into one of their stores and know that you’d see classical music there.

Finally, and most depressingly, The Detroit News looks at the effects Borders’ failure will have on local and national economies and unemployment rates:

Borders workers will be hurt because retail employment has stalled and it could be difficult to find a new job, says John Challenger, chief executive at Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a Chicago job outplacement consulting firm.

Borders will lose its 10,700 employees nationwide, which represent just less than 0.1 percent of the country’s roughly 14.5 million retail workers, Challenger said.

"That’s a big loss of jobs," Challenger said. "We haven’t seen five-figure mega-layoffs in a while."

It takes a retail worker three to four months on average to find another job in the sector, he said.

 

Publetariat Dispatch: Can the Subscription Model Work For Trade Publishers?

Publetariat: For People Who Publish!

In today’s Publetariat Dispatch, Publetariat founder and Editor in Chief April L. Hamilton wonders if a subscription model, such as that employed by Netflix and Gamefly, could work for trade publishers where ebooks are concerned.

I recently read a Slate article about how the film industry is repeating the DRM and business model mistakes of the music industry, and of course saw many parallels with, and implications for, trade publishing in it. But unlike the film and music industries, Big Pub has plenty more market and cultural shifts to contend with these days than just the rising popularity and availability of digital media.

The once-mighty Borders has failed, proving once and for all that brick and mortar is no longer the ace in the hole it once seemed for trade publishers. Authors, established and aspiring alike, are seeing fewer and fewer reasons to partner with trade publishers now that it’s become clear they can get their work to a readership more quickly, keep control of their intellectual property rights, and earn higher royalties to boot by going indie. As if to add insult to injury, Amazon seems poised to eat whatever’s left of Big Publishing’s lunch after everyone else has had a go at the trough. But it occurred to me that there may yet be some unexplored and promising territory for Big Pub, if they’re willing to entertain an unorthodox idea: a subscription model of ebook content delivery.

Much like Gamefly and O’Reilly’s Safari Books Online, major publishers could offer a monthly, flat-fee subscription service for

book-at-a-time access to all their ebook titles in various ereader formats. Note that I said access, not ownership. It would be a rental-type paradigm, and like Gamefly and Netflix could be offered at various pricing tiers according to how many titles the consumer is allowed to have checked out at any given time. Such a plan would enable publishers to maintain steady, ongoing revenue streams in addition to their existing sales channels, and would allow publishers to do an end-run around Amazon, B&N’s Nook store, and Apple’s iBookstore, too.

Perhaps just as importantly, it would allow publishers to gracefully exit the ebook pricing, DRM and staged release debacles of the past, and finally be seen as offering a valuable service to consumers instead of being the big, greedy bad guys.

Gamefly charges the equivalent of the cost of one new game at retail prices for its basic subscription; trade publishers could do the same. At $10 – $15 per month I think plenty of avid ebook readers would be willing to sign up, because they’re probably already buying at least one ebook at retail prices each month.

There are only 5 major players left in trade publishing, so even if you had to ‘subscribe’ to all 5 of them individually (since it’s not likely they’d form some kind of collective service), you’re still only talking approximately the same monthly fee as what plenty of people are already paying for their Gamefly accounts.

While publishers would lose money on accounts signed to voracious readers who currently buy numerous ebooks every month at retail prices, those folks are outliers. Most people I know don’t buy ebooks at that rate, and most people I know don’t read more than one book a month, either. Also, there would surely be a large contingent of people who sign up fully intending to wring their money’s worth out of the subscription fee, but ultimately end up ‘checking out’ a book only every second or third month. Once you know the books are there for the taking any time, there’s no urgency.

If you subscribe to Netflix, Gamefly or even a health club, you’re probably personally acquainted with this phenomenon. I say this while gazing ruefully at the Netflix DVD I’ve had checked out for nearly four months now. Yep, I’ve paid the monthly fee for that movie three times over, and in fact could’ve bought the DVD for less than I’ve paid for this rental by now. But I still have no intention of cancelling my Netflix subscription because it’s a convenience I’m willing to pay for. And maybe someday I really will end up checking out a new movie every few days, like I imagined I’d be doing when I first signed up.

Yes, there are technological hurdles to be overcome. And yes, there will be some considerable startup effort and investment. But those things are true of any new business model trade publishers might try to adopt. And heaven knows, the model they’ve currently got is no longer working so they’re going to have to try something.  

This is a cross-posting from April L. Hamilton‘s Indie Author Blog.

Publetariat Dispatch: 8 Myths About Reading Books on Mobile Phones

Publetariat: For People Who Publish!
In today’s Publetariat Dispatch, Piotr Kowalczyk addresses common myths about using smartphones as e-readers.

According to Wikipedia there are 4.6 billion mobile phones in the world. It’s a huge number. But people don’t try to read books on them. In this post I’d like to address some of the most popular reasons, which prevent us from doing it.

The screen is too smallThis is true – if you still own a 5-year old phone with black&white screen large enough to show in full length only a phone number (if you’re lucky). But things change, and one of the quickest developing ones are mobile phones. More and more people buy smartphones. They have screens large enough to make their producers cry: “Hey you can even watch movies on this phone!”

I’ve heard many times that reading on a mobile phone is a disaster. Now try to watch a movie. It stops every 5 seconds, as it takes a lot of time to download it. THIS is a disaster.

Let’s compare sizes. For a book, you have an A5 format (average paper book) vs a phone screen. For a video, you as a reference we can use a 21″ TV screen. If we can shrink our video world that much, why we can’t do the same with books?

Another comparison. On average the screen of a smartphone has the width of a text column in a newspaper. If the size of a text field in a paper edition of The New York Times is not enough for you, then you can also complain about a mobile phone.

This is bad for eyesThis is truly mysterious point of view. If you read on your 21″ desktop computer monitor – this is bad for your eyes. But the smaller the device is, the less it affects your eyes.

The font is too smallThis argument comes usually with a first one, but I guess it’s also connected in some way with a general perception of what the e-book is. There are still a lot of people who think, that an e-book is a fixed pdf document, and that you need to scroll and zoom a lot to see anything.

It’s not true any more. More and more e-books are made with mobile devices in mind. They have a proper format (like ePub), which enables a user to change a font size, among many other features. That means you can enlarge a font to the size you want. Kid book size needed? There you go.

There are few books available

People with the knowledge of modern e-book formats, still think that the number of publications is very limited and they are hard to find.

The truth is that any major e-bookstore now offers books in mobile friendly formats. Do you have an account at Amazon? All books in Kindle e-bookstore are well readable on smartphones. That means you log in to your Amazon account from your cellphone and start reading an e-book in minutes. Same with Barnes&Noble or Borders. What’s more important, there are sites devoted to mobile reading, like Feedbooks or Wattpad. Go there and you’ll see how many good books you can download to your mobile phone – for free.

Extra effort is needed to get a bookIf you have a smartphone, you can easily turn it into an e-reader – I wrote a short post about it. What you need is to choose your favourite method. The most popular and the easiest way is to download an application. For iPhone OS you have Stanza. Free books for Android are available via Aldiko application. Kindle and Kobo have apps for both mobile OS-es.

Another way is managing and reading books via a mobile browser. This is what Google Editions is going to bring to an e-book world in the coming days. Reading books will be even easier. No special app needed, you’ll use your smartphone’s browser.

One thing is clear. You absolutely don’t need to learn anything about format-to-format conversions to start reading books on your mobile phone.

It costs moneyMost e-book reading apps are free of charge. What you need to pay for is books themselves. So if you think, that turning your mobile phone into an e-reader will cost you an extra money –  you’re just wrong.

What you may want to know is that there are two kinds of apps in the applications markets. One is a program to read and manage books downloaded to it. The other one is a book-app – a book sold as a separate application.

If you want to give the e-books a try at no cost the best way is to download Stanza for iPhone or Aldiko for Android. They both give you the access to free resources from Feedbooks – public domain books as well as new titles from self-published authors.

It’s inconvenient to manage a book librarySome of us think, that building a book library based on a mobile phone is a useless work. Managing all the books from a small device is hard to imagine.

You don’t need to assume that any more. With cloud-based services you can access your library from a lot of devices, like a computer, a tablet, an e-reader – and a mobile phone.

You don’t need to manage your library from a mobile phone – just pick up the most convenient device for that.

Phones will be replaced by better-suited devices anywayNot true. Tablets, e-readers and phones will be used simultaneously. I’m sure that with the availability of bookshelves in the cloud, anyone will want to have a comfort to access books from whatever device he’s got at hand. The big decision to make will be “tablet or e-reader”, but smartphones? We have them anyway, they can be easily turned into e-reading devices.

And they can be used to read books on the go, anywhere where there was no reason to take a bigger device – but there is time to read books.

This is a reprint from Piotr Kowalczyk‘s Password Incorrect.

Publetariat Dispatch: 40 Years Of Ebooks

Publetariat: For People Who Publish!
In today’s Publetariat Dispatch, Piotr Kowalczyk shares his infographic, charting the history of ebooks over the past forty years.

When I finished the infographic and showed it to my wife, she said: “Forty years? No way. Four, maybe.”

“Four, maybe” – it’s what most people think. Most people are still convinced that e-books are a fad. That’s why I was looking for a convenient, all-in-one way to challenge this myth. I hope it works. Every year shows not only the information about e-books, but also other facts and achievements. This builds a good, thought-provoking time reference.

Share this infographic if you think it deserves it. I wanted to put it on the web before this year’s edition of Read an E-Book Week. 40 years of history are asking for a week of attention – this should work.

I dedicate this little piece of work to a true visionary Michael S. Hart. When he was typing the text of the US Declaration of Independence, the only word I was speaking was “ma-ma”.

via ebookfriend.ly

 

This is a reprint from Piotr Kowalczyk‘s Password Incorrect.

Publetariat Dispatch: Game Changer – JK Rowling’s Pottermore & Ebooks Without A Publisher

Publetariat: For People Who Publish!
In today’s Publetariat Dispatch, Alan Baxter takes a closer look at JK Rowling’s new Pottermore undertaking, and what it could mean for the future of publishing and sales of ebooks.

The internet has been abuzz lately since mega-billionaire-super-author, J K Rowling (of Harry Potter fame, in case you’ve been a monk in a cave for more than ten years) announced Pottermore. In a nutshell, it goes like this:

After seven books and eight films and more merchandising than you can fit in George Lucas’s ego, Rowling has now announced a website which will be a complete interactive experience for all ages based on her stories. Along with that she’s announced that for the first time ebook editions of the Harry Potter series will be made available. Well, legal ebook editions that is. Rowling truly is the master at monetising her ideas and characters, having turned some books about wizards at school into an international behemoth across all media.

With Pottermore, as the press release says:

For this groundbreaking collaborative project, J.K. Rowling has written extensive new material about the characters, places and objects in the much-loved stories, which will inform, inspire and entertain readers as they journey through the storylines of the books. Pottermore will later incorporate an online shop where people can purchase exclusively the long-awaited Harry Potter eBooks, in partnership with J K Rowling’s publishers worldwide, and is ultimately intended to become an online reading experience, extending the relevance of Harry Potter to new generations of readers, while still appealing to existing fans.

It’s a pretty inspired concept. Of course, Rowling with her riches and business partners is the kind of author with the kind of clout you’d need to make something like this happen.

The real game changer among all this, however, despite the partnership comment above, is that the ebooks will be essentially self-published. Her publishers, Bloomsbury, Scholastic, etc., don’t own the eletronic rights – and I bet they’re really happy about that. So Rowling is planning to make the ebooks available directly through Pottmore. Of course, when Rowling self-publishes, she’s has a team of people behind her and her own company on the case, so it’s not like she sits there on her own and uploads files to Amazon. But the key here is the lack of a third-party publisher.

The Kindle will accept epub format ebooks soon and the announcement that the Harry Potter ebooks will be available from October seems to fit in with that, so it’s likely the books will be in epub. That certainly does seem to be the prominent format and, aside from Amazon’s mobi format, has been the industry leader all along. Once the Kindle accepts epub too, we have the first stage of industry standardisation and that’s a good thing for all of us. Perhaps we have Rowling to thank in part for forcing that change – who knows who talked to who while this was getting off the ground.

Authors leveraging their existing print success to manage their own ebook releases is nothing new – just see J A Konrath’s example for one. But nothing on this scale has happened before and we can see things shifting a little more on the axis. I’ve said it before – we’re living in exciting times in writing and publishing and the ride ain’t over yet. I wonder how many kids will get an ereader with a set of Harry Potter books on board for Xmas this year? This will be a big step in mainstreaming ereaders, which are becoming more and more mainstream anyway. On a recent flight to Melbourne I noticed several people reading from Kindles and Sony Readers while waiting for my plane.

The kind of cross-media storytelling and promotion which Pottermore represents is certainly not new, but we’ve seen nothing on this scale before. Just the official announcement video is better than any book trailer a lowly author like myself could hope for. I wonder where we go from here?

Here’s the official release video from Rowling herself.

And here’s the Pottermore site.

Interesting times indeed. What do you think? Is this a good thing or not? Where do things go from here?

This is a reprint from Alan Baxter‘s The Word.

Publetariat Dispatch- Interactive Novels: Not So Much.

Publetariat: For People Who Publish!In today’s Publetariat Dispatch, Publetariat founder/Editor in Chief and indie author April L. Hamilton explains her reservations about interactive novels, such as those offered for the iPad.

I love books, but I am not a particular lover of paper. For years now, most of my "reading" (where fiction is concerned, at least) has been done via audiobooks. I am also receptive to ebooks, and feel that certain books actually offer much more functionality in electronic form than in hard copy: travel guides, tech books, pretty much anything where the ability to easily jump to a specific topic of interest is desirable. With the advent of the Vook and book apps for the iPad and iPhone, I’ve looked forward to seeing what an "enhanced" novel might have to offer. The answer to that question—at the present time, at least—is disappointment.

For my first foray into the world of book apps, I decided to go with an award-winning, best-of-breed title: Dracula: The Official Stoker Family Edition, produced by Padworx Digital Media, Inc. I’d read many glowing reviews of this book app online, and since I’ve also read the book in the old-fashioned, paper-pulp format, it was an ideal candidate for comparison and evaluation.

First off, let me say the book app is beautiful to look at and the music is both lovely and entirely suitable for the subject matter. There are interactive elements on many pages. In one instance, you must move a virtual lantern around over a darkened page to read it. In another, you can bring a background illustration into better and brighter focus by touching it. In yet another, you must move a crucifix necklace about where it hangs over the page in order to see the text beneath it. Sounds cool, right? Well, these interactive features ARE cool, but they also pulled me right out of the story.

The experience of reading the book very quickly devolved into an exercise of hunting for "easter eggs", the term used for hidden bonus features in computer programs, on DVDs and Blu-Ray discs. You can’t always tell by looking at a given page of the app whether or not it contains interactive elements, so I found myself reading the text and then tapping all around on the screen to check for those elements. On the pages that don’t have them, all the tapping is for naught.

The experience ends up falling somewhere between playing a video game and reading an ebook, but it’s not a very good experience of either one. If the app were a full-fledged video game, I’d want interactivity on every page and I’d want it to be more extensive in terms of controlling my experience of the content. When I play a video game, I want my choices and actions to have consequences beyond causing formerly hidden images to display and being able to move objects around on a screen. Conversely, in an ebook, I want to feel immersed in the story world, to lose my awareness of the device on which the ebook is displayed; if you must tap or click all around on each screen to expose and enjoy the interactive elements, this is impossible.

 I thought this might be a case of this specific book app not being my cup of tea, so I also decided to check out another much-lauded title, the War of the Worlds book app from Smashing Ideas, Inc. Again, as a literary classic I’d read previously, it seemed a terrific pick. And again, I was disappointed.

With the WotW app, the interactive illustrations are not as numerous as in the Dracula app, though they are just as beautiful. However, I still had to tap around on them to find the hidden goodies, which was kind of annoying and again, took me right out of the story.

I’ve pondered how this issue might be overcome, and I’m stumped. Even if some sort of indication were given as to the location of the interactive elements (as is the case for some of the Dracula app content), the moment you’re tapping the screen and thinking, "Cool!" at whatever happens, you’re no longer gripped in the terror of Castle Dracula or an alien invasion, you’re admiring the technology.

The good news is, I think the book app is still very much in its infancy and publishers and developers just don’t know quite what to do with the capabilities of the technology yet. My prediction is that where novels are concerned, the book app will find its full flower in a sort of purposeful hybrid of book and video game. And yes, the words will no longer be the stars of the show in most cases, much as it is with movies. Every year there are those few, standout examples of films that are worth seeing for the sake of the whip-smart and insightful script alone. The Social Network is an example of that type of film. But most often, moviegoers are satisfied to be thrilled by action, wowed by special effects, or cracked up by comedy.

Such entertainments are largely disposable, and while it pains me to say so, I’m afraid this may prove to be the future of literature. Every year there will be a handful of new books that are worth actually reading, simply as words on the page, and for these the experience will be one of good, old-fashioned theater of the mind. But for the rest, consumers will come to expect the play to be delivered not only pre-scripted, but with the cast, costumes, sets, stunts and special effects already in place, with the reader empowered to act as director of the entire production via its interactive elements.

But this raises another, and I think thornier issue: in the case of a completely original interactive book app (as opposed to the re-imaginings of literary classics examined here), assuming a team of people were involved in creation and production of the app, who is actually the Author? I’m not sure that title will be apt for anyone involved in such a project, since the consumer’s eventual experience of the content will not be limited to the written words, but driven just as substantially by the multimedia and interactivity of the app. I suspect it’s more likely that the person we used to think of as the author will be given a "Written By" and/or "Story By" name check in the credits of the app.

If I’m right about that, it’s a double-edged sword. On the one hand, there should be more and better opportunities for writers to see their works produced and brought to an audience; maybe aspiring authors should start querying book app companies like Smashing Ideas and Padworx right alongside agents and publishers. But on the other hand, those writers won’t get quite the same level of recognition and prestige as in the past. Is this a good thing, or a bad thing? As of yet, I’m uncertain.


This is a reprint from April L. Hamilton‘s Indie Author Blog.

Publetariat Dispatch: Of Readers And Gatekeepers: A Call To Arms

Publetariat: For People Who Publish!In today’s Publetariat Dispatch, indie author and small press owner Alan Baxter urges readers and writers alike to flex their influence by posting more book reviews.

Are you reading this? Then I’m talking to you. You’re a reader and you have a new responsibility. I’m including myself in this. I’m a writer, but I’m a reader too. Any writer worth his or her salt should be a voracious reader, and we’ve got a new responsibility as well. We’re all the New Gatekeepers. No, not extras in a Doctor Who episode, don’t get over-excited.

There’s so much talk about the changing face of publishing, and justifiably so. It’s an exciting time and writing and publishing is going through a renaissance brought about by new technologies. That means there are options out there for pretty much everyone to get their writing out into the world, and a lot of people are taking up the opportunity. Some people are doing seriously well out of it, like Amanda Hocking. Others are doing rather less well, like the poor woman that immolated her career with one online review – you know who I mean. But one of the net results of this revolution in publishing is that readers have been saddled with a massive new responsibility.

Gatekeeping is important. In the good old days of the late 90s and early 2000s, and since forever before that, the gatekeepers were the publishers. Writers would approach publishers, either directly or through agents, and publishers would decide what was published and what wasn’t. They essentially filtered what everyone got to read. The upside of this was, largely, the stuff that made it into print was generally well written and worth reading. Generally. We all know publishers are quite capable of turning out reams of utter shite too. But on the whole they ensured a general level of quality control. The downside, apart from the afore-mentioned shite, is that they also ensured that anything risky or unusual, something strangely cross-genre, something not immediately saleable, was unlikely to see the light of day. There were self-publishing and small press success stories, where the unlikely became massive, but those hits were very, very rare.

Now, with the advent of Print On Demand and ebook technology, publishers have found those gatekeeping responsibilities ripped away. Writers are still keen to be published by the big guys – there’s a definite advantage to it, both in terms of credibility and distribution, hence readership. But literally millions of people are circumventing the publishers and self-publishing. Millions more are scoring smaller deals with small press. The volume of stuff out there is staggering. And a lot of it is complete shit.

Remember, the publishers themselves have turned out many stinkers over the years, but the strike rate for quality – in editing, formatting, production and so on, as well as writing ability – has generally been kept high even if the stories were rubbish. Not always, but often. Nowadays people think it’s easy to write and be “published” and there’s loads of stuff out there that really shouldn’t see the light of day. Poorly written, poorly edited, poorly formatted – just poor. And that’s where we as readers come in. This is why we are the New Gatekeepers.

Success in writing has always relied on word of mouth. When a big publisher puts the might of the marketing machine behind a new release that word of mouth gets a massive head start, but it’s still the reviews and recommendations of critics and readers that determine whether a book is truly successful or not. That’s still the case, but the mainstream reviewers can’t keep up with the tsunami of words constantly bearing down on them. Along with all the newly published writers, a whole bunch of new reviewers have cropped up, and many book review blogs are developing considerable power. This is a very good thing, as it helps to strim out the crap and let the quality stuff rise to the top.

But you don’t need a review blog to wield power in this new world. You’re a reader – you have enormous power. If only you’d use it. By the Power of Yourskull! Or, more accruately, the brain within it. If you read something you like, tell people all about it. Recommend it to your friends, buy it and gift it to people. You can gift ebooks now as well as print books. There is no better result for a writer than a reader enjoying the book and recommending it. But don’t stop there – there’s so much more you can do, very easily.

You don’t need to be a talented reviewer to review books. Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Goodreads, Smashwords – all these places and more make it very easy for you to leave a review and rate a book. Or just rate it. Your review doesn’t have to be anything lengthy to have an impact. For example, look at this review of my second novel, MageSign, that a reader called Joefredwheels left on Amazon.com (Yes, I’m going to use my own work as reference. Sue me.):

excellent follow up – great story continuing adventure of first book protaganist. hoping for more stories in this world. Baxter is an excellent writer of a fast past exciting plot. THIS IS WORTH THE MONEY. BUY THE BOOK

He also rated it five stars. Brilliant. It’s very short, it’s not worrying about being good writing in itself, it’s simply conveying the person’s enjoyment of the book. Sure, it’s cool when readers take the time to write a few paragraphs of carefully thought out critique when they review, but the review above is just as valuable.

Here’s another example, this time a review of RealmShift, left on Amazon by Cathy Russell “Ganymeder”:

a well thought out tale – I liked that this story had believable characters and explored faith (or lack of), it’s origins, etc. It had a lot of deep themes. The characters were well thought out. The plot was engaging, and I liked the whole idea of a superhuman who could kick the devil’s ass. While reading this, I kept thinking it would make a great action movie or comic book too. I’d recommend this. 4 stars.

That wouldn’t have taken long to write, but in a single paragraph she recommends the book and gives some basic reasons why. Again, brilliant.

I can’t express how grateful I am when people take the time to do this. And it’s something we can all do, for any publication, anywhere on the web.

I tend to review books I enjoy here on my blog, but I’m a regular blogger anyway. I always rate them on Goodreads. I’m also planning to copy my reviews over onto Amazon and Goodreads – I wish I’d done it as I wrote them, as now it’s going to take a while and a concerted effort. But I’ll do it, because I plan to put my reviews where my mouth is.

So we, as readers, are the new gatekeepers. It’s our responsibility to help spread the word about the good stuff we read, and the bad. You don’t have to leave negative reviews on anything – just don’t review them. But it’s an act of true benevolence to leave good reviews of stuff you enjoy, or drop by websites and leave a star rating. You can write a single line or single paragraph review and copy that to all the sites you visit or shop at. If you do blog, then reviewing a book on your site is fantastic. But whatever you do, do something. Help spread the word. As writers, nothing is more valuable to us than the recommendations of readers. It’s always been that way, and now it’s more true than ever. Readers can make sure the good stuff out there gets noticed and more writers get themselves a well-earned career. Power to the people!

 

This is a reprint from Alan Baxter’s The Word.