'Til The World Ends is Reviewed!

I have a strict personal policy never to read reviews of my books. It messes with my head too much. I'm not one to stand on ceremony when it comes to the opinions of others, but today is different. Today is special.

Yesterday was release day for Harlequin Luna's much-anticipated anthology of three dystopian novellas, 'TIL THE WORLD ENDS. My novella, SUN STORM, is one of them. I'm humbled to be included in a book that showcases the work of two widely read best selling authors, Julie Kagawa and Ann Aguirre. And today we were favorably reviewed by USA Today!

When I saw the tweet this morning from Harlequin editor Tara Parsons, I almost didn't click the link. But her tone was too enthusiastic to ignore, so I decided to take the risk. And I'm so happy I did.

The reviewer, Jessie Potts, said: "When anthologies are well done, they're by far my favorite books to read. You not only get prequels and half stories from favorite authors, but you discover new authors as well... This is the first work I've read of Karen Duvall's, and I'll be putting more of her books in my queue." This is definitely cloud 9 worthy, and I've been floating on that cloud all day!

I don't toot my horn often, and would rather never toot at all, but I'm indulging myself today. My blood, sweat and tears over my writing is slowly paying off.

I'm not a best selling author, but if I work hard enough, perhaps someday I will be. For those of you working your bodonk-a-donks off to be better writers, you have good stuff to look forward to. And always remember:

A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others. -- Salvador Dali

I hope I this blog post will inspire some of you writers out there to keep up the good work. :)

Would you pay someone to review your book?

It's funny how just going through your email can inspire blog post ideas. I get blog ideas all the time, then forget about them a day later. Today I'm going for it. Yay me! :)

Like many authors and readers, I belong to GoodReads. I'm not an active participant, but I like to receive the reading recommendations from my friends there. Today I got an email with a review on a dystopian novel that looked really interesting, so I decided to explore further and decide if it's something I'd enjoy reading.

As is so often the case, one idea always leads to another as we follow links and read reviews and comments. The book I was interested in is a 99¢ self-published ebook and the cover is quite intriguing. I'm withholding the author's name and book title because that's not the point and I'm not trying to persuade anyone to read it, or not read it. It just opened up some interesting areas in regard to editing and reviewing that I'd like to share with you all.

This book has been out for a few months and has 55 reviews on Amazon, 36 of which are 5 star reviews. My first thought was that it's a popular choice among readers and probably a really good book. But after reading some of the reviews and comments, and after reading the first chapter that Amazon provides for free, I changed my mind.

It's not the reviews that changed my mind, but the poorly edited pages. I found 5 grammatical and spelling errors on the first page, and though that may not bother everyone, that kind of stuff chokes my eyeballs. If it's that bad on the first page, it's likely just as bad or worse on all 338 pages. Cheap or not, my time is worth a lot more than 99¢ and I'm not going to waste it on a poorly written book.

As for the reviews, the glowing ones were pretty generic. Most cited the typos and bad grammar, and said it was excusable because the story was so awesome. I'm very happy for them. :) It's a deal breaker for me, but that's not the point. The point is that those who didn't rate it high were verbally bludgeoned in comments on their reviews (one review had over 100 comments!). I think what a lot of people may not realize is that when they dispute a bad review, it leaves a bad taste in the mouths of potential readers, and may result in a decision to not read the book.

Something I discovered as I read the reviews and comments about this book on Amazon is the power of "shill" reviews. These are reviews that are either paid for, or posted by friends and family members multiple times and from multiple Amazon accounts, or a combination of both. Is that what happened with this book? Possibly, there's no real way of knowing. But here's the thing: the more positive reviews a book has, the higher it moves up in Amazon's rating system. Amazon's "Recommended Books List" to consumers is based on a combination of sales, the number of positive reviews, and the number of negative reviews, so fake positive reviews can undercut better books as well as dupe potential readers. Interesting, huh?

I would never buy a review for one of my books, but I imagine others do and for the reason stated above. To push a book up closer to the top of the list. There's another interesting phenomenon that I was only recently made aware of, and that's those buttons on the bottom of each review that ask if the review was helpful. The more yeses a review receives, the higher it will be placed on the review page.

So if you wanted to buy a review for your book on Amazon, where would you go? There's actually a resource for this very thing. It's called Fiverr.com and it lists all the various services and contacts for getting someone to do something for you for $5. Crazy! I tell you, I learn something new everyday. Some of those services that relate to book promotion may be okay, like paying a service to tweet about your book on twitter, or host an ad about your book on their blog or website. But in my opinion, the review thing is dishonest. People will even take a review of your book that you wrote yourself and post it on Amazon under their own name. Wow. Just... wow.

Would you pay someone to review your book on Amazon or anywhere else?