Fellow Writers – Please Stop Allowing Book Review Sites to Rape you Blind

This might be a bit of a controversial post but it’s important to write about this topic. I’ve written before about writer’s selling themselves too cheaply to try and drum up sales and I suppose that to an extent it does work. However, what that encourages is readers who devalue the work that writers do and it creates false expectations of how cheap ebooks should be. Further, it also creates to some extent the mentality that you get what you pay for, and when you’re paying 99 cents for an ebook or even $2.99 then you’re getting something cheap. And folks bitch about cheap stuff all the time.

Anyway, this is not about how cheap you want to sell your novel but about how much you’re willing to pay to sell your novel.

I was on a forum the other day, this one related to internet marketing and folks were talking about backlinks and how to rank your site higher in the search engines – Giggle – primarily. It soon became obvious, though no one wanted to hear it about how the best links to get are the ones that are the most difficult.

Everybody knows, including you book bloggers how easy it is to spam blogs to add comments, especially if that naive webmaster has allowed do follow comment links. Even on this blog I get the occasional spam, but there are literally thousands if not hundreds of thousands of blogs out there that have little editorial review over what gets published as a comment.

In fact, there are software programs out there designed to harvest these blogs and spam the shit out of them with your links. If you don’t want to buy the software you can buy a service that will send out 2,000 links for $5 or something like that.

Now if I was able somehow to get a backlink from Leo Babauta from Zen Habits, that would be worth more than 10,000 spam links. Easily. How do I know? Because I’ve tried real hard to get a guest post published on Leo’s great blog to no avail… so far

You might be thinking, “dude, what’s this got to do with book review sites?” I hear ya. Bear with me.

So the best links if you want to try and rank high in the search engines are the hardest ones to come by. The natural links too, like that one I just gave my friend Leo. Though it’s not the most potent link as my blog is still a baby but it helps.

Some of you smarter readers out there, the ones that read mystery fiction or who write it and like to solve puzzles probably know where I’m getting.

When times are desperate the desperate get taken advantage of. And writers, especially most of us without 6 figure legacy publishing deals are generally a desperate bunch. Admit it.

So what happens is that we really, really, really want our baby to be given the breath of life and shine amongst all the other book stars out in that big black hole of publishing, so we’ll try anything.

And there are tons of book review blogs out there and we comb through the book reviewers lists looking for golden nuggets. I’ve done it. I’ve sent my book and had it reviewed on a dozen or so book blogger’s review websites. I’ve given away a similar amount of books for free to their “loyal” readers, and I sold…. 0, zilch, bupkis, nothing from it!

That’s okay though, didn’t cost me too much other than some coupons for free ebooks.

But I’ve kept my ear to the ground and some savvy marketers who are trying to get their own books selling even in the hundreds and hopefully thousands are figuring out a way to relieve hopeful and desperate authors of some hard earned cash.

It’s called book reviews for cash. Though not that crassly. I think these book reviewers are couching their request for payment in order to be reviewed due to the fact that they are “inundated” with books, they want to “keep their doors open to new authors” and other shite like that.

And sometimes they spin a good yarn. Sounds fair enough. I mean if they’ve got readers right, then I could sell a few dozen or more, so that $30 or $50 or even $100 in some cases seems like it’ll pay out in the end.

Sorry chum, it won’t. You’ll just be out of cash. But I’ll tell you what you can do, you can spend that $30 by buying all 3 of my books and you’ll get change back too. Plus you’ll have something for your money

The only time I might consider paying for a book review is if a site gets a ton of visitors. Head on over to Alexa and type in the book reviewer’s website like “bookreviewsite.com” without the http://www etc. If that site is in the top 100,000 i.e. has an Alexa ranking of a smaller number than 100,000 then you know they’re getting a ton of traffic.

This is not foolproof but it is a great rule of thumb. Plus you won’t be chasing unicorns this way either. And I bet you’ll be unlikely to find a book review site that isn’t a major news publication that has that kind of a ranking and/or takes on self published writers.

Listen folks, I’m sorry, but writing is hard work. And selling your beloved book is even harder. What you need to focus on is do what you’re best at which is keep on writing. And then once you have a few books out there then keep knocking on doors.

And the doors you should be knocking on are publishing housing doors and if you want, the legit book review sites like the Globe and Mail or your local paper or the New York Times. You’ll likely never get them to review your book unless you’re legacy published, but paying to have your book reviewed is even more of a pipe dream if you think it’ll get you into the Amazon Top 100.

I know I’ve just written a story with a sad ending. Our protagonist has been killed off… such a sweet kid!

But that’s the truth. Very few writers are going to make a living off of their craft. The bar to entry is non existent. The depth of the milk well is deep and the layer of cream very thin. It’s the same with sports and acting. Everyone can try and act, everyone can learn a sport, but to become world class at it takes not only time but in my opinion a large dose of fairy dust i.e. lady luck.

I know we love to believe in fairy tales and myths especially as writers, I mean that’s our world. The current myth I like to call the Cinderella myth. It goes like this:

There are self published authors out there who are making bank. I mean look at Amanda Hocking and John Locke. In fact, Locke was the first indie to sell over 1 million books. Whoo hoo, I can do it to. Maybe dear reader, but unlikely.

Well, what about J A Konrath. Well, first of all he came from legacy and he has more books published than you do.

Listen, there are I bet, a handful of Indies selling more than a thousand books a day, and how many of us are writing and trying to sell our books everyday? Give up, let me give you an estimate. Smashwords just published their 15,000^th ebook, and they’re publishing 2,000 a month. That’s almost 2,000 new writers competing with you each and every month. And that’s only Smashwords, what about Amazon’s KDP and CreateSpace?

Yeah I know that writers will put out more than 1 book a year so even if we halve that number, there’s still 1,000 new writers clawing away each and every month at trying to make a stake in that little dirt pile of reader interest and bookshelf space.

Write because you love it and you want to share it with the world. Don’t throw good money after bad by paying for reviews from book reviewers who even though they might be sincere are just taking your money and not offering any value in return. And then maybe after a decade or more and you’ve got 10, 12 or more books out there, maybe it will become a living wage. But don’t bet your mortgage on it.

Alternatively, I’ve just given you a recipe to success within the book writing and reading world. Become a book reviewer and charge other writers for reviewing their books. Folks are doing it and making a handsome side income with it. You don’t even have to read the damn thing. The writer has already told you what the book is all about in their blurb, just add some generic pap to it and you’re golden.