Category: Goodreads

All Hail Emperor Bezos and Bow Down Before the Amazon Overlords!

There is no getting around it. Very soon I will have to get on my knees like everyone else in the world and beg for scraps at the feet of Emperor Bezos. As much as I would love The Book and the Blade to be 100% indie… only available in small shops with quirky cafes and book sellers who double as baristas, or perhaps even in unique little corners of the internet on websites run by enthusiastic book bloggers, I will still need to play The Amazon Game!

3(0) is the magic number! Yes it is, it’s the magic number!

– 30 reviews gets your book noticed by Amazon’s algorithms (Wizards. Wizards sounds cooler.)

– reviews get you onto lists

– lists get you exposure

Lists like these…

Having not released the book yet it is no surprise I’m floundering at the very bottom

But then there’s the strange caveat that reviews from people you know sometimes disappear. I’ve seen this with author friends and there are many indie authors on Twitter who testify to the same thing… any reviews they have which may be linked to, say, people on their Facebook friends list, can mysteriously vanish. Forget algorithms and wizards, that is the work of Amazon’s Dark Overlords!

(A smidge dramatic? Maybe.)

This doesn’t always happen but it has occurred enough times for it to be “a thing” for indie authors.

I don’t know how it will play out for The Book and the Blade but I do ask (and will repeatedly beg) that if you do read my little book, please leave a review. They might vanish into the ether, they might not. Either way, all interaction makes a huge difference. Perhaps together we can unite and overthrow the overlords? And they don’t have to be complex reviews or even analyse the story in any way. They just have to exist.

Here’s a few examples…

***** Excellent cover

I.P. Freely

***** Interesting title

Ivana Tinkle

***** It’s a book

My mate Mitchell

***** Looks great on my shelf

Seymour Butts

***** That bit with the cat was funny

Al Coholic

***** It’s not that shit

Oliver Klozoff

Thanks for reading!

Ask me anything… (sort of)

Well, ladies and gents, I’ve managed to get this website up and running and I’ve made sure all the links work (and go precisely where they’re meant to). So far, it’s all tip-top and shiny. So, I wanted to draw your attention to a couple of new links I added just now. These two…

That’s Goodreads and Youtube and you can find them both in the header of this website. The reason I want to mention Goodreads, in particular, is because eventually, I will be begging people to leave reviews of The Book and the Blade there. And on Amazon.

As much as it pains me that old Bezoz rules the world and I will be hopefully focusing more on independent bookshops than the big brother dark overlord of book purveyors it is pretty much essential for a new book to get good traction on the conveyor belt of Amazon in order to have even a hope of success. And like everything else in this dear world, Amazon bought Goodreads.

So anyway, enough of the politics for a second. I set up a Goodreads account a while ago. I list all the books I’ve read there, post reviews, keep my reading life organised and, apparently, I also opened myself up to an ‘ask the author’ segment.

I don’t remember doing this, but I answered a couple of questions (generic ones, I believe. I still stand by the answers). So, I figured, what the heck? Ask me anything! Go for it, don’t be shy. Either do it on Goodreads itself (and please give a follow while you’re there) or ask in the comments here or on Facebook/Twitter.

And yes, Mam, you can just call on Whatsapp and ask me there x

Thanks for reading