Reviews: The Currency of Indie Authors

It's true. We never know until we've published our own book what a great commodity reviews are. I found myself watching the number of reviews go up just as much as the sales ticker.

It's even okay if there are a couple bad reviews in the bunch. It just means people are reading your stuff. Plus I never trust a book that is exclusively five star reviews. Smacks of payoffs. heh heh

So now that I know this about reviews, I'm silently pleading with every person who buys the book...please leave a review! Pretty please! I'm dying here!

And I get greedy too. One Amazon review isn't enough. Now I want Goodreads reviews. I want traffic! I want blog coverage! I want free advertising, dang it! Now back up there, cowgirl.

It's possible to get carried away with obsessing over sales and reviews. What I've started doing is ignoring those two indicators.

I've been reading. And I've been leaving reviews. On both Amazon and Goodreads. It's the least I can do for my fellow authors, both self-published and not. And maybe someday if they have time, they'll buy my book and read it and review it too. I should be so lucky.

But what I really need to be doing now is working on 98. So I will go. But if you have happened to read 97, I hope you leave me a review or two. Not that I'm looking, because I'm not. I swear.