Further comment on the Amazon – Goodreads marriage is emerging. This interesting take from Harvard Business Review by Paul Nunes and Josh Bellin discusses the holy grail for book marketing:  Unique consumer comment. Amazon.com announced last week that it would purchase Goodreads, a social network for bookworms. As the “world’s largest site for readers and [...]

So what does the news that Amazon is to acquire Goodreads actually mean for us self-publishers?  Most of us relish Goodreads, and actively star each other’s work, as Goodreads proves to be a more successful platform for honest consumer review than Amazon in some ways – less glitchy than the strange process used by Amazon’s [...]

    This puts Amazon in an even stronger position to control which books get read and which ones languish. We’ll have to wait and see if Amazon starts deleting bookstore links, thus reducing options for both readers and authors. In any case, the 500 pound gorilla that is Amazon just got considerably bigger.  Amazon.com [...]

The most trusted form of criticism for consumers on the internet is now the consumer review. Hailed as SEO gold by Google, these reviews are popping up all over the joint due to rich snippets, which I will explain in my next post in more detail. In fact, 63% of consumers now buy products not [...]

Self-published author Catherine Tosko on why Amazon should write a story of their own before publishing other people’s. Someone I know has just published their second book on Amazon and due to formatting issues has completely given up on selling any more books due to bad reviews, not about the book but about the formatting. [...]

  I have a Free Book Promotion coming up and I keep hearing the George Strait song ‘Give it Away’ playing in my ears. (Now you know where I get some of the inspirations for  my posts). It was time for me to do some research and talk to several  successful authors on how to do [...]

With the huge controversy brewing in the Book Publishing Industry over book reviews and how they’re obtained and used, I thought I would jump in on this. We have exposed a problem in the trust of one of the decision points buyers have. Is the ebook as good as the review says it is? How [...]

In this round-up: the Smashwords July sale for either hemisphere, GalleyCat’s weekly lists of eBook sales ranks, new legal ruling in Europe on eBook resale, a lengthy opinion piece deconstructing why The Authors Guild among other things attempts to invoke sympathy for PublishAmerica, and a save-the-libraries campaign from The Bookseller. Enroll Your Books in the [...]

Does Amazon have a winning hand or do they need to draw more cards to stay ahead in the game? Amazon is the dominate player in the ebook industry, hands down. In fact, they are so strong that they can sell some products at a loss and still win the hand. They can do this [...]

I recently discovered that my book was victim to an act of sabotage through bad reviews and wrote a blog post for the Huffington Post. Here it is: How much can you trust book reviews on the web? Turns out, very little. My journey in self-publishing started at the end of this past October. I had [...]