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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Do you really want to be an old time author and publish your book traditionally or do you want to be an eBook author and self-publish your content on-line? That’s the question. An old time author! Are you one of them? You know the traditional author that has beat his head against publisher’s front doors [...]

In the past, I’ve blogged my thoughts about the review process, and I’m at it again. It’s the wonderful experience when publishing a book. Every author, whether self-published or traditional, has a star-filled future from one to five. After being in the public eye since 2008, I’ve come to one conclusion. The entire review process [...]

We can talk all day about the importance of good writing/editing, good cover art, and good blurbs when it comes to selling ebooks, but obscurity is the toughest thing for us to overcome. Whether you’ve written a thrilling science fiction adventure or a manual on dog training, nobody is going to line up to buy [...]