Tag: Reviews

Audience Anxiety…

Guest post
by Ken La Salle

I coined a new term today, which I’m calling “Audience Anxiety”.

Here’s how it came to be: I was out having breakfast with my best friend, Sean, this morning. (As it turns out, most of my Indies Unlimited pieces are inspired by breakfast.) I was telling him about the new podcast – So Dream Something, now available for FREE on iTunes – and asked him if he had listened to the most recent episode. Sean gave me one of those looks. You probably know the look. It was one of those, “Oh no. He’s hitting me up for something again,” looks. I usually see those when I’m talking up my new book, article, podcast with my friends and family. It took a few moments for Sean to get his response out, a rather sheepish sounding, “Uh, no. I haven’t.” Continue reading “Audience Anxiety…”

BUY/LIKE MY BOOK/PAGE/WEBSITE

I will, right after you kiss my A**

I’m sorry but I’ve hit the wall. I’m tired of it. I don’t want to be asked to “like” your product page or check out your website or buy your book. The fact that we follow each other on Twitter or are brand new Facebook friends just isn’t enough. We might get to the point where we talk about each other’s work and I may be interested in buying your book at some point but it can’t be the first thing you ask me to do. It absolutely has to stop. Continue reading “BUY/LIKE MY BOOK/PAGE/WEBSITE”

IU Survey: Do Reviews Belong in the Book Preview?

We get a lot of requests to feature books here on Indies Unlimited. As time allows, we like to preview those books before we commit to showcasing them here for a couple of reasons: If there is an obvious mistake (such as a typo in the book description or even the title), we can let the author know and give them an opportunity to fix it; and,
Since we don’t cover all genres of writing, we like to make sure the submission is a good fit for our site.
Lately, we have noticed a lot of authors seem to be using a large percentage of the front matter that makes up the “Look Inside” feature on Amazon. In some few instances, there was so much front matter, that none of the actual story was included in the preview.

You end up with a preview that consists of a title page, a page of boilerplate copyright info, an acknowledgements page, a dedication page, a list of other titles by this author, a poem, song lyric, or quote that author likes, a couple of pages of excerpts from pre-release reviews and then you’re out of space.

Is this a clever use of yet one more space to deploy marketing, or does it deprive the prospective buyer of the promised sample? Is it a deliberate attempt by the author to hide a weak start to an otherwise good book? In short, WTF?

We’d like to know your thoughts.

Is including reviews in the preview section of your book a good idea?

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Anarchy in Indie World

I have a friend who says, “We always are, what we were”. And, she means it. I’ve known her since we were thirteen years old and she says there’s a part of us that stays the same no matter what age we are or how much we try to change. She might be right.

I always wanted to be a punk. In the seventies, growing up in small town Canada I listened to music no one had heard of, had a funny haircut, wore the wrong clothes, and from time to time got into a little bit of trouble. Due to the fact that my mother may read this, and there is no parental statute of limitations, that’s about as specific as I’m going to get, but suffice to say, I know a little bit about breaking rules. Really, I do.

So, when I was told that in order to be a successful self-published author there are certain things you can and can’t do I immediately wanted to prove “them” wrong. You know “them”. “They’ve” been telling us what to do our whole lives. I listened to “them” for a long time but now that I’ve found my dharma and I’m doing what I always dreamed of doing, I’m going to do it my way. These are some of the rules that an Indie-gone-rogue punk author like myself breaks on a regular basis: Continue reading “Anarchy in Indie World”