Another question of quality: self-pub.

Amazon reviews are useless these days. Because everyone knows that you have to get a bunch of reviews to get any sales traction, a lot of self-pubbers get everyone they know to write nice reviews, then they pay for more from sites like Fiverr, at $5 a pop. The reviews on Amazon.co.uk are often a better indication, because most of the paid reviewers forget there's anywhere outside Amazon.com Goodreads is also a better guide, because that's where the avid readers hang out, and the paid-for reviews are a much smaller proportion there. The Amazon best-sellers list has some reasonable stuff on it, too, because (obviously) they've sold enough to prove they're not complete turkeys.

I don't know what the answer is. It would be lovely to have some sort of independent quality control, someone who just reads the stuff and says: yes, that's as good as a traditionally published book. But I just don't know how it would work. I read and reviewed around 50 self-pubbed books last year, but that's a miniscule proportion of the total.

If anyone wants my best-of list for the year, here it is: 5 Self-Published Gems of 2013 | Fantasy Review Barn All of them are professional quality, and I enjoyed them.

 

There was a huge stink a while ago b/c Goodreads removed a lot of reviews that it thought were harassing to the author and out of line, and the writers of those reviews were incensed. Without going into all the mucky details, it seems that the problem was started by self-pubbed authors with no one to advise them otherwise who responded inappropiately to 1 star reviews, the reviewer then responded back, and war breaks out. Now if you get a 1 star review, Goodreads gives you a notification telling authors not to respond.

As far as I know, the reader reviews are genuine and aren't paid for on or through Goodreads. They do have an advertising program for self-pubbed authors, but it's not paid comments in the reviews. So they are pretty accurate with a large enough sample size. (This is not to say self-pubbed auhtors don't pay people outside of GR.)

 

That is the big conundrum, how to stand out from the squalor works that are self-published.

Amazon reviews are okay, and they do drive sales, as I've evidenced from my own works (I could go into detail, but that's not the point of the thread). One of the ways to determine the validity of reviews is to simply take a review you think is legitimate and then click on the reviewer's history. That and the verified purchase is some help.

What you did, Caged Maiden, is what most readers who are willing to take a chance on self-published books. They look at the sample. That's not guaranteed to help.

One thing that might help a self-published author is to get blurbs from other authors, and the more respected or good-selling, the better it will be. Most authors with any readership are hesitant to write a blurb for a book they don't think is up to snuff. But getting an author to read and offer a blurb can be a challenge.

Getting reviews on independent review blogs can help a self-published author some, but that really depends on the blog. Large and small are inundated with requests, and many of the major ones don't accept self-published books.

My 4 books currently have (in order of publication) 32, 12, 5, 25 reviews on Amazon and 8, 4, 1, 1 for review blogs (with some reviews pending). The majority of the amazon are from folks I have no clue who they are. Getting reviews is difficult. I guess I don't press family and friends to review as much as I could. I've had a few crit partners in the review my works on Amazon, or mention them on their blogs, but usually those are writers who've been published. But like PaulineMRoss said, reviews are important for a book to get traction. Readers are more suspect, and like I indicated--they look at the publication and review date (some reviews appear the same day or a day or two after release. Those are discounted by most potential readers. Verified sales, and checking history of the reviewer, those are also good clues.

The other way to tell if a self-published book is decent is the Amazon rating. Ratings (Kindle for example) between 50,000 and 100,000 means it's selling 1-2 copies a day. 25,000 to 49,000 a few more. 10,000 to 24,000 up to 10 or 12 a day, and it goes up from there. That's a good sign of a quality book. (there are charts that can be found online that approximate sales based on ranks on Amazon).

But that is mostly for the reader to determine, and not for the self-published author to break out. On other boards, and I think there is merit to this, is for an author to get multiple titles out there. Self-publishing one novel to test the waters isn't always a good way to test the waters because of this.

I'll add another thing that can help a self-published author get noticed is a professional/well done cover, especially in fantasy.

Note: I'm published by a small press, which is somewhere between a big publishing house and self-publishing, if you ask me. It does help getting some sales and events, but the lines get further blurred as many self-published authors create their own publishing company which they publish under, which might benefit a self-published author giving it a try.

 

Sounds like a lot more solid arguments for my independent appraisal and rating system.

My three books have hardly any reviews on amazon, but a handful on goodreads. I have never chased anyone to put ratings or reviews up (which is probably why I don't have many), but I'd guess I'd know about a third of the reviewers/raters. Good consistency among the raters though, with no qualitative difference between those who know me and those who don't. If anything the better reviews are from strangers as my friends are not the sort of people to get too excited about anything.

 

Hi,

Just to throw one more iron into the fire - getting reviews is hard. Damned hard. I don't solicit them, don't approach book bloggers mostly, and I don't get family and friends to write them. On average I would guess I get one review per hundred to one hundred and fifty sales of a book. That's a very wild estimate by the way. So if say you take Maverick where I have 24 reviews that would equate to somewhere between 2,400 and 3,600 sales - which is somewhere in the ballpark. I actually don't know the true number.

However, I see other books by other authors out there with hundreds of reviews, and really terrible rankings, and each time I think to myself, did they really have tens of thousands of sales? Or is something else going on?

At the end of the day the only way to be sure of a book's quality is to "look inside". But this is no different to going to a physical bookstore and browsing.

Cheers, Greg.

 

One self-pubbed author who keeps very accurate statistics reckoned she got 1 review per 187 sales, so I'd say your number is a good guess. Bear in mind also that there's a lag in reviews. Especially if a book is cheap or by an unknown author, readers can take months or even years to get round to reading it. I've got stuff on my Kindle I bought two years ago that I'm only just now posting reviews for.

Be very wary of an unknown author with a recently published book with hundreds of reviews. I once tracked this in detail for an author I was suspicious of. He published his sales figures (big mistake) so I was able to see that the bump in sales *followed* the bump in reviews. That means paid for reviews.

 

I think my numbers were about 1 in 220. These numbers just illustrate how hard actual reader reviews are hard to come by. One other thing to keep in mind, if a self-pubbed author doesn't like a review, more times than not he can get Amazon to remove it for a number of reasons (even made up). I have seen several complaints about this practice, as well as the review buying services available.

I had a review for one of my stories on Goodreads that had been there for a couple of months before I was even aware of it, so I would say author consent is not required.

This works, and it doesn't. If your somewhere in the sweet spot of the the books sales, you can get an idea of its popularity at the time, but if you catch the title in the early stages of that bell curve, or at the end (say a year and a half after release), then your aren't seeing a true representation of how the book did, or is going to do. I'm not arguing the numbers, because they are close to accurate (Amazons ranking system is about as broke as its rating system).
I will say that if a book has been out for better than a year and it still ranks in the top 100,000, then the author is doing something right, but that still doesn't mean the title is great. I picked up one that was very well ranked, (I believe it was like 15,000 something) and it was so bad I was tempted to hunt down the author and ask him his secret on getting such good sales.

I'm just taking the patience approach.
Look, my first book was good, but it had some editing issues that would likely get some people on these boards fired up and throwing stones. Perhaps that first book deserves to be lost in a sea of crap. One day I will go back and fix it up, but it sold well (much better than I expected), and its life cycle is at the wrong side of the bell-curve for an author with one title. My second title is better, but it won't sell much better than the first. My third title will be an improvement again, and it will be the last of the series, which will drive the sales of one and two back up, since many readers wait for an entire series to come out before buying (especially with indies).
My fourth title will be a stand-alone. By that time (another 2 years away), I will have four titles on Amazon, and I believe my work will begin to float to the top of the cesspool.
I don't concern myself with other peoples tripe that sells well because of bogus reviews and get-rich-quick schemes (writing a new title every couple of months). I focus on my work, and make every effort to release quality titles. I have a strong belief that if I write quality it will eventually float to the top.

But, again, I think I've mentioned this before; I'm in no hurry. I don't write to be rich. I write because the characters in my head won't shut their traps.

 

Hi Caged Maiden,

In my case they mostly don't. My sales aren't that great and I have absolutely no marketing strategy save to write more books. Still I have a few fans and bring in enough to keep the cats in style and I'm happy with that.

C. Hollis, yeah there is a facility to remove reviews for certain reasons, but Amazon is quite strict with them as I understand it. (I haven't applied to have any of the reviews on my books removed even though some of them are completely unfair - and one is more than a little disturbing.) The main reason they remove reviews is actually that the reviewer is another author. It's the main reason I don't write reviews for books. The other reason being that it looks bad - one author back slapping another. It's a lose lose for me.

Cheers, Greg.

Cheers, Greg.

 

I have read that Ms. Hocking did use social media to advertise her books. But what I think benefited her was that she had several books to offer when she self-published. I think she had something like 17 books written (not sure if that's how many she published), which speaks to her dedication to the craft. She kept writing.