Soon after I began writing reviews and publishing them on my blog, I asked another author if he would review my book of short stories and post it on his blog. He said that he didn’t write reviews because he didn’t want to be a target for disgruntled authors who might not like what he said about their work. I took his point and decided that if I couldn’t say something good about a book, I would say nothing about it in public. I also want to support good authors, not talk about books that aren’t so good. Who wants to hear about them anyway? So my policy for reviewing is that I will only publish reviews for books that I can give 3 or more stars for. That doesn’t mean that I give 3-5 stars for everything I read; it means that I don’t publish my 1 & 2 star reviews. If the author had requested a review from me, then I send them a few private notes. However, in the same way that fake 5 star reviews have consequences for the whole rating system, so does this policy. Many reviewers, … [Read more...]
A different kind of book trailer
We all know what the usual sort of book trailer looks like (see the second video below for an example) but here's a different kind of thing. It's the really soft sell, aimed to grab people's attention with humour. Why am I posting this as part of the Celebration of Indie Excellence? Because I just put it together, think it's really cute and figure you would enjoy it. Also because perhaps it symbolised the kind of creativity that Indies authors represent. The video is just for fun. I'm not really expecting it to sell books. It's shot in my garden, using the animals that live there in the staring roles. I'm the voice-over. I hope you enjoy it. It's 1 minute and 20 seconds. Here's the revamped traditional style trailer for You CAn't Shatter Me. This one is 1 minute. Do you like them? If so, could you pop over to You Tube, click the like button and share them. Since they are both new and so have no views and no 'likes' yet (at the time of writing), they look a little unloved. So … [Read more...]
