Tag Archives: amazon

My free reading challenge: I bought a book

Reading, Uncategorized, , , , , , ,

When I started my free reading challenge, I knew it was going to be difficult, so I gave myself some let-outs.

This week I used my joker to buy a book from an author I’ve read a free book from in order to help with their launch.

Like one – Love the next

A couple of weeks ago I read Kelly St Clare’s Fantasy of Frost (free in a giveaway). A high fantasy YA novel, I thoroughly enjoyed it. So when I discovered she had a sci-fi/dystopian novel due out 30th August, The Retreat, I wanted to support her launch. I asked for and got a review copy and loved The Retreat even more than I had Fantasy of Frost.

Cover of Kelly St Clare's The Retreat
Click for the preview

Pay with a review

So, all’s well so far, and I could just have stuck to my free reading challenge and “paid” with a review (which I have, check it out on the Paisley Piranha site).

Amazon are at it again

But I’ve also seen a lot this week about Amazon doing yet another purge of anything they consider less-than-ethical reviews, which always seems to mean removing reviews from legitimate independent authors, while leaving them to help spam-bot rip-off merchants.

Now, I know we authors get very exercised about vanishing reviews (they are – fortunately or unfortunately – very important), but as a reader I’m pretty cross about it, too. If I take the time to read a book, then further time and effort to arrange my thoughts about that book into a review, I don’t think it’s acceptable for Amazon to arbitrarily decide my review isn’t valid (especially since it’s evaluated by software, not a human being: way to wind up a human – make a machine more important than them!)

The value of ‘verified’

So, I bought a copy on the basis that a review from a “Verified Purchase” would be less liable to interference from the ‘Zon (and because I really wanted to support this 5-star read).

And now I’m scratching my head, wondering how come a dislike of Amazon’s practices means I’ve made an additional purchase with them…

Spread the (book) love

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I love books. You might have noticed. I don’t love ALL books, though, that would be impossible (and ambitious, given how many now exist in the world). I have my go-to genres, and even within them there are books I pick up and put down, books I abandon after reading the first couple of pages, those I read and enjoy, and those I LOVE.

We all have them – books you adore and want to foist on complete strangers in the street because they are SO GOOD.

Now, I’m British so I would never dream of foisting anything on a stranger, which may or may not be an opportunity lost to the authors I love. But there is another way of shouting about brilliant books.

It’s reviews, of course – a way to tell the world about a great book and help recruit a new audience for it. I participate in a book blog (as one of the Paisley Piranhas, check us out), and I also post reviews on Goodreads and Amazon. Please, if you enjoy a book, tell people so. I promise, you will make the writer’s day.

Tell the world

This next bit is for hardcore fans, or book reviewers who want to get a bigger audience for their reviews because, I’ll be honest, it is a bit more work. However, it’s not a lot more work for the impact it has.

I’ve just discovered (apologies, I can’t link to the original post because I didn’t save it – I didn’t think it couldn’t possibly work until I actually tried it – my bad!) that it’s possible to share reviews across numerous Amazon platforms with very little effort – and given that you’ve exerted yourself to compose a review, don’t you want the biggest possible audience for it?

If you want to shout about a favourite book or writer and make sure EVERYONE hears, all you need to do is follow the steps below:

1. Open up your local version of Amazon and find the book you want to review. I’m using Kim Curran as my example because her books are fabulous and should have a bigger audience (i.e. everyone), and also because this is the first review I’ve done using this method and I’m wired that it works.

2. On the address line, you’ll have something that looks like this: http://www.amazon.co.uk/GLAZE-Kim-Curran-ebook/dp/B00K9UYLR4/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1453468983&sr=1-1&keywords=glaze+kim+curran

Yeah – snappy or what?! Remove everything except for http://www.amazon.WHATEVER/dp/B00K1REF321/, so it looks like this: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00K9UYLR4/

3. Copy this shortened address and paste it into a new line. Change the .WHATEVER to the alternative Amazon location where you want to leave your review (I ended up with a row of address lines with .com; .co.uk; .ca; .com.au to cover the main English-speaking sites.

4. Write your review at one of the addresses.

5. Cut and paste it to the other locations. Save them all.

Ta da – four reviews for the price of one, and a couple more continents full of readers have the benefit of your views on the book you loved so they can decide whether to try it.

I’ve just done my second review, for the equally fantastic The Territory by Sarah Govett and it was even faster than my first. Do give it a try!

 

The art of knowing when to stop

My books, Writing, , , , , , , ,

I am in the thick of final, final, FINAL proofing for my next novel, The Last Dreamseer.

Somehow, I thought it would be quicker than this. I’ll explain my editing process: I’ve written the book, had writer friends look at it, revised and revised again. It’s then been to a professional editor for substantive edits (what’s wrong with the plot/characters), and revised. And then to a line editor (what’s wrong with the sentences), and revised. It’s then been printed out and read through by me, as well as being proofed by two professionals and fed through my Kindle to catch any errors I couldn’t see on the PC screen. I’ve then gone through the formatting, so all that was needed was to upload the final version to my retailers (Amazon and Smashwords).

I thought it would take me maybe an hour.

Two days.

It’s the oddest thing, but reading it through on the Amazon on-line checker made me see all manner of repetitions (and a few, plain, good-old typos) that had managed to escape all the eyes that have looked through the book so far.

Finally, it’s now done and uploaded and I’m relieved to see the back of it, if I’m honest.

Cover of Katy Haye's The Last Dreamseer
It’s beautiful … but it’s time it got off my PC and out into the real world.

Because the thing is, writing is the kind of art that doesn’t ever have to be finished. As well as checking for typos and errors, I was also aware of my fingers twitching over the keyboard, while my mind nagged at me, “Is that the right verb? Are you sure?” and “Maybe that scene would be better if it took place outside instead of in her room.”

I had to grit my teeth and stop myself making some unnecessary changes, thankful that I had a deadline because otherwise I might still be tinkering with the thing on my deathbed.

So that’s my tip for this week. If you have a piece you can’t stop messing about with, but you’re confident it is, fundamentally, fine as it is, then set yourself a deadline and move on. Publish it, if you plan to self-publish, or get it sent off to agents and editors.

And then move on to the next. Because that’s the other ‘always’ – there’ll always be another story to write.

And I can’t wait to get on with my next.

Spoilt for Choice

Reading, , , , , ,
An array of great books waiting to be read
How I feel facing my recently acquired TBR pile.

I was in enough trouble yesterday when I drafted this post. Then I went to the library. I didn’t need any more books, I wasn’t going to get any more books … but I thought I might as well have a little look, just in case. Yeah, well, all readers know how that one ends.

So I’ve now got 5 books from the library, 3 just arrived from Amazon, 2 previews on my Kindle that I want to download and read, and 3 loaned from friends that I “must read”.

This is good, because I’d hate to run out of books, but such a surfeit of wonders also makes me uneasy because I’ve found in the past that when I’ve got lots of books waiting, the first couple are read while the rest slide into my TBR pile, never to surface again.

It’s as though, once they lose the gloss of ‘new’ (to me) I don’t love them so much and would rather move onto the next new thing rather than reading something I’ve had kicking around for weeks.

I hate to think I’m so fickle, and maybe I’m a victim of The Paradox of Choice (click through if you’re interested in the psychology of it). In short, the idea is that more choice makes it harder to make a decision, rather than easier.

Problem is, I’d hate to have less choice in books – because the nightmare that wakes me screaming is that I’ve run out of things to read.

Since cloning isn’t yet available, I guess there is a simple alternative…

Young person facedown on an open book with other books around them