In a rational world of publishing, nothing should be more persuasive than great reviews. Strangely, though, they often don’t seem to move the sales needle very much. Should you care?
This morning I opened my email to find a message from someone whose name I didn’t recognize. It read in it’s entirety as follows:
I absolutely loved the Alexandria project, and would love to read your next book, can you add me to your announcement list.
That certainly got my day off to a very pleasant start. Checking in on Twitter, I saw that Marcus Case, the author of The Bomb Makers (an excellent thriller that I recently reviewed here) had posted a five star review of my book at GoodReads and Amazon, and a shorter review at his own site, which read as follows:
I rarely write reviews, and only choose to do so when I read a book that I want to shout about. The Alexandria Project by Andrew Updegrove is one such book. It really is a marvellous read and I couldn’t recommend it highly enough. I think it’s the only book that I’ve ever returned to in the middle of the night ‘just to get another chapter in’ before falling asleep. And I did that twice. On the same night.
I next visited GoodReads to read Marcus’s full review, and saw that someone else had also just given the book either a 4 or 5 star rating. This was in addition to another very nice review that someone had posted at GoodReads a couple of days before.
When I responded to the person that had sent me the email I quoted above, he replied at length, including this observation in his response:
What I really liked about The Alexandria Project, was the realism of the computer systems described in it, I could understand as an engineer how these things could work, I loved the idea of the iBall, and tried to work out how they could be implemented…The technology seemed to be part of the story, almost a character in the story, rather than just being an incidental prop.
This was very nice to hear, because handling the technical part of the plot was a double challenge. First, ensuring that the technical elements would support the plot rather than distract from it took some doing, as did making sure that the explanations would be comprehensible to a lay person without boring an expert. Quite a few reviewers of the former persuasion have commented that they had had no problem understanding what was going on, and with only one exception I can recall, techies have found that the technical bits engaged them as well. Chalking up another win in the expert category therefore always brings a sense of relief.
Given that it’s easy to go for days or weeks with no positive (or any) reinforcement from readers at all, this morning’s input has therefore been very welcome indeed. You can already guess what I saw when I checked my Amazon rank, of course: one sale in the past week.
The question an author can’t help asking on a morning like this, then, is this: if he’s written such a great book, how come so few people are buying it?
The answers, I think, are several. And it’s hard to figure out a good way around any of them.
The first one is rather obvious. In the old days, reviews tended to be in newspapers, on radio stations, and in magazines, all with quite large audiences. And there were only so many places where reviews appeared. So when an author got a great review, it was likely to make a larger impact on those that are exposed to it. And because the audiences were often local, there was more chance for buzz to build.
Yes, the same thing can, and in theory should, happen through social media, but my impression is that social media works better to reinforce momentum for a book rather than to create it. And authors are more than half of the problem, because social media is so abused by so many authors so often that anyone that receives a book-related tweet or other ping is more likely to ignore it than to take it to heart.
There’s another problem, too, which is that the great majority of reviews are going to be read by far fewer people than in the old days, and the number of available reviews to read are almost endless. So the impact of any single review – or even of 100 favorable reviews for your book at Amazon – is likely to be less, in the latter case because someone has to land on your Amazon page to see them to begin with (and why will they do that if they don’t know about all of those great reviews?)
The more subtle issue, though, is that no matter how great a review may be, there are lots of other great books out there with great reviews as well. So in one sense, the effect of a long list of great reviews is more to qualify your book as being of potential appeal, rather than to assert a strong “buy me!” effect.
Another way of making the same point is that it’s almost impossible to differentiate your book from all of the other great books out there. You can’t say it’s cheaper than many other good books (because it isn’t), and you can’t say it will tell secrets that can’t be learned anywhere else (because it won’t). And you can’t expect people to believe that your book is actually better than those written by lots of great writers that have come before, or who are releasing new books right now (because, well, I’m really sorry about that).
In fact, it’s usually impossible to differentiate a book of fiction from any other capable author’s book of fiction, until someone actually read it. Only then will they get a chance to see whether there’s some subtle magic in the way you weave and present your tale that makes them hunger for more.
I’d like to close by sharing some sort of revelation that will help you solve that conundrum. But unfortunately, I can’t. What I can share is that reading a good review of a book you have written should be reward enough. Knowing that you’ve connected with someone, and that they’ve been able to appreciate your skills as a writer is in a very real sense a more appropriate reward for all the hard work you’ve invested than any monetary return would be.
And it certainly can help a Saturday morning get off to a pleasant start. How do you put a dollar value on that?
Have you discovered The Alexandria Project?
Andrew Updegrove: Tales of Adversego 
I wish someone would do an analysis, in terms of gender, regarding the effectiveness of social media on indie book success. I believe women are more inclined to share their personal experiences. In blogs and guest postings, they talk freely about children, illness, crises, the struggles facing the writer, aging parents, chocolate, favorite meals, etc., and because other women share many of these same experiences, the writer succeeds in establishing superficial, cyber-age “personal” relationships with them. When readers become involved in this way with a writer, they view the writer’s books in a special light. Assuming a writer’s book isn’t drivel, the reader will sense an obligation to read and to like their “friend’s” book.
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That would be quite interesting. It would also be interesting to see whether it was more successful in some genres than others (e.g., romance vs. mystery).
I think that there is a real discontinuity between readers engaging at a blog and readers actually buying books. The reason, I assume, is because people may read and engage at blogs for reasons that have nothing to do with discovering books to read. Authors read author blogs, for instance, to pick up tips and share experiences, and seem to actually buy each others books much less often than one might hope.
I think that this is true across all social media. Authors would like to use social media for that purpose, the people reading their log entries, tweets and so on are not doing so to be promoted to, so there’s perhaps a built in resistance to reacting favorably when that happens.
This is one reason I’ve spent more time engaging (and even advertising) with GoodReads than with any other site – because people are actually there because they want to talk about books. And, back to your original point, it seems that far more women than men actively engage there as well.
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Andrew: your recent expose of a certain book-marketing expert would seem to support what you say here about the disconnect between people who read blogs and then actually buy the bloggers’ books. The marketer in question appears to have many enthusiastic followers, yet her own book sales are anything but impressive.
If you are seeing some results from time/money devoted to Goodreads, I would certainly like to learn more about that. What I’ve read argues against Goodreads as very useful.
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Barry, I don’t know why there’s no “reply” option displaying under your comment, so I’m placing this reply as close as I can; sorry for the confusing placement.
I don’t think I’ve made sufficient use of GoodReads to be qualified to pass judgment one way or the other. To the good, when I ran an ad against a book giveaway (ten paperback copies; a one month signup period) over 1200 people added my book to their shelves, a few of whom went on to read it, although it’s hard to tell how many did so without being exposed to other marketing I’ve done (e.g., some also already followed my blog). Of the ten that received copies direct from me, only a couple posted reviews, although a few more might have ranked it.
Still, to have 1200 people be aware enough of your book to add it to their “to read” shelves is pretty impressive, since I can’t think of another promotional way to motivate that sort of behavior. So the bigger question to me is, “how can you motivate them to take the next step, and actually read the book?” That’s a tough one, because the same people might have added another book – or a dozen books – to their shelves on the same day.
On the ad side, for my $50 budget, the ad was displayed on something like 70,000 page views – all for free, since you only pay when someone clicks on the ad. The problem is, only a small number did, on average about one person every other day. So on the one hand, the advertising was incredibly cheap and successful, as measured by ad impressions. But since ad impressions aren’t the goal – sales are – it wasn’t very successful, since only a few people clicked on the ad, and only a few, at most, then bought the book as well.
As of now, my book has 15 reviews and 25 ratings at GoodReads, which provides some useful validation. But sales? Not many so far.
So I guess what I can say so far is that establishing a credible presence at GoodReads is probably useful for adding credibility to your book, and hence is useful as part of an overall promotional campaign. That said, I haven’t personally figured out yet how to use GoodReads to result in any meaningful number of sales.
The one thing I would say is that I would definitely run another ad and giveaway campaign as one part of an aggressive launch of a new title. Once you’re GoodReads site is set up, the time investment is minimal and the advertising costs very low, so if you’re going to do a blitz of promotion, this should definitely be part of it, IMHO.
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Andrew–Thank you very much for your detailed reply to my question regarding Goodreads. I will keep your experience in mind when I get ready to issue (I am a little tired of the term “launch”) my next book, some time in September or October. Thanks again.
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All so true, Andrew. Thank you. In this age of information overload, that sense of connection is indeed a precious thing.
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My pleasure, Barry. What do you think are the most important elements of a campaign to properly support issuing a new book? I’d be intrigued to hear your thoughts.
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Andrew: I’m going to forward to your email address a proposal sent to me by a marketing outfit called The Editorial Department. The founder (not much involved now) is the co-author of a good book, along with the editor who just sent me his reader’s report on my new novel (the book is Self-editing for Fiction Writers). I will also send along my questions regarding the proposal.
You might be interested in a recent exchange I had with Porter Anderson, a well-known publishing authority. This was in relation to his post yesterday at Writer Unboxed, a good site on craft and publishing. In a nutshell, I speculated that we will eventually see self-publishing dominated by two groups or classes: The Geek Squad (tech wizards), and those with sufficient means to pay others to manage the drudgery related to self-promotion. All the rest will languish in the Outer Darkness, or so I see the future of self-publishing.
As you will see in The Editorial Department’s proposal, Goodreads is presented as a useful, economical component in a marketing plan. I’m going to use it.
As to your question–“What do you think are the most important elements of a campaign to properly support issuing a new book?”– I wish I knew. All I do know is that I’m not going to spend countless hours trying to master a field that’s entirely different from the one I’m concerned with. I will pay for marketing expertise IF I can find a source that’s able and willing to convince me–with data–that what I’m buying is likely to be effective. I have no expectation of any such person operating in the agent/client style you and I want–ain’t gonna happen any time soon. But I’m still hoping to find people who make sense, who don’t admonish me to blog blog blog, and slave over guest posts, and tweet my head off, etc. That, too, ain’t gonna happen.
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