For the small press author who sees only a small advance (if he or she is lucky) and a trickle of royalties on a book, reviews are the real reward. Good reviews, preferably, but even a less-than-glowing review is gratifying in its own way. At least someone is talking about the novel you slaved over for months and months.
But are reviews effective promotional tools that result in sales? I don’t believe so; not the kind of reviews that so many small press authors chase, anyway.
Allow me to elucidate. With my first two novels, Ghost Kiss and Hollywood Hearts Ablaze, I did very little promotion beyond a couple of interviews. The idea that the author should be responsible for getting the word out through marketing or have to sell books directly to the public was anathema to me. If I wanted to be a salesman, I would go and sell something more profitable, like real estate.
After early spikes, sales of both novels were, on the whole, disappointing. So with Invasion at Bald Eagle, I decided I would suck it up and do everything I could think of to promote it. This included sending advance review copies to websites and publications that expressed a willingness to receive them unsolicited. (I had done something similar for Hollywood Hearts Ablaze without netting a single review, but that’s another discussion.)
Anyway, the president of one of the websites, which I won’t name, came back with this reply:
Thanks for your interest in [website], Kris. I will put your book details on our list and see if I can get it reviewed for you. I would love to help you out with an advertising package on [websites].
I’m sure we could get you a nice package advertising your book if you were interested. I will say that we are inundated* with requests for reviews and we do make anyone advertising on any of our sites a review priority.
So basically it was just an upsell in violation of Yog’s Law (‘Money flows towards the writer’). But then I thought, what the hell, maybe it might be worth it as a branding exercise, a way to get my name out there. So I sent back this:
Thanks for your reply. Do you have any information on the effectiveness of advertising with [websites]? Quantified return on investment and the like? Like most small press authors I don't have a lot of money to splash around on promotion, so I would need to get value for money.
The next day I received an email from a company called Bostick Communications at the email address listed on my website, which is different to the one I use for writing-related correspondence. I don’t know if the above-mentioned president passed on my name to Bostick or it was just coincidence (I haven’t heard back directly from Mr President). Anyway, Bostick offered me “a special rate of $95 to reach up to 30,000 applicable reviewers and media contacts…”.
It also included a link to some testimonials from author clients. So I began to investigate these authors and their books on Amazon.
First impressions were good: all the books had a considerable number of reviews. But then I scrolled down to see their Amazon sales ranks and got a nasty shock. One was ranked lower than 4 million and the second I checked was 7 million. These books were recent releases, I might add. To put that in perspective, my novel Ghost Kiss, which was published in 2008 and had been out of print for a few years, was ranked about 9 million.
The moral of the story is that reviews in and of themselves do not sell books, certainly not those that appear on Amazon and Goodreads, anyway. (A review in Esquire or the New York Times Review of Books is another matter.) What they are good for, however, is generating discussion. A vigorous online discussion about a book can draw in new readers who then want to form their own opinions. But for this to happen, a novel needs to have decent sales to begin with.
The abovementioned ‘bought’ reviews fail on two counts: they don’t fire up discussion (because the reader does his or her duty and then forgets all about it) and they don’t create sales (because who the hell buys a book on the strength of an anonymous review that often begins with the line, “Disclaimer: I was given a free copy of this book in return for an honest review”?).
Thus we arrive at the fundamental dilemma facing most small publishers. They have very little money to spend on promoting and selling books, but if they don’t spend money on promotion their books will not sell and they will very quickly go broke. Most of them publish for the love of reading and writing, and for that we should all be thankful, but while altruism might be its own reward, it is not self-sustaining.
*The editor at Grand Mal Press, Ryan Thomas, alerted me to this when I asked about promotional activities for Invasion at Bald Eagle. “I must warn however that in the past year review sites have become so inundated with small press and self published books that we've seen a definite decline in responses,” he wrote in an email. Welcome to 21st century publishing, folks, where seaworthy ships are lost in a gale-force wind of crap.