I may be diving into dangerous waters here but for those of you who know me, there will be no surprise. Poking the bear is what I do for a living so why would I avoid it in my Author world. No, this is not me taking potshots at politics, social media, or the government, though they are all target-rich environments no matter your position. I want to talk about reviews.
I am very fortunate to have a great following in almost all my chosen Genera, and in those, I am still growing (well that’s all of them really.) I have a generous and forgiving readership that appears to enjoy the way I spin a tale. There will always be those on the fringe that I have somehow offended to the core with no discernable source of insult, but that’s still a valid review.
The only racist, biased, prejudiced, intolerant, misogynistic, or negative views perceived in my books are what you brought with you at the beginning of the tale. I go out of my way to avoid such content because, as a business person, it limits the market readership and is just bad for sales besides being the wrong thing to do as a good person. If you think you find that in my books, I urge you to reread that part without your filters on and see if it’s still there.
I think I am a good person and as opinions go, that’s the only one I really worry about, besides my family of course and they are free with their opinions! They say family keeps us humble and mine is very good at that.
If you don’t like any particular book I have penned, try a different genre, it might suit you better with differing characters (buy as many as you need to be sure you got a good overview of my style, I suggest them all.)
Now you might be asking what bad thing happened for me to inspire this narrative? It’s quite the opposite. I noted recently that my reviews had climbed by a significant number, with some cases more than doubling from my previous count. I am told from a little research Amazon is combining the Goodreads reviews with their existing ones for a combined consensus of the Author’s quality.
In EVERY case the flood of new reviews into Amazon has kept my ratings at 4+ stars for every title I released. I was at 4+ before the merging of the scores and I expect Amazon has a way of rooting out duplicates.
This is humbling, as I do work very hard to provide a quality story, and my family will attest to my time commitment to do so. As an Indie I still have the proofing and quality challenges that hit me regularly in my reviews, but even that seems to get overlooked with the promise of another book in the series!
I just wanted to thank all you readers out there who keep me relevant in the world of eBook publishing. We live or die by those reviews.