Writing on his Fast Company blog, Adam Pennenberg said this about book reviews:
Good reviews help, at best,
incrementally, and bad reviews hurt, at worst, incrementally. They're published
then they disappear, living on as pithy testimonials on authors' Web sites, or
on the back covers or in the fronts of paperback editions.
It wasn't always this way. A
rave review 20 years ago in, say, The New
York Times, Washington Post,
or Publishers Weekly could
usher an obscure author into the limelight.”
He mentions that his first
book got about 30 reviews in a variety of publications, his second got seven,
and his third (and current) looks to get just three, because the number of publications carrying book reviews keeps shrinking. I’ve noticed the same
trend with my own books (even though I was never ushered into the limelight…).
Now it’s bloggers and Amazon
reviews that make a difference. Pennenberg cites a study that shows the impact
of a one-star review is greater than that of a five-star review.
Of course with Amazon
reviews you’re at the mercy of anyone. Some years ago one of my books got a
review in which I was called names and was accused of stealing someone else’s
book title. It turns out this fellow had self-published a book with a vaguely similar
name and had posted hate-reviews for half a dozen other books as well.
Fortunately Amazon took down the reviews as well as the reviews of his own book
(he’d either written them all himself or happened to have half a dozen
reviewers with the same habit of using exclamation marks in every sentence).
On the other hand, I’ve been
fortunate to receive emails from people who have enjoyed my books and usually I
ask them to please post a review on Amazon or their other favorite online
site—and some are nice enough to take the time to do it. (Hint: if you’ve read
one of my books and liked it, it would be great if you could do the same.)
