a note of appreciation
I would just like to take a moment to thank Michael Philips, who left a nice review of CLOAK GAMES OMNIBUS ONE on Amazon UK this weekend.
I mentioned on Facebook that CLOAK GAMES OMNIBUS ONE could use some UK reviews. What happened was that I had a Bookbub scheduled for CLOAK GAMES OMNIBUS ONE in the UK on July 1st. At the time, CLOAK GAMES OMNIBUS ONE didn’t have any reviews. However, on the afternoon of June 30th, the first review appeared, and it was one star. That would nerf the Bookbub pretty quickly.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion, of course. It’s just that this opinion was slightly ill-timed from my perspective. 🙂
So on the night of June 30th I mentioned on Facebook that CLOAK GAMES OMNIBUS ONE could really use some reviews on Amazon UK, and Michael left one before the Bookbub went out, which was really helpful. The book got up to #202 on July 1st, and was #1 in Low Fantasy on Amazon UK.
I would also like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has left a review on my books over the last seven years. It really helps! According to Amazon, on Amazon US my books have a total of 4,600 reviews, and on Amazon UK they have 2,230 reviews.
That is a lot of reviews, and thanks for reading!
-JM
JM wrote: “Everyone is entitled to their opinion, of course.”
I have an opinion on that! 🙂
One problem with the Amazon review system (in my opinion) is that sometimes I’d like to leave a written review without assigning stars to it. In other words, I’d like to leave information for other prospective readers without affecting the overall star rating.
The most common reason for me wanting to do that is that a book isn’t what I expected and I think that it won’t be what others expect either. Yet, while I didn’t really like it, I can easily see that it’s a fine book and others might like it (or they might not).
For example, let’s say someone (definitely not me!) loved your Frostborn series and then read Thief Trap and didn’t really like it because he expected something different. And indeed, someone (not me), did pretty much write exactly that on one of the Cloak Games books’ reviews. Writing that would be helpful to some other Frostborn fans who may not have liked it or should at least have their expectations changed. However, giving it one star was definitely NOT helpful because I think it likely turned away readers who would’ve otherwise liked the series very much.
I find myself in a similar position fairly often. I’d like to write something about a book that I think would be helpful, but there simply isn’t any star rating I can assign to it that makes sense.
I would not want to be the one in charge of administering Amazon’s review system! It must be a constant headache.
That’s why I never leave reviews on Amazon. (That, and Amazon doesn’t allow people to leave reviews on competitors’ products, and it sometimes inconsistently applies that policy to writers.) If I want to write a review of a book, I’ll do it here on my site. The downside, of course, is that far fewer people will see it than a Amazon review. The upside is that I can say whatever I want and don’t have to fit it into an arbitrary numeric score.
That is the challenge of writing in multiple genres – some people who like FROSTBORN are never going to read CLOAK GAMES and vice versa.