Doug BrotherofCats Dandridge

When I self-published my first eBook, The Deep Dark Well, I was a little fearful of getting reviews. You know, the kind that tell you that you are nothing as a writer, and how dare you darken their page with your lack of ability. I thought I had a good book. The long rejection letters I had received from two big name publishers gave me reason to believe that it was better than most of the submissions they received. The same from friends or members of critique groups who had read some of the book. There is still that fear, and I went to Amazon to look at my first review with a sense of dread. And surprise, he liked it. He only gave me a three, since I had a lot of formatting problems on Kindle, which I have since learned to correct before putting something out, but the book itself was praised. Then I got two five star reviews. And since then, nothing. The book has sold, some, as have the other nine I have put out online. But the reviews are not coming in. And from what I have read, an author lives or dies on his or her reviews. I have also recently read that many writers get every friend and family member they can use their influence on to write a review, and have also heard that people are starting to discount those reviews, unless they are accompanied by a Top Reviewer tag. I have avoided asking friends to write reviews, feeling that it would be better to have actual readers review the work. But when only about one in thirty buying the book write a review I wonder if that is a workable strategy.
Recently I have put two of my books into the KDP Select program, more as an experiment to see if it works than anything else. For those who don’t know, KDP Select makes the author pull that particular work from any other outlet that might sell it, including their own website, and sell exclusively on Amazon for a 90 day period. The author can then renew, or take the book out of the select program. One of the benefits of the program is the ability to promote it for free on Amazon for five days during that 90 day period. So, on September 7 through 11 The Deep Dark Well will be offered for free on Amazon. I hope a lot of people go there and download this labor of love for free. And I hope more than one in thirty of them write a review, or at least click the write button on the book page. I have no control over that part of it, I can only hope that enough will comment to send it over the top. Go over to Amazon at The Deep Dark Well Page and get yours during that five day period. It’s science fiction as written by the old masters, with science.