Doug BrotherofCats Dandridge

I recently did a guest post at Linda R Harley’s Site, Rosebuz. My post, entitled How much is too much science?, is a post on my theme of getting the science right in science fiction. I am appreciative of Linda for allowing me to guest post on her blog, that of a book blogger who reviews books and gets the word out about independent writers. She performs a great service for independent authors and the reading community, and I look forward to the review she has promised of The Deep Dark Well. I have contacted several other book bloggers who have agreed to do author interviews or reviews in the future, depending on their schedules. I hope that happens, as it is a great boost in publicity. I have also had some who promised to do something and then didn’t. I sent a great deal of information to two bloggers, as well as a copy of one book for review, only to hear nothing after. For one I actually bought a webcam for a video interview. I tried to contact that blogger (though they actually called themselves a promoter) and kept getting a reply that they were still interested. I finally gave up. If they want to contact me that’s great. If not, I move on.
I still am not really sure how much publicity or reviews play into the success of a book online. One book, The Shadows of the Multiverse, has five 5 Star Reviews and went through its five day promotion on Amazon. I had planned for it to be the next book to take off after The Deep Dark Well, only it hasn’t happened. So far less that a hundred sales, though I still have hopes that it will someday take off, and even if it only sells forty books a month for the next couple of years it will have been worth the effort. Another science fiction novel, Exodus: Empires at War: Book One, just seemed to take off on its own. 1,300 sales in seven weeks, without the benefit of reviews or likes, though it has some of each now. I can only figure that a lot of the people who downloaded The Deep Dark Well when it was free, or bought it afterwards, wanted another of my books to read, and skipped over The Shadows of the Multiverse. Currently I have my Steampunk Fantasy, Daemon, on promotion, and based on past performance, I have no idea how it will do afterwards.
Is the effort of publicizing a book, whether through promotion, reviews or book blogging, really worth it? All I can say is it can’t hurt. Over the weekend I tried another method. I put a list of all of my current book on a page at the front of each ebook, with hyperlinks to their sales page on Amazon. I have also placed a The Favor of a Review section at the end of each book, along with a hyperlink to that book’s sales page where the reader can easily post a review. Will that help? I have no idea, but again it can’t hurt.