I need to talk to you about something very important to independent authors:
Independent authors need ratings.
Independent authors don’t have large advertising budgets; as a consequence, feedback and ratings are vital for building an audience and demonstrating that their work is valued.
I know, I know: it’s a hassle. Amazon won’t let you leave just a rating – you have to leave at least a sentence feedback – and writing something vague and nondescript like, “I really enjoyed reading this novel!” is unsatisfying, whilst writing a more meaningful review that exactly captures your feelings about the book is hard work. I hear you. I’m working on being better at it myself.
But, to independent authors, a positive single sentence review with a rating is no small thing at all. Get enough of those and you can get listed on websites which will only list your book if it has above a certain number of reviews: it all helps, you see.
In January 2013, I added up my sums and determined that over 1,600 people had downloaded ‘AFK’, my free Kindle novel, from amazon.com. Only four of these people had left a rating. That’s a quarter of 1%, and for a book they got for nothing.
If you have read and enjoyed one of my novels, please consider leaving a review and rating at the place you obtained it from – be that Amazon, Smashwords, Lulu, Barnes & Noble, Apple or right here on this website in the comments section for the book you read. If you want to go that one step further, a Facebook/Twitter/[insert latest SM thing here] share would be wonderful. If you blog and would like to review one of my books there, that would be fantastic.
But a single sentence review at Amazon is also great. Really. It helps me tremendously and I cannot tell you just how much I love seeing just that an extra person has read one of my books and enjoyed it.
You’ll put a smile on my face, I promise you.
What the Huck? 
I take it you’d like only positive reviews.
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Hi Luna. I doubt anyone would believe me if I said I would *like* negative reviews! I ultimately don’t *mind* negative reviews, however, so long as they’re fair. A friend of mine who has no knowledge of Second Life once read AFK and said it wasn’t for him. Fair enough. If someone were to critique aspects of the plot or my writing style or the technical accuracy of my books I could probably live with that (though, as I say, I might not ‘like’ it). What does irk, though, is when people leave a one star review and a line of text that is either difficult to interpret or suggests they have not read the book or understood a key element. For example, ‘The grammar was poor’ for a novel mostly based on dialogue in SL where I am intentionally mimicking the writing style of certain residents.
But anyway the point of the post above is not to try to dissuade people who disliked one of my novels from leaving a bad review, but to try to persuade people who liked one of my novels to leave one. If ten people read a book I wrote and nine like it but don’t leave a review whilst the one who hated it leaves a bad one, you can understand why that might peeve me just a little as a writer, right?
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