I like seeing reviews of my book. What author wouldn’t?
That said, doesn’t paying for reviews take away from the mystique of having a true-blue reader give you their opinion?
During the course of the time that Flagrant Foul has been published, I never really gave much thought to shelling out money to some review site to give their two cents. Part of the reason was purely financial. Seriously, if you’re already a self-published author and you didn’t really have that much money invested in your book to begin with, why would you spend extra to have someone review?
Obviously, there is the other reason why I have no intention of ever paying for book reviews.
Think about it for a minute, if you spend money on getting your book reviewed, do you honestly think you’re going to get a valid assessment? I doubt it. You’d really be better off having your friends and family, who may or may not have read your book, flood positive reviews into, say, Amazon or Barnes & Noble. You’d save a lot of money that way, even though that’s really not any better than paying for it.
But even if you succeed in doing that, do you really think that Amazon hasn’t caught on? They actually did last year, according to the New York Times, a paid review site, whose name shall remain nameless, got caught by Amazon and, inevitably, was shut down because of it. That hasn’t really stopped the guy who started it from moving on to something else.
And that hasn’t really stopped other sites that offer paid reviews, and some independent reviewers on news sites like Examiner.com from offering the same deal.
I don’t get it, nor ever really got this whole concept. I’d like to think that readers aren’t foolish enough to fall for this sort of thing.
Then again, who knows?
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