A Couple of Loose Ends

In drawing my marketing career to a close, it's dawned on me that now may be the time to finally view my novel's "unseen" reviews. Honestly, at this point am I still worried about my pride being hurt?

It's quite true that I'm very sensitive to reviews, too sensitive. That's not something I can change about myself. On the one hand, I crave reviews, but when I know I've gotten some, there's always that sense of foreboding.

Authors are told to never read their reviews. Does anyone abide by that? I seriously doubt it. It's too much of a temptation. My coping mechanism has always been that when I pull up my Amazon book page to copy the link (which I must have done hundreds of times), if I notice that my review numbers have changed, I look at the overall rating. With this novel, it's been sitting at 4.8 forever, but it recently dropped to 4.6. I then had to decide if I wanted to read the new one. (I peeked, but it was just a 3-star ranking, not a text review.) 

I'm aware that I have two (count 'em) reviews on Pen Pinery, which is a low level ARC site, no offense. I believe I learned about the site from a Reddit post, and since it was free, well, there you go. It's since transitioned to all romance, so all you romance authors out there, here's one more opportunity! (It's no longer free, by the way, but its cost is reasonable at $10.00 for one campaign.) 

Oh, wait. I guess it's too late to read those two reviews:

"Listings and reviews for non-romance titles are generally no longer active or hosted on Pen Pinery, as the platform transitioned to a 100% romance-only ARC service and removed support for non-matching genres." 

Their previews, though, still show up in a Google search, and they pretty much tell me what I need to know: 

Overall, it felt like a game of tug of war going back and forth as Leah tries to find herself in the music industry. She's erratic and emotional and I just ...

3.0 · Review by SmallTownWoman

 

This was an absolutely beautiful story. I feel (sic) in love with Leah from the beginning. She was such a strong person. The twists and turns had me really ...

4.0 · Review by Ssirren

 

That just leaves The Storygraph. Storygraph's reviews don't funnel to Google, because its business model restricts them to its own site. I gave away 100 copies of my novel in late July, so logically some reviews may have been posted by now. All I need to do is log on. Which I will. Just not today. What I can intuit, however, is that since I've seen no increase in sales resulting from Storygraph, well, you can draw your own conclusions.

 

Yep, I'm going to read them. I promise.

 

Then I'll be done.