The Importance of a Positive Book Review....

by Valerie J. Steimle

I celebrated the publication of my 6^th book (Home Is Where the Learning Is For High School) two weeks ago with the availability of purchase online.  I did the normal promotions to get the word out on Facebook, Goodreads and other internet websites. Next came the release of the kindle version of this book which was not my forte.  I thought a Word document copy of the manuscript for kindle would suffice as I was worn out and in a hurry to just get the e-book on sale. 

Boy, was I ever wrong.  All of my other books had been on kindle and I knew they were marginally formatted. In reality, I should have waited another week to really take the time to do the kindle version correctly as it resulted in a negative book review. I was lazy and at the time didn’t think it mattered, but it did.

As Michael J. Fox says:           "If you don't take the time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?"

Even better....after correcting the blunder and doing it right when will people realized you fixed your mistake? You only get a first impression once....

I learned an interesting lesson through all of that. I learned  that no matter how you are feeling about pushing your book out there the kindle version is just as important as the printed version. A bad book review will somehow undo all the good ones, especially when there are only a few reviews posted in the first place. Bad book reviews leave a bad taste in everyone’s mouth and it is very painful to read.

So, to those independent authors who are responsible for their own manuscripts, I say take the extra time with the electronic version that you did with the printed version.  Since that time I studied and learned very quickly how to reformat my manuscript into an e-book and it’s not difficult at all; just very time consuming.  Now all of my books are reformatted into a beautiful kindle format so they will be bought and read with ease.  The kindle people are sending emails to all those who had purchased these books prior to the newest version and hopefully all of those people will download and read what I have done.

So now I can move forward, promoting my heart out wherever I can and hopefully that bad review will be forgotten and replaced by wonderful reviews to come.