An Amazon Milestone

As I checked my books on Amazon this week, I came across a pretty cool surprise. My first novel, Frankly Speaking, reached the milestone of 50 reviews. I’ve come across this in several articles as a desirable milestone. With mounting Amazon reviews, there are some positive things that can happen to your books. They include:

• 20-25 reviews, Amazon starts including the book in “also bought” and “you might like” lists. This increases your chances of someone finding your title.
• 50-70 reviews, Amazon looks at your book for spotlight positions and the newsletter. This is HUGE.
• Number of reviews may affect Amazon sales ranking.
• Some websites will not consider or promote your book unless you have a number of reviews on the page.
• Readers may read through your reviews and decide to purchase or not purchase the book based on this.

Source: https://gwenperkins.wordpress.com/2012/04/07/qa-why-write-amazon-reviews/

I can attest to the third bullet item as I looked at my ranking:

I’m not sure if this is a turning point for me as an Amazon author. Of my other books, the one with the most reviews after Frankly Speaking is Blood Orange with 29. It took two years to get to 50 reviews, but Blood Orange has only been out for about 6 months, so it’s on a good pace.

I’m not into blowing my own horn. It’s my least favorite part of being an indie author, but I thought I’d share this. Am I ready to retire on my writing income? No, but I might be able to go out to eat with my wife a couple more times per month.

Keep at it. The work does pay off.

Just a quick thank you

Hello,

As you have seen from my numerous posts, I’m doing a 99 cent promotion of Blood Orange this week. (Sorry, I feel like I’m running an NPR pledge drive). Anyway, the readers have come through. I have two days to go and I’m in the top 100 on the Kindle store in 3 categories and in the top 13,000 overall on Amazon.

I couldn’t be more pleased and humbled.

Thank you!

Amazon’s New Bookstore – Why? What? How?

There has been a lot of media coverage over Amazon’s opening of brick and mortar bookstores. If you’re expecting Barnes and Noble on steroids or Books a Billion, you might want to check out this article. I was expecting a possible venue that would feature indie authors. Silly me. With words like ‘heavily curated’ and ‘surplus stock’ you might want to check out this Forbes article for yourself. Check it out here.