The world of book publishing is fierce, and this is especially true with the popularity of being able to self publish your own books these days. While self publishing has its advantages there are some growing concerns that you should be aware of.
While you can connect with many people on author sites, Facebook and LinkedIn groups there are those people who are out to do you more harm than good. One area that can really suffer from this is your book reviews.
Of course every author wants to have quality reviews for their books. Many people do get together and review each other’s books and leave comments on sites such as the Amazon Book Store and GoodReads. Other people, unfortunately, do nothing but write bad reviews on purpose.
This seems to be a growing trend and one that Amazon and Google are trying to shut down or prevent at the very least. It is not just the authors which are the subject of the attacks it is the reviewers as well. Both parties are seemingly becoming furious with each other if a bad review is left. The author will then go to extreme measures to attack the reviewer on sites including taking their attacks to the social sites. You know what the power of Facebook, Twitter and Google+ has and you can just image the consequences of coming under attack on one of these sites.
As an author if your book receives a bad review, don’t immediately retaliate, instead look into the review and see if they have any valid points. Does your ecover suck (I use this tool to create beautiful ecovers in mere minutes) and the reviewer points this out in no uncertain terms, while you may love your ecover if your audience doesn’t your sales are going to suffer.
After looking into the review or comments you can then search for this person and see if all of their reviews are bad. If so, this could possibly indicate spam reviews and you can report them to Amazon or GoodReads.
Whatever you do you do not want to use your social sites to defame any person. Use these sites correctly to gain friends and loyal readers for your books. Remember the image you portray online will follow you around forever. It only takes one bad comment or slanderous remark to ruin your reputation as an author.
Keep in mind that you can also request that bad reviews or spam reviews are removed from your sales page. Many people today are advocating that the best practice for reviews is for the author not to reply to any of the comments, good or bad. You may want to keep this in mind.
If you happen to get bombarded with spam or insulting comments on any of your social sites, report them as abusive. It can also be helpful to take a screenshot of the comment so you have further proof. Try to get a shot that shows which site it was left on and the date.
While it is so easy to write an angry reply you should avoid doing this. If a comment angers you simply back away from it and see if there is any truth to it. If not you have nothing to worry about it, just continue as you have been and keep writing great books.
