There is an intriguing new website called Bookvetter that has caught my eye. It is the creation of Marc Brackett who saw a real need for credibility in book reviews. Here's a chance for a writer to get unvarnished opinion about his/her writing by anonymous peers. Bookvetter will post reviews for books that are "vetted." I'll stop and let Marc explain. Read carefully. ![]() Have you ever needed an independent and honest assessment of the quality of your content? Bookvetter is a new literary community designed to provide authors with quality assessments that can be used to develop writers and identify exceptional content for the benefit of readers. The process starts with anonymous author peer reviews in order to avoid review trading or review reprisals. The content of books is also matched with the reading interests of reviewers in a wide range of areas like profanity or levels of graphic content, as part of ensuring the content of books is fairly evaluated. All books will be reviewed and the authors provided with feedback that can used to improve their writing. Books that the author community identifies as being exceptional are considered Vetted Books and have the opportunity of being offered to the book review blogger community for additional review and promotion. The focus of Bookvetter is to get authors back to writing and creating great content that readers will help market for free. Honest and unbiased reviews are a key part of making this possible. For those serious about writing better books and letting their content advertise itself, the Bookvetter Community offers an alternate path. Marc Brackett
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![]() My shipment of print copies of my latest novel arrived recently, and I have been busy fulfilling the obligatory mailing of copies to winners of a contest I ran on Goodreads.com. Much of my time between January 1 and now has been trying to promote this book, which brings me to the subject of this post: the difficulties of being a relatively unknown--did I say relatively?--author, and managing time between marketing my work, and actual writing. I have learned through experience that word-of-mouth is the most effective way of promoting novels. That means social networking. One can spend endless hours doing this, which I also know from experience. There is no shortage of gurus ready to give you advice for a fee, but what I have seen of their advice is largely common sense. There comes a time when you just have to come to the conclusion that your best self-promotion is to keep producing good prose, and someone will eventually pay attention. Which brings me to the subject of what I'm writing now. The new book returns my heroine of two other novels, Andy Blake, a Windsor Ontario detective who returns to her home in the north after twenty-five years on the job. The Ontario Provincial Police snag her to work in Sault Ste. Marie. For followers of Andy, I can tell you she will have problems in her relation with her love interest, Grant Stacey. You'll have to wait to see how, if at all, she comes to terms with the rift. Does this means I'm entering the realm of Mystery Series Writers? I don't know. I like Andy, and that probably gives you an answer. So, back to work on the new book. I'll worry about selling the last one tomorrow or the next day! |